Introduction

It is an old prejudice, indeed a triviality, that human beings set themselves apart from animals through thinking. While it may seem trivial to remind ourselves of such a longstanding belief, it must definitely seem strange that there should be a need for such a reminder. And yet this can be considered necessary given the prejudice of our time which separates feeling and thinking to such an extent that they are supposedly opposed or even inimical to one another, that feeling, in particular religious feeling, is contaminated and perverted, even annihilated, by thinking, and that religion and religiosity do not have their roots and proper place essentially in thinking. In this kind of separating it is forgotten that only human beings are capable of religion and that animals no more have religion than they have law and morality.

When the said separation of religion from thought is maintained, one tends to have in mind the kind of thinking that may be called thinking over [Nachdenken], – reflective thinking which has thoughts per se for its content and brings them as such to consciousness. Negligence in knowing and heeding the distinction specifically formulated by philosophy in regard to thinking is responsible for generating the crudest ideas about philosophy and the recriminations against it. Since religion, law, and the ethical are properties of human beings alone, and, again, are so only because a human being is a thinking being, thinking has not been inactive at all in what is religious, right, and ethical – whether it be feeling and faith or representation: its activity and its products are present and contained therein. However, there is a difference between having such feelings and representations that are determined and permeated by thought, and having thoughts about them. The thoughts about those forms of consciousness produced by thinking them over constitute the rubric under which reflection, formal reasoning [Räsonnement] and the like, and in the end even philosophy, are subsumed.

In this connection, the claim has been made – quite frequently under the influence of an erroneous understanding – that such thinking over is the condition or even the only way for us to attain a representation of and belief in the eternal and true. Thus, for instance, the metaphysical proofs of the existence of God (which are now somewhat obsolete) have been served up as evidence that – or as if – belief and conviction in the existence of God could essentially or even exclusively be caused only by familiarity with those proofs and the conviction produced by them. Assertions such as these would be equivalent to the contention that we would be incapable of eating, before we have acquired familiarity with the chemical, botanical, or zoological properties of our nutrients, and that we would have to wait to digest, until we finished the study of anatomy and physiology. If this were so, the sciences in their fields, just as philosophy in its own, would gain considerably in utility; indeed their utility would be elevated to an absolute and universal indispensability; or rather, instead of being indispensable, none of them would exist.

Given that the determinacies of feeling, intuition, desire, volition, etc., insofar as we are conscious of them, are usually called representations, it can be said quite generally that philosophy replaces representations with thoughts and categories, but more specifically with concepts. Representations may generally be regarded as metaphors of thoughts and concepts. By merely having representations, however, we are not yet familiar with the meaning they have for thinking, i.e. we are not familiar with their thoughts and concepts. Conversely, it is one thing to have thoughts and concepts, and another to know [wissen] which representations, intuitions, feelings correspond to them. – One aspect of what is called the unintelligibility of philosophy relates to this. In part, the difficulty consists in a certain inability, which is really merely a lack of training, to think abstractly, i.e. to hold on to pure thoughts and to move among them. In our ordinary consciousness, thoughts are clothed in and combined with familiar sensuous and spiritual material, and when we think things over, reflect, or reason about them, we intermingle our feelings, intuitions, and representations with thoughts (in every sentence with a quite sensuous content – as for instance in 'This leaf is green' –, categories such as being, singularity are already part of the mix). But it is something else to make the unmixed thoughts themselves our object. – The other aspect of the unintelligibility of philosophy is due to the impatience of wanting to have before oneself in the form of a representation what exists in our consciousness in the form of a thought and a concept. We sometimes hear people say that they do not know [wissen] what they are supposed to think in connection with a concept they have grasped. When it comes to concepts, nothing further needs to be thought than the very concept itself. What those people mean to express, however, is the yearning for some familiar, current representation [of things]; when deprived of its manner of representing, consciousness feels as if it had lost the ground in which it is otherwise so firmly rooted and at home. When it finds itself transposed into the pure region of concepts, it no longer knows [weiß] where in the world it is. – As a result, those writers, preachers, speakers, etc., are regarded as the most intelligible who tell their readers or listeners things which they knew already by heart: things which are familiar to them and self-evident.

