1827. Preface to the Second Edition

The kind reader will find in this new edition several parts reworked and developed into closer determinations. I have endeavoured at the same time to soften and lessen the formal character of the exposition, and also, by more extensive exoteric remarks, to bring abstract notions nearer to ordinary understanding and to the more concrete representations of them. But the compressed brevity which an outline makes necessary, in matters that are abstruse in any case, leaves this second edition the same function as the first had: to serve as a lecture-book, which has to receive its necessary elucidation through oral exposition. The title of an Encyclopaedia was indeed at first meant to leave room for a lesser strictness of scientific method and for an external juxtaposition; but the nature of the subject brings with it that the logical connexion had to remain the foundation.

There would be only too many occasions and incitements that might seem to make it necessary for me to declare myself on the external relation of my philosophising to the pursuits, with and without spirit, of the culture of the age. This can only be done in an exoteric way, as in a preface; for these pursuits, although they assign themselves a relation to philosophy, do not engage with it scientifically, and therefore do not engage with it at all, but carry on their talk from outside and out of doors. It is a disagreeable and even a hazardous thing to set foot on such ground, foreign to science; for such declaring and discussing does not further that understanding which alone can matter for true cognition. But to discuss some of these phenomena may be useful or needful.

What I have worked, and work, towards in my philosophical endeavours generally is the scientific cognition of truth. It is the hardest way, but the only one that can have interest and value for the mind, once the mind has set out upon the way of thought, has not fallen into vanity upon it, but has kept the will and the courage for truth. It soon finds that method alone can tame thought, lead it to the matter, and keep it there. Such a leading-on proves to be itself nothing other than the restoration of that absolute content beyond which thought at first strove and set itself; but a restoration in the most proper and freest element of the mind.

Not so very long ago there passed away an artless and, to all appearance, a happy state, in which philosophy went hand in hand with the sciences and with culture, a moderate enlightenment of the understanding was satisfied at once with the need of insight and with religion, a natural law likewise agreed with state and politics, and empirical physics bore the name of natural philosophy. But the peace was superficial enough; and in particular that insight stood in fact in inner contradiction with religion, as did that natural law with the state. Then came the separation, and the contradiction developed itself. But in philosophy the mind has celebrated its reconciliation with itself, so that this science is in contradiction only with that contradiction itself, and with the whitewashing of it. It is one of the evil prejudices to suppose that philosophy stands in opposition to a thoughtful knowledge drawn from experience, to the rational actuality of right, and to an artless religion and piety. These forms are recognised by philosophy, and even justified: the thinking mind rather immerses itself in their content, learns from them and strengthens itself in them, as in the great intuitions of nature, of history and of art; for this solid content, so far as it is thought, is the speculative Idea itself. The collision with philosophy only arises in so far as this ground steps out of its proper character, and its content is to be grasped in categories and made dependent on them, without carrying these on to the notion and completing them into the Idea.

For the important negative result at which the understanding of general scientific culture stands, namely that on the way of the finite notion no mediation with the truth is possible, usually has the opposite consequence from the one that immediately lies in it. That conviction, instead of bringing about the removal of the finite relations from cognition, has rather done away with the interest in the investigation of the categories, and with attention and caution in their application; their use, as in a state of despair, has only become the more undisguised, the more unconscious and the more uncritical. From the misunderstanding that the insufficiency of the finite categories for truth entails the impossibility of objective cognition, the right is inferred to speak and pass sentence out of feeling and subjective opinion; and in the place of proof come assurances, and narratives of what is found as facts in consciousness, which is held to be the purer the more uncritical it is. On a category as barren as immediacy, and without investigating it further, the highest needs of the mind are to be made to rest, and by it they are to be decided. One may find, especially where religious subjects are treated, that philosophising is expressly laid aside, as if all evil were thereby banished and security against error and illusion obtained; and then the investigation of truth is undertaken from presuppositions taken from anywhere, and by ratiocination, that is, in the use of the ordinary determinations of thought, essence and appearance, ground and consequence, cause and effect, and so on, and in the usual inferences according to these and the other relations of finitude. “The Evil One they are rid of, the evil has remained”; and the evil is nine times worse than before, because it is trusted without any suspicion or criticism. As if that evil which is kept at a distance, philosophy, were anything other than the investigation of truth, but with consciousness of the nature and the value of the relations of thought that bind together and determine every content.

