In this third edition, various improvements have been made here and there. Particular care has been taken to enhance the clarity and exactness of the exposition. However, in keeping with a course book's purpose of serving as a compendium, the style had to stay condensed, formal and abstract. The book retains its function of receiving the requisite explanations only through the oral presentation.
Since the second edition, several evaluations of my philosophy have appeared that have for the most part shown little aptness for such business. Such careless responses to works that have been thought and worked through for many years with all the seriousness of the object and its scientific requirements are unseemly and unpleasant when one sees the nasty passions of conceit, haughtiness, envy, mockery, and so on, that emerge from those responses; even less is there anything in them that might be instructive. Cicero says in
Tusculanae disputationes 1. II [4]: '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.' [Philosophy is content with but a few judges and flees from the
multitude deliberately, while they are themselves both
suspect to and
hated by the multitude; so that, if someone wanted to chide it as a whole, he could do so
with the support of the people.] The more limited the insight and thoroughness, the more popular it is to attack philosophy. A petty repulsive passion is palpable in the resonance it encounters in others, and ignorance accompanies it with the same sort of intelligibility. Other objects impress themselves upon the senses or stand before representation in all-embracing intuitions; one feels the need to have at least a slight degree of acquaintance with them in order to be able to converse about them; in addition, sound common sense [
Menschenverstand] finds it easier to recall them since they are situated in a familiar, firm presence. But the lack of all this [i.e., all these features of other objects] unleashes itself unabashedly against philosophy, or rather against some imaginary empty picture of it that ignorance fabricates and talks itself into. It has nothing [standing] before it towards which it could orient itself and thus wanders about, entirely among the indeterminate, empty and thus senseless. – Elsewhere, I have undertaken the unpleasant and sterile business of shining the spotlight on some of those phenomena in their utter nakedness, woven as they are out of passions and ignorance.
7
Recently, it could have seemed as if the province of theology and even religiosity were poised to prompt a more serious study of God, divine things, and reason scientifically within a broader domain.
8 Alas, the very inception of the movement quashed such hopes. For the inducement was dependent upon
personalities, and neither the pretensions of accusatory piety nor the attacked pretensions of free reason elevated themselves to the
basic matter, much less to the consciousness that one would have to enter upon the terrain of philosophy in order to discuss the basic matter. That personal attack on the ground of very particular external aspects of the religion exhibited itself in the monstrous presumptuousness of wanting to reject the Christianity of individuals based on one's own absolute power, sealing them with secular and eternal damnation in the process.
Dante, empowered by the enthusiasm of divine poetry, took it upon himself to wield the keys of Peter and to condemn by name many of his – albeit already deceased – contemporaries, even popes and emperors, to damnation in hell. The infamous objection has been levelled against a more recent philosophy that in it the human individual posits itself as God. But compared to such a reproach concerning a false inference, it is an actual presumptuousness of a completely different order to pose as the Judge of the World, to censure the Christian character of individuals and thus to issue the innermost condemnation of them. The shibboleth of this absolute power is the
name of the Lord Christ and the
assurance that the Lord resides in the hearts of these judges. Christ says (Matt. 7: 20): 'By their fruits you shall recognize them', but the monstrous insolence of condemning and damning others is hardly good fruit. He continues: 'Not all who say unto me, “
Lord, Lord” shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Many will say unto me on that day: “
Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? Have we not
in thy name cast out devils? Have we not done many deeds
in thy name?” Then shall I profess to them: “I never
recognized you,
get away from me, all of you, you evildoers.”' Those who give assurances of being in exclusive possession of Christianity and demand of others this faith in it have not brought matters so far as to exorcise devils. Many of them, like the believers in the Seer of Prevorst,
9 pride themselves far more on being on good terms with a riff-raff of ghosts and revering them, instead of chasing away and banning these lies of an anti-Christian and servile superstition. They show themselves to be equally inept at conveying wisdom and utterly incapable of performing great deeds of knowledge and science which should be their vocation and duty. Erudition is not yet science. While busying themselves at length with the mass of irrelevant externalities of faith, they remain, by contrast, in regard to the import and content [
Gehalt und Inhalt] of faith itself, all the more barrenly at a standstill with the name of the Lord Christ and deliberately scorn with invectives the development of the doctrine that is the foundation of the faith of the Christian Church. For the spiritual, let alone the thoughtful and scientific, expansion would interfere with, indeed would prohibit and erase, the self-conceit of the subjective insistence on the obtuse [
geistlose] assurance – barren of the good and rich only in evil fruits – that they are in possession of Christianity and own it exclusively themselves. – With a consciousness that could not be more definite, this spiritual expansion is distinguished in Scripture from mere faith in such a way that the latter becomes the
truth only through the former. '
Rivers of living waters will flow', Christ says (John 7:38), 'from the body of whoever has
faith in me.' These words are then immediately explained and specified in verse 39 that faith in the temporal, sensuous, present personality of Christ as such does not achieve this; that he is not yet the truth as such. In the subsequent verse (39) faith is then further specified [by saying] that Christ said this of the
spirit whom those who
believed in him
were to receive. For the Holy Spirit
was not yet there, since Jesus was
not yet transfigured. The not-yet-transfigured shape of Christ, which is the immediate object of faith, is the personality that was then sensuously present in time or, which is the same content, that was afterwards represented as such. In that present moment, Christ himself revealed to his disciples orally his eternal nature and vocation for the reconciliation of God with himself and of human beings with him, the order of salvation and the ethical doctrine. The faith that the disciples had in him encompasses all this. Nevertheless, this faith that did not lack in the strongest certainty is declared to be only a beginning, a conditional foundation that is as yet unfinished. Those who believed in this way have not yet
received the spirit. They must first receive it – receive the spirit [that is] the truth itself that comes later than the faith that leads to every truth. Those others, however, stop short at such certainty – a certainty that is [only] the condition. But certainty, itself merely subjective, bears only the subjective fruit of formal
assurance, and therein that of conceit, slander and condemnation. In opposition to Scripture, they hold fast only in the certainty against the spirit which is the expansion of knowledge and only then the truth.