Due to the fact that philosophy merely lays claim to thinking as constituting the proper form of its business, and the fact that each human being by nature possesses the capacity for thinking, abstraction is made from the difference referred to in § 3, and thus there comes to pass the opposite of what was mentioned above concerning the complaint about the unintelligibility of philosophy. This science frequently suffers contemptuous treatment even by those who have not taken the trouble to study it but fancy themselves capable of understanding without further ado what philosophy is about, and of philosophizing and passing judgments on philosophy, simply on the basis of an ordinary education, and religious feelings in particular. People admit that one must study the other sciences in order to be familiar with them, and that one is entitled to pass judgment on them only by virtue of such familiarity. People admit that in order to manufacture a shoe one must have learnt and practised shoemaking, despite the fact that everyone possesses the requisite model for it in his own feet, as well as the required aptitude for the task in his own hands. Only for philosophizing are such study, learning, and effort supposed not to be a requirement. – This convenient opinion has in recent times received confirmation through the doctrine of immediate knowing [Wissen], or knowledge through intuition.

What is rational, is actual,

And what is actual, is rational.

These simple sentences have seemed striking to some and have been received with hostility even by those who would not want to be regarded as lacking in philosophy, let alone religion. It will be unnecessary to turn to religion for support for these sentences, since its doctrines of the divine governance of the world express the above propositions only too clearly. With regard to their philosophical meaning, however, we may presuppose that the reader is sufficiently educated to know [wissen] not only that God is actual – that he is what is most actual, indeed that he alone is what is truly actual –, but also, insofar as the merely formal difference is concerned, that existence [Dasein] in general is partly appearance and only partly actuality. In ordinary life, we may accidentally call every idea, error, evil, and the like, actual, as well as every concrete existence [Existenz], crippled and transitory though it may be. But even for someone possessing an ordinary sensitivity, a contingent concrete existence [Existenz] will not be deemed to deserve the emphatic designation of being actual; a contingent concrete existence has no greater value than something that is possible and which may just as well not exist as exist. But when I spoke of actuality, it should have been evident in what sense I am using this expression, since I treated actuality in my more extensive Logic, too. There I directly distinguished it not only from what is contingent (which, after all, exists as well), but also and more specifically and precisely from existence [Dasein], concrete existence [Existenz], and other determinations. – The notion of the actuality of the rational seems immediately to come up against two objections: one, that ideas and ideals are nothing more than chimeras and philosophy a system of such phantasms, and the other that, conversely, ideas and ideals are much too exquisite to be actual, or again too impotent to acquire for themselves the status of something actual. But the severance of actuality from the idea is popular particularly with that kind of understanding which takes the dreams of its abstractions for something true, and which insists pretentiously on the 'ought' which it likes to prescribe especially in the sphere of politics – as if the world had been waiting for this to learn how it ought to be, but is not. Were it as it ought to be, what would the precociousness of such 'ought' come to? When its 'ought' is directed against trivial, superficial and transitory objects, arrangements, situations, and so forth (that is to say, what may perhaps be of relative importance to certain circles for a period of time), then this understanding may indeed be right to find many things that are not in accord with universal and correct standards. Who would not have enough good sense to see much around him that is indeed not as it should be? But this cleverness is in the wrong when it fancies itself to have the interest of the philosophical science at heart with such objects and their 'ought'. Philosophical science deals solely with the idea which is not so impotent as to demand that it merely ought to be actual without being so and, hence, it deals with an actuality of which those objects, arrangements, situations, etc., are only the superficial exterior.

The principle of experience contains the infinitely important determination that human beings must themselves be involved when taking up a given content and holding it to be true, more precisely that they must find such content to be united and in unison with the certainty of themselves. They must be involved in it, whether through their external senses only or with their deeper spirit and the essential consciousness of their respective self. – This is the same principle that in our time has been called faith, immediate knowledge, the revelation coming from outside and in particular from one's own inner being. We designate those sciences that have been called philosophies as empirical sciences due to their taking their point of departure from experience. But what in essence they aim at and produce are laws, general propositions, a theory, i.e. the thoughts of what there is. Thus Newton's physics has been called a philosophy of nature, while Hugo Grotius, for instance, by cataloguing the historical interactions of peoples among themselves, and by relying on ordinary reasoning, has developed general principles, a theory that could be called a philosophy of international law. – Even today the name of philosophy retains this general connotation among the English, and Newton continues to enjoy the fame of being the greatest philosopher. Down to the very pricing tables used by 'instruments-makers', those instruments that are not specifically classified under the columns of the magnetic or electric gadgets, such as the thermometers, barometers, etc., are called philosophical instruments; though, frankly, only thinking rather than some combination of wood, iron, etc.¹⁰ should properly be called an instrument of philosophy. In particular, the science of political economics, which has emerged in recent times, is also called philosophy, something we usually call rational state economy, or perhaps intellectual state economy.¹¹