The worst fate in all this befalls philosophy itself at those hands, when they busy themselves with it, partly apprehending it and partly passing judgment on it. It is the fact of physical or mental life, and in particular of religious life too, that is disfigured by that reflection which is incapable of grasping it. Yet this apprehending has, taken by itself, the meaning of first raising the fact into something known; and the difficulty lies in this transition from the matter to cognition, which is brought about by reflection. In the case of science itself this difficulty is no longer present. For the fact of philosophy is cognition already prepared, and the apprehending of it would accordingly be only a re-thinking, in the sense of a thinking that follows after; only the judging of it would require reflection in the ordinary meaning. But that uncritical understanding proves itself just as unfaithful in the bare apprehension of the Idea when it is definitely expressed. It has so little misgiving or doubt about the fixed presuppositions it contains, that it is even incapable of repeating the bare fact of the philosophical Idea. This understanding marvellously unites in itself two things: it is struck, in the Idea, by the complete divergence from, and even the express contradiction of, its own use of the categories; and at the same time it has no suspicion that there is another way of thinking than its own, and that one is practised, and that it must therefore conduct itself here otherwise than in its usual thinking. In this way it comes about that the Idea of speculative philosophy is at once held fast in its abstract definition, in the opinion that a definition must appear clear and settled for itself, and has its regulator and touchstone only in presupposed representations; or at least in ignorance of the fact that the meaning of the definition, as well as its necessary proof, lies solely in its development, and in its issuing from that development as the result. Now, more precisely, the Idea in general is the concrete, spiritual unity, while the understanding consists in apprehending the determinations of the notion only in their abstraction, and so in their one-sidedness and finitude. That unity is thus made into an abstract, spiritless identity, in which accordingly there is no difference, but all is one, and among other things good and evil too are all the same. For speculative philosophy, therefore, the name system of identity, philosophy of identity, has already become an accepted one. If someone made his confession of faith, “I believe in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth”, we should be surprised if another were to make out of this first part alone that the confessor believes in God the maker of heaven, and therefore holds the earth to be uncreated and matter to be eternal. It is a correct fact that the first said in his confession that he believes in God the maker of heaven; and yet the fact, as the other has apprehended it, is completely false; so much so, that the example must be regarded as incredible and trivial. And yet in the apprehension of the philosophical Idea this violent halving is what happens; so that, in order that it may not be possible to misunderstand what kind of thing the identity is which, on the assurance given, is the principle of speculative philosophy, there follows the express instruction, and the corresponding refutation, that the subject, say, is different from the object, and likewise the finite from the infinite, and so on: as if the concrete spiritual unity were in itself without determination and did not itself contain the difference within it; as if anyone did not know that the subject is different from the object and the infinite from the finite; or as if philosophy, lost in its school wisdom, needed to be reminded that outside the school there is a wisdom to which that difference is something well known.