This piousness shares that barrenness of basic scientific content, and basic spiritual content in general, with what it directly makes the object of its indictment and condemnation. Through its formal, abstract thinking, the enlightenment of the understanding has emptied religion of all content, just as that piousness had done by reducing faith to the shibboleth of 'Lord, Lord.' Neither of them has the better of the other in this respect. And as they contentiously collide, there is no material on hand with respect to which they might come into contact with one another and could arrive at a common ground and possibility of bringing things to an investigation and, further, to knowledge and truth. Enlightened theology for its part has stood fast in its formalism, namely, of appealing to the
freedom of conscience,
freedom of thought,
freedom of teaching, of appealing even to reason and science. Such freedom is, to be sure, the category of the
infinite right of spirit and the other,
specific condition of truth in addition to the first condition, i.e. faith. But as for
what sort of reasonable determinations and laws the true and free conscience
might contain, what sort of
content-free belief and thought might have and teach, they refrained from touching this material point. They have not moved beyond that formalism of the negative and beyond the freedom of filling out the freedom according to whim and opinion, such that it is altogether irrelevant what the content itself is. They also could not get near to any content, because the Christian community has to be and is still supposed to be united by the bond of a doctrine, a creed, whereas the generalities and abstractions of the stale, lifeless, rationalistic waters of the understanding do not permit what is specific to an intrinsically determined, developed Christian content and doctrine. By contrast, the others, insisting on the name 'Lord, Lord', frankly and freely scorn the fulfilment of faith by spirit, basic content and truth.
Thus, to be sure, much dust has been stirred up – dust of conceit, spitefulness, and personality as well as empty generalities – but it is a dust cursed with sterility and unable to contain the basic matter itself, unable to lead to the basic content and knowledge. – Philosophy could be content to have been left out of play. It finds itself outside the terrain of those presumptions – presumptions of personalities as well as those of abstract generalities – and, were it dragged onto such ground, it could have expected only things unpleasant and fruitless.
As that deep and rich basic content disappeared from the greatest and absolute interest of human nature, and as religiosity, the pious together with the reflective, came to find the highest satisfaction in something without content, philosophy has become a contingent, subjective need. For both kinds of religiosity, those absolute interests have been set up – and, of course, set up by nothing other than a strictly formal mode of reasoning [
Räsonnement] – in such a way that philosophy is no longer needed to satisfy them. Indeed, philosophy is deemed, and rightly so, a disturbance of that newly created contentment and such narrowed-down satisfaction. As a result, philosophy is entirely left over to the free need of the subject. No constraint of any kind is issued to it; rather, where this need is present, it has to steadfastly resist [others'] suspicions [of it] and admonitions to be cautious. It exists only as an inner necessity that is stronger than the subject, a necessity that tirelessly drives its spirit 'so that it may overcome' and may procure for reason's urges the satisfaction it deserves. Thus, far from being prompted by any sort of authority, including religious authority, engaging in this science is instead declared superfluous and a dangerous or at least dubious luxury, and as a result it stands all the more freely on an interest in the basic matter and the truth alone. If, as Aristotle says, theory is what is most
blessed and the
best of the good [
Metaph. XII 7, 1072b 24], then those who partake of this pleasure know [
wissen] what they possess in it, namely the satisfaction of the necessity of their spiritual nature. They can refrain from making demands on others regarding it and can leave them to their needs and the satisfactions they find for them. The pressing, yet unsolicited motivation to enter into the business of philosophy was considered above, namely how the motivation becomes noisier the less it is suited to take part in philosophy, so that the more fundamental, profounder participation in philosophy is more alone with itself and quieter towards what lies outside it. Vanity and superficiality are quickly finished with the business and driven to interrupt it in next to no time. But when a basic matter is great in itself and can be satisfied only through the long and arduous work of a complete development, seriousness about such a matter immerses itself for a long time in quiet preoccupation with it.
The swift depletion of the second edition of this encyclopedic guide (which does not make the study of philosophy easy according to the sense indicated above) has given me the satisfaction of seeing that, in addition to the clamouring of superficiality and vanity, a quieter, more rewarding participation [in philosophy] has taken place, which I hope will now also be accorded this new edition.
Berlin, 19 September 1830