There is an old saying customarily attributed to Aristotle (and falsely, because it allegedly expresses the standpoint of his philosophy), namely that nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuerit in sensu; – there is nothing in the understanding that has not been in sensation, in experience. It must be considered a misunderstanding, if speculative philosophy were to refuse to accept this proposition. It would, however, just as much have to assert the opposite, namely that nihil est in sensu, quod non fuerit in intellectu and assert it in the quite general sense that nous, or, in its deeper determination, spirit, is the cause of the world, and more specifically (see § 2 above) in the sense that the feelings concerning what is right, ethical, or religious are feelings and, consequently, that they are the experience of a content that has its roots and its seat in thinking alone.

To that extent, the relationship of the speculative to the other sciences is merely this, namely that the former does not simply set aside the empirical content of the latter, but instead acknowledges and uses it; that it likewise acknowledges and utilizes as its own content the universal produced by these sciences, such as their laws, genera, etc.; and furthermore that it introduces into those categories others as well and validates them. In this respect, the difference between them concerns solely the said modification of the categories. Speculative logic contains the former logic and metaphysics, preserves the same forms of thought, the same laws and objects, but at the same time in doing so it develops them further and transforms them with the help of additional categories.

The concept in its speculative sense must be distinguished from what is customarily called a 'concept'. It is only with reference to the latter one-sided sense of the term that it has been asserted again and again a thousand times and been made a prejudice that the infinite cannot be grasped by means of concepts.

It is one of the main viewpoints of the Critical philosophy that, prior to setting about to acquire knowledge of God, the essence of things, etc., the faculty of knowing itself would have to be examined first in order to see whether it is capable of achieving this; that one must first come to know the instrument, before one undertakes the work that is to be produced by means of it. For should the instrument be insufficient, all the effort would then have been expended in vain. – This thought has seemed so plausible that it has elicited the greatest admiration and acclaim and drawn knowing away from its interest in the objects and work on them and drawn it back to itself, i.e. to the formal aspect. If, however, we do not delude ourselves with words, it is easy to see that other tools may very well be examined and evaluated in ways other than undertaking the actual work for which they are determined. But the examination of knowing cannot take place other than by way of knowing. With this so-called instrument, examining it means nothing other than acquiring knowledge of it. But to want to know before one knows is as incoherent as the Scholastic's wise resolution to learn to swim, before he ventured into the water.

Reinhold,¹² who recognized the confusion that prevails in beginning in this way, proposed as a remedy that one make a preliminary start with a hypothetical and problematic kind of philosophizing and continue in this vein – Heaven knows how [man weiß nicht wie] – until somehow at some point along the line it would emerge that in this way one had arrived at the primordial truth. Looked at more closely, this would come down to the usual procedure, namely analysis of an empirical foundation or a provisional assumption that has been put into a definition. Unmistakably, it is right to declare the usual manner of working with presuppositions and provisional assumptions a hypothetical and problematic procedure. Still, while right, this observation does not alter the character of such a procedure, but instead immediately articulates the insufficiency of it.

The realization that the dialectic makes up the very nature of thinking and that as understanding it is bound to land in the negative of itself, i.e. in contradiction, constitutes a cardinal aspect of logic. Despairing over its inability to achieve by its own lights the resolution of the contradiction into which it has placed itself, thinking returns to the resolutions and appeasements that have become part of the spirit in its other modes and forms. In the course of this return, however, thinking did not need to fall into the misology – a phenomenon Plato had already witnessed – of acting polemically against itself as happens when the so-called immediate knowing is declared to be the exclusive form in which we may become conscious of the truth.