Philosophy is reviled, more definitely, in regard to the difference it is supposed not to know, in such a way that with it the difference of good and evil is also said to fall away in it; and here it is a favourite practice to show fairness and generosity, by conceding “that the philosophers in their expositions do not always (— and so perhaps, after all, also because these consequences do not belong to them —) develop the pernicious consequences that are bound up with their proposition”. Philosophy must disdain this mercy which it is proposed to bestow upon it; for it needs it just as little for its moral justification as it can lack insight into the real consequences of its principles, or fail to draw the express inferences. I will briefly throw light on that alleged consequence, by which the difference of good and evil is to be made a mere semblance, more in order to give an example of the hollowness of such an apprehension of philosophy than to justify philosophy. For this purpose we will take only Spinozism itself, the philosophy in which God is determined only as substance and not as subject and spirit. This difference concerns the determination of the unity; on this alone everything depends. Yet those who are in the habit of calling the philosophy a system of identity know nothing of this determination, although it is a fact; they may even use the expression that according to it all is one and the same, and good and evil too are alike. These are all the worst modes of unity, of which there can be no talk in speculative philosophy; only a still barbarous thinking can make use of them in dealing with ideas. As for the assertion that in that philosophy the difference of good and evil does not hold in itself or properly, we must ask what this “properly” means. If it means the nature of God, it will surely not be demanded that evil be placed in it; that substantial unity is the good itself; evil is only disunion; in that unity, accordingly, there is anything but a sameness of good and evil; evil is rather excluded. Hence in God as such there is just as little the difference of good and evil; for this difference exists only in what is disunited, in something in which evil itself is. Now in Spinozism there further occurs the difference: man is different from God. On this side the system may not satisfy in theory; for man, and the finite generally, though it may afterwards be reduced to a mode, merely turns up in the consideration alongside substance. Here, then, in man, where the difference exists, it is that it also exists essentially as the difference of good and evil; and here only is it that it properly is, for here only is its peculiar determination. If in Spinozism one has only substance in view, there is in it, to be sure, no difference of good and evil; but that is because evil, like the finite and the world in general (see § 50, Remark, p. 132), does not exist at all from this standpoint. But if one has in view the standpoint at which man and the relation of man to substance also occur in this system, where alone evil, in its difference from good, can have its place, then one must have looked through the parts of the Ethics which treat of it, of the affects, of human bondage and of human freedom, before one can tell of the moral consequences of the system. Without doubt one will be convinced of the lofty purity of this morality, whose principle is the pure love of God, as much as of this, that the purity of the morality is a consequence of the system. Lessing said in his day that people treat Spinoza like a dead dog. It cannot be said that in more recent times Spinozism, and speculative philosophy in general, have been better treated, when we see that those who report on it and judge it do not even take the trouble to grasp the facts correctly, and to state and relate them correctly. That would be the minimum of justice, and such a minimum it could at any rate demand.

The history of philosophy is the history of the discovery of the thoughts about the Absolute, which is its object. Socrates, for example, may be said to have discovered the determination of end, which was elaborated and definitely known by Plato and especially by Aristotle. Brucker’s history of philosophy is so uncritical, not only as to the externals of the history but as to the statement of the thoughts, that one finds twenty, thirty and more propositions cited as the philosophemes of the older Greek philosophers, of which not a single one belongs to them. They are inferences which Brucker draws according to the bad metaphysics of his time, and fathers upon those philosophers as their assertions. Inferences are of two kinds: partly mere workings-out of a principle down into further detail, partly a going back to deeper principles. What is historical consists precisely in stating to which individuals such a further deepening of thought, and the disclosing of it, belongs. But that procedure is improper, not merely because those philosophers did not themselves draw the consequences supposed to lie in their principles, and so simply did not expressly state them, but rather because such inferring directly imputes to them an acceptance and use of relations of thought belonging to finitude, which are directly contrary to the sense of philosophers who were of a speculative mind, and which rather only contaminate and falsify the philosophical Idea. If, in the case of ancient philosophies of which only a few propositions have been reported to us, such falsification has the excuse of what is supposed to be correct inference, the excuse falls away in the case of a philosophy which has both grasped its Idea itself in definite thoughts and expressly investigated and determined the value of the categories: when in spite of this the Idea is apprehended in mutilated form, only one moment is taken out of the exposition and (like identity) passed off as the totality, and the categories are brought in quite naïvely, in the first and readiest way in which they run through everyday consciousness, in their one-sidedness and untruth. A cultivated knowledge of the relations of thought is the first condition for apprehending a philosophical fact correctly. But crudity of thought is expressly not only justified by the principle of immediate knowledge, but made into a law. The knowledge of thoughts, and with it the cultivation of subjective thinking, is as little an immediate knowledge as any science, or any art and skill.

