Chapter I: The Metaphysics of the Understanding (6)

The forms of Philosophy which we have considered bear the character which pertains specially to metaphysics, of proceeding from general determinations of the understanding, but of combining therewith experience and observation, or the empiric method in general. One side of this metaphysic is that the opposites of thought are brought into consciousness, and that attention is directed upon the solution of this contradiction. Thought and Being or extension, God and the world, good and evil, the power and prescience of God on the one side, and the evil in the world and human freedom on the other: these contradictions, the opposites of soul and spirit, things conceived and things material, and their mutual relation, have occupied all men’s attention. The solution of these opposites and contradictions has still to be given, and God is set forth as the One in whom all these contradictions are solved. This is what is common to all these philosophies as far as their main elements are concerned. Yet we must likewise remark that these contradictions are not solved in themselves, _i.e._ that the nullity of the supposition is not demonstrated in itself, and thereby a true concrete solution has not come to pass. Even if God is recognized as solving all contradictions, God as the solution of these contradictions is a matter of words rather than something conceived and comprehended. If God is comprehended in His qualities, and prescience, omnipresence, omniscience, power, wisdom, goodness justice, &c., are considered as qualities of God Himself, they simply lead to contradictions; and these contradictions, Leibnitz (_supra_, p. 348) sought to remove by saying that the qualities temper one another, _i.e._ that they are combined in such a way that one annuls the other. This, however, is no real comprehension of such contradiction.

This metaphysic contrasts greatly with the old philosophy of a Plato or an Aristotle. To the old philosophy we can always turn again and admit its truth; it is satisfying in the stage of development it has reached—a concrete centre-point which meets all the problems set by thought as these are comprehended. In this modern metaphysic, however, the opposites are merely developed into absolute contradictions. God is indeed given as their absolute solution, but only as an abstract solution, as a Beyond; on this side all contradictions are, as regards their content, unsolved and unexplained. God is not comprehended as the One in whom these contradictions are eternally resolved; He is not comprehended as Spirit, as the Trinity. It is in Him alone as Spirit, and as Spirit which is Three in One, that this opposition of Himself and His Other, the Son, is contained, and with it the resolution of the same; this concrete Idea of God as reason, has not as yet found an entrance into Philosophy.

In order that we may now cast a retrospective glance over the philosophic efforts of other nations, we shall apply ourselves to the further progress of Philosophy. Once more we see Scepticism making its way into this arid philosophy of the understanding. But this time it is, properly speaking, in the form of Idealism, or the determinations are subjective determinations of self-consciousness. In the place of thought we consequently find the Notion now making its appearance. Just as with the Stoics determinateness is held to be an object of thought, we have in modern times this same manifestation of thought as the unmoved form of simplicity. Only here the image or inner consciousness of totality is present, the absolute spirit which the world has before it as its truth and to whose Notion it makes its way—this is another inward principle, another implicitude of mind which it endeavours to bring forth from itself and for itself, so that reason is a comprehension of the same, or has the certitude of being all reality. With the ancients reason (λόγος), as the implicit and explicit Being of consciousness, had only an ethereal and formal existence as language, but here it has certainty as existent substance. Hence with Descartes there is the unity of the Notion and Being, and with Spinoza the universal reality. The first commencement of the Notion of the movement of fixed thoughts in themselves is found in this, that the movement which, as method, simply falls outside its object, comes within it, or that self-consciousness comes within thought. Thought is implicitude without explicitude, an objective mode bearing no resemblance to a sensuous thing; and yet it is quite different from the actuality of self-consciousness. This Notion which we now find entering into thought, has the three kinds of form which we still have to consider; in the first place it has that of individual self-consciousness or the formal conception generally; secondly, that of universal self-consciousness, which applies itself to all objects whether they be objects of thought, determinate conceptions, or have the form of actuality—that is to say it applies itself to what is established in thought, to the intellectual world with the riches of its determinations and looked on as a Beyond, or to the intellectual world in as far as it is its realization, the world here and around us. It is in those two ways, and in those ways alone, that the actual Notion is present in the succeeding chapter; for not as yet is it in the third place to be found as taken back into thought, or as the self-thinking or thought-of Notion. While that universal self-consciousness is, on the whole, a thought which grasps and comprehends, this third kind of thought is the Notion itself recognized as constituting reality in its essence, that is to say as Idealism. These three aspects again divide themselves as before into the three nations which alone count in the civilized world. The empirical and perfectly finite form of Notion pertains to the English; to the French belongs its form as making an attempt at everything, as establishing itself in its reality, abolishing all determination, and therefore being universal, unlimited, pure self-consciousness; and, lastly, to the German pertains the entering into itself of this implicitude, the thought of the absolute Notion.