The relationship of immediacy and mediation within consciousness will have to be discussed explicitly and in detail below. At this point, it suffices to point out that, although both moments appear to be distinct, neither of them may be absent and they form an inseparable combination. – Thus, the knowledge [Wissen] of God, like that of anything supersensory, essentially contains an elevation above sensory feeling or intuiting. It accordingly entails a negative stance towards its initial object and therein a mediation as well. For mediation means to make a beginning and then to have proceeded to a second item, such that this second item is the way it is only insofar as one has arrived at it by starting with something that is an other over against it. This does not mean, however, that the knowledge [Wissen] of God is for all that any less independent vis-à-vis that empirical side; to the contrary, it achieves its independence essentially by means of this negation and elevation. If mediation is made a condition and is emphasized in this one-sided fashion, then one can say (although it does not say much) that philosophy owes its initial origin to experience (the a posteriori) – for thinking is indeed essentially the negation of something immediately on hand – just as eating is indebted to food, since without the latter one would not be able to eat. Note, however, that in this connection eating is represented as ungrateful, for it consumes that to which it owes its being. Taken in this sense, thinking is no less ungrateful.

However, the immediacy that belongs properly to thinking and that is reflected into itself and thus mediated in itself (i.e. the a priori) is universality, its being-at-home-with-itself [Beisichsein] in general. In this universality, it finds satisfaction within itself, and in this respect the indifference against particularization, and hence against its development, is innate. Religion also possesses this same intensive kind of satisfaction and bliss, whether it be more or less developed or uneducated, whether it has advanced to scientific consciousness or been kept alive in the heart and a naïve sort of faith. When thinking remains at a standstill with the universality of ideas, as is unavoidable in the case of the first philosophies (think of being in the Eleatic school, becoming in Heraclitus, etc.), then it is rightfully accused of formalism. Even in the case of a more developed philosophy it can happen that only abstract propositions or determinations are taken up (such as, for instance, that everything is one in the absolute, that there is an identity of the subjective and the objective), and are merely repeated when we come to the particulars. As far as the first abstract universality of thinking is concerned, it makes very good and sound sense to say that philosophy owes its development to experience. On the one hand, the empirical sciences do not stand still with the perception of the details of the appearances; instead, by thinking, they have readied this material for philosophy by discovering its universal determinations, genera, and laws. In this way, they prepare this particularized content so that it can be taken up into philosophy. On the other hand, they thus make it necessary for thinking to proceed to these concrete determinations by itself. The process of taking up this content, in which thinking sublates its mere givenness and the immediacy that still clings to it, is at the same time a process of thinking developing out of itself. Insofar as philosophy owes its development to the empirical sciences, it bestows upon their contents the most essential shape of the freedom of thought (i.e. the shape of the a priori) and, instead of relying on the testimony of their findings and the experienced fact, provides their contents with the corroboration of being necessary, such that the fact becomes the depiction and the replication of the original and completely independent activity of thinking.

When dealing with what seem to be so many diverse philosophies one must distinguish the universal and the particular according to their proper determinations. If the universal is taken in its formal aspect and set alongside the particular, then it, too, becomes something particular. Such a procedure would strike us automatically as inappropriate and inept in the case of objects of everyday life, such as when someone were to ask for fruit and then rejected cherries, pears, and grapes simply because they are cherries, pears, and grapes, but not fruit. When it comes to philosophy, however, we allow ourselves to justify its rejection on the grounds that philosophies are so diverse and that each one of them is only one philosophy, not the philosophy; as if cherries were not fruit as well. It also happens that a philosophy whose principle is the universal is placed alongside one whose principle is particular, or even alongside doctrines that assert that there is no philosophy at all, in the sense that both are merely different aspects of philosophy, just as if light and darkness were to be called two different kinds of light.

A philosophizing without a system can be nothing scientific. Apart from the fact that such philosophizing expresses by itself more of a subjective outlook, it is also random in terms of its content. A particular content is justified solely as a moment of the whole. When separated from it, it represents an unjustified presupposition or a subjective certainty. Many philosophical writings limit themselves to expressing in this way merely attitudes [Gesinnungen] or opinions. – By a system one wrongly understands a philosophy built on a narrowly circumscribed principle distinct from other such principles; contrary to this, however, it is a principle of any genuine philosophy that it contain all particular principles within itself.

