|
2
I am not in any way accusing Hegel of atheism. Today such an accusation would appear ridiculous: Hegel himself is no longer of this world, and even if he were still living, no one would persecute him for his atheism; on the contrary, he would perhaps be highly praised for it. But it is certain that the materialists who openly deny God express more correctly the final thought of Hegel's philosophy than Hegel himself. And the idealist Schopenhauer formulated the very essence of idealism more happily when he declared that religion is only for the mob, while philosophy - atheistic philosophy naturally - is only for the elect, for those to whom it is given to see and understand the truth. The mob are those die das Allgemeine nicht erreichen, who are not capable of raising themselves to the general. It is not I who have added "raising themselves"; these words are always found in Hegel when it is a question of the relationship between the individual and the general. According to Hegel, God too, like Kant's one hundred thalers, is much more sublime when He is transformed into an idea than when He remains alive in His individuality. That is why Hegel accepts the ontological argument for the existence of God and argues with Kant.
Let us for the moment leave the demands of morality aside. It may be that it is indeed more elevated to give preference to the general over the individual; it may also be that it is not exalted but on the contrary very low. I say: let us leave this aside, for I do not at all know how one could decide this question and even whether it can be resolved in one sense or another. To my mind, there is no solution and there cannot be any. Some will say that the God who is only an idea is no more God than the white bull of certain Oriental peoples or than the idol of the savages, and that if God really has, as Hegel affirms, only "being in truth," that is, a being like the concept of a hundred thalers, this is equivalent to saying that God has no being at all. The moralist can climb on his highest stilts and demonstrate, following Horace, that justum et tenacem propositi virum [the just man tenacious of his purpose] must remain impassive, even if the celestial vault falls in on him; this will not change the situation in any way. Morality is autonomous and prescribes its laws without taking any account, naturally, of laws of any kind decreed by the other incorporeal inhabitants of the empirical human soul. But since when did the Epicurean Horace become an authority in moral questions? He extols courage as an absolute virtue, and Hegel repeats this and declares with assurance that the Christian must be even more courageous than the pagan. Hegel speaks thus in his own name and on his own responsibility; but here one can set opposite his conviction a contrary conviction. It is certainly appropriate for the pagan to push his courage to the limits of which Horace speaks; for the pagan morality is in fact the supreme court of appeal. For the pagan the "good" rules over the gods as over men, and no power in the world can abrogate what the "good" has prescribed. For the Epicurean as for the Stoic, virtus, courage, is the primary, fundamental, and supreme virtue. It is not for nothing that the Romans designated by this term courage as well as virtue in general. But the Christian also knows other virtues; for the Christian, and in general for one who believes in God, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Even Schopenhauer, whose soul had preserved at most only weak remembrances of his erstwhile faith, knew that courage is only an empirical virtue of the subaltern officer. In this respect, certain, animals surpass man: do we not say, fearless as a lion?
In fact, courage is a conventional virtue - I should say an immanent virtue, and as such it plays a cardinal role in the doctrine of the Epicureans and the Stoics. Nil admirari - not to be astonished at anything and not to fear anything: for one who is persuaded that there is nothing beyond the limits of the visible world, it is natural to aspire only to understanding, and it is quite as natural for him to drive far away from himself sentiments such as astonishment, fear, hope. The most remarkable representative in modern philosophy of this attitude is obviously Spinoza, whose influence on Hegel cannot be exaggerated. The idea of the absolute spirit belongs entirely to Spinoza and it is in him also that, with a force one does not find in anyone else, everything individual and particular is transformed into a mode of the single, eternal substance. And repugnance not only for the Platonic but also for the Biblical mythology is expressed with still greater force in Spinoza than in Hegel; he believed in the spirit and only in the spirit. Doubts, hesitations of the soul, were for Spinoza only signs of weakness, and he scorned alike those who let themselves be led by fear and those who let themselves be enticed by hopes. For him, i.e., for the philosopher, there is only one duty: intelligere. Consequently his ideal is amor Dei intellectualis. The word intellectualis can, in my opinion be applied as well to love as to God. We may then translate it thus: intellectual love for an intellectual God.