Religion is the kind and manner of consciousness in which the truth is for all men, for men of every degree of culture; but the scientific cognition of truth is a particular kind of the consciousness of it, whose labour not all undertake, but rather only a few. The content is the same; but as Homer says of some things that they have two names, one in the language of the gods, the other in the language of men of the everyday, so for that content there are two languages: the one of feeling, of representation, and of the thinking of the understanding, which nests in finite categories and one-sided abstractions; the other of the concrete notion. If one would discuss and judge philosophy from the side of religion as well, more is required than merely being used to the language of everyday consciousness. The foundation of scientific cognition is the inner content, the indwelling Idea and its living activity in the mind; just as religion, no less, is a heart that has been worked through, a mind awakened to reflection, a cultivated content. In the most recent times religion has more and more contracted the cultivated breadth of its content and withdrawn into the intensity of piety, or of feeling, and often indeed of a feeling that manifests a very meagre and bare content. So long as it has a creed, a doctrine, a dogmatics, it has that with which philosophy can occupy itself, and in which philosophy as such can unite with religion. This, however, is again not to be taken according to the separating, bad understanding in which modern religiosity is entangled, and according to which it represents the two so that the one excludes the other, or that they are in general so separable that they can then only be combined from outside. Rather, it is implied in what has been said that religion may well be without philosophy, but philosophy cannot be without religion, but rather includes it within itself. The true religion, the religion of the spirit, must have such a creed, a content; spirit is essentially consciousness, and so consciousness of the content made objective. As feeling it is the unobjective content itself (qualified only, to use an expression of J. Böhme’s) and only the lowest stage of consciousness, indeed in the form of the soul which is common to us with the animal. It is thinking that first makes the soul, with which the animal too is endowed, into spirit; and philosophy is only a consciousness of that content, of spirit and its truth, in the shape and manner too of that essence of spirit which distinguishes it from the animal and makes it capable of religion. The contracted religiosity that concentrates itself into a point in the heart must make the heart’s contrition and crushing the essential moment of its rebirth; but it ought at the same time to remember that it has to do with the heart of a spirit, that spirit is appointed to be the power over the heart, and can be this power only in so far as it is itself reborn. This rebirth of spirit, out of natural ignorance as well as out of natural error, takes place through instruction, and through the faith in the objective truth, the content, which follows from the witness of the spirit. This rebirth of spirit is also, among other things, immediately the rebirth of the heart out of the vanity of the one-sided understanding, which boasts of knowing such things as that the finite is different from the infinite, that philosophy must be either polytheism or, in keen-thinking minds, pantheism, and so on: the rebirth out of such pitiful insights, on which pious humility rides high against philosophy as against theological cognition. If religiosity persists in its intensity without expansion, and therefore without spirit, it knows, to be sure, only of the opposition of this narrow and narrowing form of its own to the spiritual expansion of religious doctrine as such, as well as of philosophical. But the thinking spirit not only does not confine itself to satisfaction in the purer, artless religiosity: that standpoint is in itself a result issuing from reflection and ratiocination. It is with the help of a superficial understanding that it has procured for itself this genteel liberation from as good as all doctrine; and it is by using thought, by which it is itself infected, to rail against philosophy, that it forcibly keeps itself on the thin, contentless point of an abstract state of feeling. — I cannot refrain from quoting in extract the exhortation of Herr Franz von Baader on such a form of piety, from the Fermenta Cognitionis, part 5, preface, p. ix f.

“So long”, he says, “as religion and its doctrines have not again been procured, from the side of science, a respect grounded on free inquiry and so on true conviction, … so long will you, pious and impious alike, with all your commands and prohibitions, with all your talk and action, … not remedy the evil; and so long will this religion, which is not respected, also not be loved; since one can love heartily and sincerely only what one sees sincerely respected and knows beyond doubt to be worthy of respect, just as religion too can be served only by such an amor generosus. … — In other words: if you want the practice of religion to flourish again, then take care that we arrive once more at a rational theory of it, and do not leave the field entirely to your opponents (the atheists) with that irrational and blasphemous assertion, that such a theory of religion is not to be thought of at all, as an impossible thing, that religion is merely an affair of the heart, in which one may well divest oneself of one’s head, and indeed must.”