How much of the particular parts is required to constitute a particular science is indeterminate insofar as a part is not merely a singular moment, but must itself represent a totality in order to be something true. Thus, the whole of philosophy constitutes truly one science, but it may also be viewed as a whole made up of several particular sciences. – A philosophical encyclopedia distinguishes itself from other, ordinary encyclopedias in that the latter are meant to be an aggregate of sciences that have been included in an ad hoc and empirical fashion. Some of these merely bear the name of a science but are in reality a mere collection of data. Because sciences of this kind have been taken up extraneously, the unity into which they are brought together in such an aggregate is itself likewise extraneous, i.e. – an arrangement. For this reason, such an arrangement must remain a provisional attempt and will always display unsuitable sides, especially since its materials are themselves of a contingent nature. – So in addition to the fact that a philosophical encyclopedia excludes (1) mere aggregates of data (as philology, for instance, seems at first glance to be), it likewise and a fortiori excludes (2) those based on mere caprice (such as, for instance, heraldry); sciences of the latter sort are positive through and through. (3) Other sciences are called positive as well. They, however, have a rational basis and starting-point. This part of them belongs to philosophy, whereas their positive side remains peculiar to them. The positive element of the sciences comes in several forms. First, what is in itself a rational starting-point passes over into something contingent due to the fact that they have to trace the universal back down to empirical singularity and actuality. In this field of the changeable and the accidental it is not the concept but only reasons [Gründe] that can be appealed to. Jurisprudence, for instance, or the system of direct and indirect taxation, require definitive, exact decisions which lie outside the determinateness in-and-for-itself of the concept. They therefore admit of a wide margin of discretion that may lead to one result for one reason and a different result for another, but is not capable of a final certain determination. Similarly, when pursued down to its individual details, the idea of nature fades away into contingencies. Thus the history of nature, geography, medicine, etc., end up with determinations of concrete existence and with species and genera that are determined by external coincidence and playfulness rather than by reason. History belongs here as well, insofar as its essence is the idea, while its appearance unfolds in contingency and in a field of arbitrariness. Second, sciences such as these are also positive, insofar as they do not acknowledge that their determinations are finite. Nor do they point up where these determinations, together with their entire sphere, make the transition into a higher sphere. Instead, they assume those determinations to be unqualifiedly valid. Connected with this finitude of the form (the earlier point concerned the finitude of the material) is the finitude of the epistemological ground, which draws partly on formal reasoning, partly on feeling, belief, the authority of others, in general the authority of inner or outer intuition. Philosophies that want to base themselves on anthropology, facts of consciousness, inner intuition or outer experience belong in this group as well. To add one more thing, it may also be the case that only the form of the scientific presentation is empirical, but a meaningful intuition has ordered what is otherwise mere appearance in a way that it accords with the inner sequence of the concept. It is characteristic of such an empirical presentation that, due to the opposition and manifoldness of the juxtaposed phenomena, the extraneous and contingent circumstances of their conditions sublate themselves, so that the universal then comes before the mind. – In this way, a sensible [sinnige] experimental physics, or history, etc., will present the rational science of nature and of human affairs in an external image that mirrors the concept.

I. Logic, i.e. the science of the idea in and for itself,

II. Philosophy of nature as the science of the idea in its otherness,

III. Philosophy of spirit as the idea returning back to itself from its otherness.
In § 15 above, mention was made of the fact that the differences between the particular philosophical sciences are merely determinations of the idea itself and that it is the latter alone that presents itself in these several elements. What is recognized in nature is not something other than the idea. It is just that in nature the idea is in the form of externalization, just as in spirit the very same idea exists as being-for-itself and as coming to be in and for itself. A determination such as this in which the idea appears is at the same time a fluid moment. Thus, the individual science is just as much this: to know its content as a positively existing [seiend] object, as well as knowing therein immediately of its transition to a higher sphere. The representation of the division into parts is thus incorrect insofar as it sets the particular parts or sciences alongside one another, as if they were merely static components with substantive distinctions, similar to species.