1830. Preface to the Third Edition

In this third edition many improvements have been made here and there, and particular care has been taken to help the clarity and definiteness of the exposition. But for the compendious purpose of a textbook the style had to be kept compressed, formal and abstract; the book keeps its function of receiving the necessary elucidations only through oral exposition.

Since the second edition, various judgments on my philosophising have appeared, which for the most part have shown little vocation for such business. Such light-minded replies to works that have been thought through for many years, and worked out with all the earnestness of the subject and of scientific requirement, afford nothing gratifying in the sight of the evil passions of conceit, arrogance, envy, scorn and so on that force themselves forward from them, and still less anything instructive. Cicero says (Tusculan Disputations, book II): “Est philosophia paucis contenta judicibus, multitudinem consulto ipsa fugiens, eique ipsi et invisa et suspecta; ut, si quis universam velit vituperare, secundo id populo facere possit.” To rail at philosophy is the more popular, the less insight and thoroughness it is done with; petty, repugnant passion is comprehensible in the echo it meets in others, and ignorance joins it with equal intelligibility. Other subjects fall within the senses, or stand before representation in comprehensive intuitions; one feels the necessity of some degree, however slight, of acquaintance with them in order to have a say about them; they also remind people more easily of sound common sense, because they stand in a familiar, fixed presence. But the want of all this lets itself loose without shame against philosophy, or rather against some fantastic, empty picture of it which ignorance imagines and talks itself into; it has nothing before it by which it could orient itself, and so wanders about entirely in what is indeterminate and empty, and therefore senseless. — Elsewhere I have taken on the unpleasant and unfruitful business of exposing some phenomena of this kind, woven of passion and ignorance, in their uncovered nakedness.

It might recently have seemed as if a more serious investigation of God, of divine things and of reason was to be scientifically stimulated over a wider field, from the ground of theology and even of religiosity. But the very beginning of the movement did not let such a hope arise. For the occasion proceeded from personalities; and neither the pretension of the accusing piety nor the attacked pretension of free reason rose to the matter itself, still less to the consciousness that to discuss the matter the ground of philosophy must be entered. That attack upon persons, on the basis of very special externals of religion, showed itself with the monstrous presumption of wishing to pass sentence, of its own plenary power, on the Christianity of individuals, and so to stamp upon them the seal of temporal and eternal rejection. Dante took it upon himself, in the strength of the inspiration of divine poetry, to wield the keys of Peter, and to condemn many of his contemporaries by name, though only those already dead, even popes and emperors, to the damnation of hell. A more recent philosophy has been met with the defamatory reproach that in it the human individual posits himself as God. But compared with such a reproach of a false consequence, it is quite another, an actual presumption, to behave as judge of the world, to sentence the Christianity of individuals, and thereby to pronounce the inmost rejection upon them. The shibboleth of this plenary power is the name of the Lord Christ, and the assurance that the Lord dwells in the hearts of these judges. Christ says (Matthew 7:20): “By their fruits ye shall know them”; but the monstrous insolence of rejecting and condemning is no good fruit. He goes on: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.” Those who assure us that they are in exclusive possession of Christianity, and demand of others this faith in themselves, have not got so far as to cast out devils. Many of them rather, like the believers in the Seeress of Prevorst, plume themselves on being on good terms with a rabble of ghosts and having reverence for it, instead of chasing away and banishing these lies of an anti-Christian and slavish superstition. Just as little do they show themselves able to speak wisdom, and they are utterly incapable of doing great deeds of cognition and science, which would be their vocation and duty; erudition is not yet science. While they make long-winded work of the mass of indifferent externals of faith, as regards the substance and content of faith itself they stop all the more barrenly at the name of the Lord Christ, and deliberately, and with abuse, disdain the cultivation of doctrine, which is the foundation of the faith of the Christian church. For the spiritual, and still more the thinking and scientific, expansion would disturb, and even forbid and wipe out, the self-conceit of subjective boasting in the spiritless assurance, barren of good and rich only in evil fruits, that they are in possession of Christianity and have it exclusively for their own. — This spiritual expansion is distinguished in Scripture from mere faith with the most definite consciousness, in such a way that faith only becomes truth through it. “He that believeth on me”, says Christ (John 7:38), “out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” This is at once explained and determined in verse 39: that it is not, however, faith as such in the temporal, sensible, present personality of Christ that brings this about; that faith is not yet the truth as such. In the following verse (39) faith is determined thus: that Christ said this of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive; for the Holy Ghost was not yet given, because that Jesus was not yet glorified. The still unglorified shape of Christ is the personality that was then sensibly present in time, or that was afterwards represented in this way, which is the same content: the personality which is the immediate object of faith. In this presence Christ himself orally revealed to his disciples his eternal nature and his vocation to the reconciliation of God with himself and of men with him, the order of salvation and the moral teaching; and the faith which the disciples had in him comprehends all this within itself. Nevertheless this faith, which lacked nothing of the strongest certainty, is declared to be only the beginning and the conditioning foundation, what is still unfinished. Those who so believed have not yet the Spirit; they are first to receive it: it, the truth itself, it which comes later than that faith, and which leads into all truth. But these people stop at such certainty, the condition. Certainty, however, itself only subjective, brings only the subjective fruit, formally, of assurance, and then in it the fruit of arrogance, defamation and condemnation. Contrary to Scripture, they hold fast only to certainty against the Spirit, which is the expansion of cognition and is first the truth.