Horace was certainly right when he said in his Ars Poetica: Pictoribus atque poetis quodlibet audendi semper fuit aequa potestas. "The power of daring was always granted to painters and poets." The right to all imaginable audacities was always granted not only to poets and painters but also to philosophers, and I would not wish that what I say here about Schopenhauer, Spinoza, and Hegel be considered an "accusation" against these philosophers of "free thinking." On the contrary, if one asked my permission, I would be ready to grant all seekers, painters, poets, theologians, philosophers or even simple pilgrims, the potestas audendi in whatever measure they desire: let them dare as much as they wish! My observations are intended only to defend the right of philosophers to all audacities, no matter how dangerous and measureless these may be. If I argue, it is quite simply because I am more and more convinced that the rationalist philosophy that comes from the Greeks has always had as its secret object to limit the potestas audendi. This purely Greek need is manifested even in Holy Scripture. The Fourth Gospel begins with the words en archêi ên ho logos - "In the beginning was the word." Just as did virtus among the Romans, so did logos among the Greeks have a twofold meaning: logos signifies both word and reason. And this is obviously not a matter of chance either. The Greeks supposed reason to be already contained implicite in the "word"; it is in the word that they sought it, particularly Socrates and the schools deriving from Socrates.
In the Phaedo Plato says that the worst misfortune that can come to a man is to become a misologos, that is, a hater of reason, and that he must guard himself against this above all else. This thought persists throughout the history of all of Greek philosophy and, apparently through the intervention of Philo of Alexandria, passed into the New Testament and from there into Christian philosophy. Socrates always triumphed over his adversaries in debate in the same way: he proved to them that their life and their actions lacked that unity and that rigorous logic which he always succeeded in discovering in thoughts and words. And he certainly was right. There is in language, in the "word," more logic than in the life and soul of any man. It is finally only in the word and in logic that one finds a rigorous consistency.
If one could clarify the inner life of Alcibiades, of Pericles, or Socrates himself, there is room to believe that it could not be compared in respect to logical rigor and consistency with the language of the Greeks, which was so carefully worked out and which in the hands of a master was a model of plasticity and precision. This comes from the fact that language operates chiefly if not exclusively through general ideas. Proper nouns themselves are general ideas: each proper noun indeed is the product of abstraction, for it presents such or such a concrete object not in a determinate place and time but always and everywhere. Caesar is Caesar, as a child, as an adolescent, as a mature man, in Rome, in Gaul, awake, asleep. When we have called a man or an object by name, we have immediately passed from the complex, enigmatic contingency, inexpressible in words, that belongs to everything real, i.e. "particular," into the domain of the general, with its simplicity, its clarity, its necessary laws and, consequently, its comprehensibility.
According to a widespread opinion, man as a rational being differs from the animals as irrational beings in that, through thinking, he is capable of passing, or as Hegel puts it, raising himself, from the particular to the general. I believe that a grave error, a very grave error, lies here. The faculty of distinguishing the general in objects does not at all belong exclusively to man: all the animals perceive the general, and the lower animals even more than the higher. For a wolf or a lion the lamb is only food, and in this respect all lambs are to them only lambs in general. It is the same with the eagle and the condor. Animals very rarely notice the "particular," generally only their own young, and that not always. It is known that birds are often incapable of distinguishing their own eggs, and thus it is that the owl hatches the egg the cuckoo has laid in its nest. I will not even speak of lower organisms for which, it seems, only the most general representations exist - what is edible and what is not edible.
So then, contrary to Hegel and those from whom he took his fundamental principles, there is room to consider the faculty of passing from the particular to the general not as a rising but rather as a falling, provided naturally that it is admitted that in the scale of living beings man occupies a place above that of the animals. But if it be so, we must believe that the logos, the word, cannot contain all reason, just as all of virtue is not to be found in virtus. If you wish, in the beginning was the word; but this was only because in the beginning, in that beginning at any rate that man could distinguish with his myopic eyes, everything was still very elementary (in the beginning, I repeat, living beings sought only nourishment, any nourishment, whatever it might be - nourishment in general), and many things still did not exist. Later, when nourishment in general, and all that "general" which is the necessary condition of the existence of living organisms, was found, and especially when civilized man with his great reserves of the "general" appeared so that one no longer needed to concern himself with it, when therefore leisure was born and with leisure the possibility of interesting oneself not only in the necessary but in anything one wished - then only did the meaning of the particular and the individual manifest itself with all its power. In the beginning all men were equal and were distinguished among themselves only quantitatively: the one was physically stronger, the other weaker. In the beginning there was neither Socrates nor Meletus, neither Patrocles nor Thersites, but only man in general. Then Homer, Schiller, and the other poets would have had nothing to do, for then there was only a general of which all sang in the same words, we must assume, and in actions still more alike.
|
|