The German Genius

inorganic level, governed by the laws of mechanics; there was the organic level, governed by the laws of biology; and there was the level of consciousness, only present among humans. The development of consciousness was looked upon by Schelling as the “culmination and goal” of the entire process. 3 In saying this, he claimed to discern a cyclical movement in history. Spirit objectified itself in the natural world as phenomena, but it “returned to itself” as mind. Investigating the nature of “mind” now became the primary task of philosophical reflection; the spirit’s apprehension of itself was the “final task” of mankind.
    In framing this approach, Schelling attached a profound importance to artistic creativity. The cumulative effects of creativity would lead to an ever-greater appreciation of what Schelling variously called “absolute identity,” “pure identity,” and “absolute reason.” There is a sense in which, to our ears, this sounds almost absurd but it was, again, a concept of an ultimate reality that had no grounding in religion and, as yet, showed no real biological understanding. With hindsight, it is possible to credit Schelling with some notion of “emergent evolution,” but his thoughts were really a halfway house and a dead-end.
    Or not quite. Schelling is perhaps most pertinent as a forerunner of Hegel, who incorporated some of his notions, in particular his idea of the “absolute spirit,” or mind.
    Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770. From 1788 to 1793 he was a theology student at Tübingen, where his fellow students included both Schelling and the future great Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin. After graduation Hegel first worked as a tutor to a number of families in Bern and Frankfurt and seems to have looked forward to a career as a reforming educator. But, possibly as a result of his contacts with Schelling and Hölderlin, he fell under the influence of Kant and then Fichte. He moved to the University of Jena to work more closely with Schelling, with whom he edited the Kritische Journal der Philosophie (Critical Journal of Philosophy) and wrote about both Schelling’s and Fichte’s philosophy, exploring their differences. He gradually diverged from Schelling, his views becoming clear in his Phänomenologie des Geistes ( Phenomenology of the Spirit ), published in 1806. 4 Schelling interpreted certain passages in this book as an attack and their friendship ended. The occupation of Jena by Napoleon’s troops closed the university, and Hegel was forced to leave. He worked first as a journalist in Bamberg, and then as headmaster and teacher of philosophy at a Gymnasium in Nuremberg, where he married and started a family. In 1816 he was appointed to the chair of philosophy at Heidelberg and then, in 1818, to the same chair at Berlin.
    From his earliest days, Hegel was influenced, as were so many in the Germany of his time, by the differences between modern societies and Classical Greece, contrasting the divisions and antagonisms of modern societies with the apparent harmony of the ancients. He was distressed by the “anarchic individualism” of contemporary European life, feeling that the great majority of people had lost a sense of common purpose and dignity and were unable any longer to identify with institutions and customs that had traditionally fulfilled their aspirations. Religion—Christianity—which at one time might have provided a remedy, had also failed. There was estrangement wherever one turned.
    This estrangement was not yet called alienation but it already played a vital role in Hegel’s thinking. It was such estrangement that led him to propose his vast synoptic vision where every aspect of the world, every discipline of knowledge, was allotted its position and an explanation and rationale provided. Within this vast system, two oppositional ideas reappeared, but reclothed and in more imposing form. 5
    For Hegel, as for Schelling, the development of the world, of phenomena, was to be understood as the evolution of the spirit, described as “the process of its own becoming.” Hegel did not think, as Schelling appeared to, that there was any such thing as “pure undifferentiated identity,” or spirit, which was in some way “logically prior” to the reality of phenomena; instead, for Hegel spirit could only exist in the multitude of ways in which it revealed itself—there was no “other world” in his scheme. He did