This bareness of scientific and of spiritual content in general this piety shares with what it immediately makes the object of its accusation and condemnation. The enlightenment of the understanding, by its formal, abstract, contentless thinking, has emptied religion of all content just as much as that piety has, by its reduction of faith to the shibboleth of “Lord, Lord”. Neither has anything in advance of the other here; and when they meet in conflict, there is no material in which they could touch one another and gain a common ground, and the possibility of coming to investigation, and further to cognition and truth. Enlightened theology for its part has held fast to its formalism, namely to calling upon freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of teaching, and even upon reason and science. Such freedom is indeed the category of the infinite right of spirit, and the other particular condition of truth, beside that first one, faith. But what rational determinations and laws the true and free conscience contains, what content free believing and thinking have and teach: this material point they have refrained from touching, and have stopped at that formalism of the negative and at the freedom to fill freedom as one pleases and as one opines, so that the content itself is in general a matter of indifference. These people could not approach a content for this reason too, that the Christian community must be united, and is still always to be united, by the bond of a doctrine, a confession of faith; whereas the generalities and abstractions of the stale, lifeless rationalist water of the understanding do not admit the specific character of a Christian content and doctrine that is determinate within itself and developed. The others, on the other hand, boasting of the name “Lord! Lord!”, frankly and freely disdain the carrying through of faith into spirit, content and truth.

Thus a great deal of dust of arrogance, of spite and personalities, as of empty generalities, has indeed been raised; but it is smitten with barrenness, it could not contain the matter itself, nor lead to content and cognition. — Philosophy could be content to have been left out of the game. It finds itself outside the terrain of those presumptions, of personalities as of abstract generalities; and, drawn on to such ground, it could only have expected what is unpleasant and unprofitable.

Since the deep and rich content has decayed out of the greatest and unconditioned interest of human nature, and religiosity, the pious and the reflective alike, has come to find the highest satisfaction without content, philosophy has become a contingent, subjective need. Those unconditioned interests have been so arranged in both kinds of religiosity, and that by nothing other than ratiocination, that philosophy is no longer needed in order to satisfy them; indeed philosophy is held, and rightly, to be disturbing to that newly created sufficiency and to such narrowed satisfaction. Philosophy is thereby left entirely to the free need of the subject; no kind of compulsion towards it is laid upon him; this need, rather, where it is present, has to stand firm against suspicion and dissuasion. It exists only as an inner necessity that is stronger than the subject, by which his spirit is then restlessly driven “that he may overcome”, and procure for the urge of reason the enjoyment worthy of it. Thus, without the stimulus of any authority, not even of the religious, and declared rather to be a superfluity and a dangerous, or at least a questionable, luxury, occupation with this science rests the more freely on the interest of the matter and of truth alone. If, as Aristotle says, theory is what is most blessed, and among good things the best, then those who partake of this enjoyment know what they have in it: the satisfaction of the necessity of their spiritual nature. They can refrain from making demands about it on others, and can leave others to their needs and to the satisfactions they find for them. The uncalled-for crowding into the business of philosophy has been mentioned above. As this makes itself the louder, the less fitted it is to take part in it, so the more thorough and deeper participation is more solitary within itself and quieter outwardly. Vanity and superficiality are quickly finished, and drive themselves to speak up soon; but earnestness about a matter that is great in itself, and satisfied only by the long and hard labour of a completed development, immerses itself long in quiet occupation with it.

The rapid exhaustion of the second edition of this encyclopaedic guide, which, according to the function stated above, does not make the study of philosophy easy, has given me the satisfaction of seeing that, beside the loudness of superficiality and vanity, a quieter and more rewarding participation has taken place; and this I now wish for the new edition also.

Berlin, 19 September 1830.