German Classical and European Post-Classical Philosophy from the 18th to 20th Centuries

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Perspective

In his later years, Schelling engaged in a sharp debate with his former colleague and university contemporary, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Unlike Schelling, Hegel emphasized that truth, like knowledge, resides not in intuition but in concepts, existing as a scientific system rather than as an art form. For Hegel, truth is a process rather than a tangible commodity, existing as both substance and subject. He believed that knowledge evolves through a lengthy journey from sensory certainty to absolute knowledge and spirit, which each individual experiences through their own development and education. Science, in this view, serves as a ladder for ascending from lower to higher levels of understanding. Hegel explored self-consciousness through the dialectic of the master and slave, where roles reverse over time. Key images of freedom in self-consciousness for Hegel included skepticism, Stoicism, and "unhappy consciousness" (Christianity). At the level of reason, which he regarded as the certainty of consciousness, Hegel asserted the identity of reason and reality.

Addressing religious issues, Hegel was the first to declare that faith is essentially the same as knowledge, albeit in a distinctive form. For Hegel, faith emerges from the insufficiency of knowledge in grasping absolute truth. He criticized the abstract opposition of faith and knowledge, arguing that faith belongs to the realm of cognition because what one believes is known and known with certainty.

In faith, where the object of consciousness is God, Hegel sees a mediation of the self by itself, which he defines as love. Faith, residing in an individual, exists through teaching but primarily through the influence of the Holy Spirit. Thus, even in its general abstract form, where God or anything else might be regarded as an object of faith, it represents the relationship between subject and object, such that faith or knowledge exists only through the mediation of the object, otherwise representing a mere empty identity: faith in nothing and knowledge of nothing. Hegel stresses that faith must be imbued with content, being itself a meaningful and true content, as distant as possible from the sensory certainty of physical existence and concrete things. He opposes the coercion of faith and emphasizes the freedom of faith, which, from the perspective of abstract thought, may appear self-contradictory because faith involves accepting something existing in reality, whereas freedom demands that it be created by the individual. In the pursuit of freedom, faith can be understood as a deeply personal and internal certainty.

In his "Lectures on Aesthetics," Hegel interprets the beautiful as sensory visibility, as the phenomenon of the idea. He developed a theory of symbolic, classical, and romantic forms of art based on the relationship between the idea and its external representation. For Hegel, the absolute spirit as art is the concrete representation of the idea. Philosophy, in Hegel's view, is a form of the absolute spirit (concept), methodically and dialectically defining spiritual life in its formation and development. The history of philosophy, according to Hegel, becomes a process of movement toward eternal absolute truth. Past philosophical systems are understood as stages in this process, each proclaiming different aspects of truth, with their sequence being logical and necessary rather than coincidental.