Hegel - The Philosopher of Freedom

The true philosophy,” as Abel (Hegel’s teacher, Jakob Friedrich Abel) says in 1776, “is the philosophy of healthy common sense, as, for example, Reid and other Englishmen treat it.” George Berkeley’s and David Hume’s philosophies, however, were metaphysical madness to him, because, as Beattie puts it, their healthy common sense was infected by the “poison of skepticism.” To follow Reid, Beattie, and Abel is to follow nature, to trust the sensuous, for only sensory knowledge (Sense Certainty) brings definite, indubitable certainty. Observation and induction, the collection of “data of the world” and “data of the inner world” in the form of empirical psychology, are therefore the crux of our awareness.

So it is no coincidence that both Schiller and Hölderlin dedicated poems to Rousseau, an admirer of “calm nature.” And although Hegel’s translations of Plato unfortunately are lost, there are hints that he worked on the Phaedo, Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic, Theaetetus, Apology, Laws, Meno, and Timaeus. Reason and sensuality, moral law and bliss are all equally important to the development of humankind and free will. This comes from the view that humankind “is made of sensuality and reason together” (GW 1:78) and is also how he critiqued Enlightenment conceptions of bliss, those “hawkers of empirical cure-alls” (GW 1:98), as well as Kant. One must consider not only the pure observance of moral law but also sensual human motivations. If one disregards nature, bliss, and health, one falls into cold, pedantic calculations, where reason and understanding become a mere duty without leading to happiness. Invoking Schiller’s search for a “gentler humanity,” Hegel wanted to “bring a gentler hue of humanity and goodness into the picture” (GW 1:86). He sought to fight Christian joylessness, to reignite the divine spark of elysium, to let the “gentle wings of happiness” beat, The Greek gods gazed with noble joy upon humankind; their temples rang with laughter; Ganymede filled their cups with delicious ambrosia. Religion and happiness are not mutually exclusive.

He cites Rousseau’s natural sciences, which are based on both emotions and knowledge, and then Greek mythology. A folk religion “goes hand in hand with freedom.” This was key to young Hegel’s thinking. But objective religion “turns people into citizens of heaven, keeping their gazes upward so that they become strangers to their own human emotions.

Such a distorted religion is the “tool,” “advocate,” and “fiery praise of the ungodly crime” of soul-sucking despotism. With that said, Hegel knew that rights cannot exist without positive rights and that religion cannot exist without positivity. He wondered what this positivity should consist in and what had caused the ancient Christian religion to fall into a form of bondage and slavish obedience. According to his critique, the value of a “slave” is determined not by freedom or self-determination but by service to the master, which, in this case, is a sort of supernatural being.

Schelling’s byword of “freedom as the alpha and omega of philosophy” (Br 1:22) would become as much a constant in Hegel’s thinking as Schelling’s idea of a scientific philosophical system.

It is Hegel’s Manuscript 41 that marks the switch from Bern to Frankfurt. It represents Hegel’s unique search for a ground of unity, seeking to fulfill Schiller’s, Fichte’s, and Schelling’s philosophical conditions: “where subject and object, or freedom and nature, are thus unified, so that nature is freedom and subject is not to be divided from object, that is divine” (GW 2:9). These demands prove the derivation of certainty from self-certainty, the unity of theoretical and practical reason, and the overcoming of one’s being ruled by the other. With unified thought, it cannot be about master and servant; it cannot be that the subject is powerful while the object is submissive, nor vice versa. Right after arriving in Frankfurt, though it created a huge burden of proof, Hegel would say that the true hen kai pan is love.

Fichte wrote that it is impossible to escape the cycle; one just has to accept the highest principle if there is to be any alternative to mere relativism. The problem with this, which Hegel identified in Bern, is that the “I” is because it thinks, but it can only think because it is; this is the basis for ideas about identity, thought, and being. But is thinking not determination? Is there then a prerequisite for the “I”? Schelling writes, in paragraph 8 of the Ich-Schrift: Nothing else can be determined, inasmuch as it is unconditional. In several years’ time, the solution to this problem would be the basis of Hegel’s philosophy.