As regards the poverty of content, it may further be remarked that it can only be spoken of as the appearance it presents in the external condition of religion at a particular time. Such a time might be deplored, if there is such need merely to produce bare faith in God, which was so earnest a concern of the noble Jacobi, and beyond that only to awaken a concentrated Christianity of sentiment; at the same time the higher principles that make themselves known even in this are not to be mistaken (see the Introduction to the Logic, § 64, Remark). But before science lies the rich content which centuries and millennia of cognitive activity have brought before them; and it lies before science not as something historical, which only others possessed, and which would be for us a thing of the past, only an occupation for the knowledge of memory and for acuteness in criticising narratives, and not for the cognition of mind and the interest of truth. What is most sublime, deepest and most inward has been brought to light in the religions, philosophies and works of art, in purer and less pure, clearer and more turbid, often very repellent shapes. It is to be counted a special merit that Herr Franz von Baader continues not only to recall such forms to memory, but with a deeply speculative mind expressly to bring their content to scientific honour, by expounding and confirming the philosophical Idea from them. Jakob Böhme’s depth in particular gives opportunity and forms for this. To this mighty spirit the name of philosophus teutonicus has rightly been given. On the one hand he widened the content of religion for himself into the universal Idea, conceived in it the highest problems of reason, and sought to grasp in it spirit and nature in their more determinate spheres and shapes, taking as his foundation that the spirit of man and all things are created after the image of God, of none other, to be sure, than the triune God, and are only this life of being reintegrated into it out of the loss of their archetype. On the other hand he conversely forced the forms of natural things (sulphur, saltpetre and so on, the astringent, the bitter and so on) into use as forms of spirit and of thought. Herr von Baader’s gnosis, which links itself with such shapes, is a peculiar way of kindling and furthering the philosophical interest; it sets itself vigorously against acquiescence in the contentless bareness of mere enlightenment-mongering, quite as much as against the piety that will only remain intensive. Herr von Baader shows in all his writings that he is far from taking this gnosis for the exclusive mode of cognition. Taken by itself it has its inconveniences: its metaphysics does not press on to the consideration of the categories themselves and to the methodical development of the content; it suffers from the inadequacy of the notion to such wild or ingenious forms and shapes; just as in general it suffers from having the absolute content as a presupposition, and explaining, reasoning and refuting from it.

Of purer and more turbid shapes of the truth we have, it may be said, enough and to spare: in the religions and mythologies, in gnostic and mystifying philosophies of older and more recent times. One may take pleasure in making the discovery of the Idea in these shapes, and gain from it the satisfaction that philosophical truth is not something merely solitary, but that its working has at least been present in them as a ferment. But when the conceit of immaturity, as was the case with an imitator of Herr von Baader, takes to warming up such products of fermentation, it readily raises such gnosis, in its sloth and its incapacity for scientific thinking, into the exclusive mode of cognition. For it is less trouble to wander about in such images and attach assertoric philosophemes to them than to undertake the development of the notion and submit one’s thinking, as well as one’s heart, to its logical necessity. Conceit is also prone to ascribe to itself, as a discovery, what it has learnt from others; and it believes this the more easily when it combats or disparages them; or rather it is irritated against them just because it has drawn its insights from them.

As in the phenomena of the time to which we have paid attention in this preface the urge of thought announces itself, though in disfigured form, so it is, in and for itself, a need for thought itself, once it has been cultivated to the height of spirit, and for its time, and therefore alone worthy of our science, that what was formerly revealed as a mystery, but in the purer, and still more in the more turbid, shapes of its revelation remains something secret for formal thought, should be revealed for thinking itself. In the absolute right of its freedom, thinking stubbornly maintains that it will be reconciled with the solid content only in so far as this content has known how to give itself the shape that is at the same time most worthy of thinking itself: the shape of the notion, of the necessity that binds everything, content as well as thoughts, and precisely in so doing makes it free. If what is old is to be renewed, that is, an old shape, for the content itself is eternally young, then the shape of the Idea such as Plato, and far more deeply Aristotle, gave it is infinitely more worthy of being recalled; also because its disclosure by appropriation to our cultivation of thought is immediately not only an understanding of it but an advance of science itself. But to understand such forms of the Idea likewise does not lie so much on the surface as to grasp gnostic and cabbalistic phantasmagorias; and still less does it come of itself to develop those forms further, as it does to point out or hint at echoes of the Idea in these.

As it has rightly been said of the true that it is index sui et falsi, while from the false the true is not known, so the notion is the understanding of itself and of the shape that is without the notion; but this shape does not, from its own inner truth, understand the notion. Science understands feeling and faith; but it can only be judged from the notion, as that on which it rests; and since it is the notion’s self-development, a judgment of it from the notion is not so much a judging about it as an advancing along with it. Such judging I must wish for this attempt also, as such alone I can respect and heed.

Berlin, 25 May 1827.