4. Hegel and His School. Hegel was well known
when he went to Berlin in 1818. He was invited there
by von Altenstein, head of the recently formed “Minis-
try of Spiritual, Educational and Medical Affairs,” who
admired Hegel's writings and was ready to grant him
special privileges. Hegel's arrival and the official sup-
port he received were of particular concern to two
leading Berlin professors, Friedrich Schleiermacher,
the theologian and philosopher, and Friedrich von
Savigny, the most eminent member of the so-called
“Historical School” of law. Hegel came into conflict
with both of them. Schleiermacher's view that religion
is man's feeling of dependence is not compatible with
Hegel's view that religion is philosophy or reason in
representational form, and Hegel did not try to smooth
over the differences. In a preface he wrote for a book
by a former pupil (H. F. W. Hinrichs, DieReligion
im inneren Verhältnisse zur Wissenschaft, Heidelberg
1822) Hegel said that if religion were the feeling of
one's dependence, dogs would be the best Christians.
According to Schleiermacher, Hegel used to criticize
him in his lectures. As we have seen, Hegel was no
supporter of traditions as such, and favored a rationally
constructed system of legislation. He did not himself
directly criticize Savigny, but in the Introduction to
the Philosophie des Rechts he criticized the work of
G. von Hugo (Lehrbuch..., p. 20) who, like Savigny,
had regarded Roman law as eminently rational, and
in §211 he said it was “an insult” to a civilized people
to question their ability (as Savigny had done) to codify
their legal system.
Not long after his arrival in Berlin in 1818, Hegel
wrote to the Minister of Education suggesting that a
journal be founded under official auspices in Berlin for
the publication of signed reviews of new publications
both from abroad and in Germany. This was not agreed
to. In 1825 the Stuttgart publisher Cotta and Hegel's
friend and disciple Eduard Gans, a Professor of Law
at Berlin, endeavored to come to an agreement with
Victor Cousin in Paris, to publish a journal that would
appear simultaneously in both capitals. This fell
through. Then Cotta and Gans, with Hegel's support,
arranged for the publication of a journal that was to
be controlled by a newly formed body, the Societät
für wissenschaftliche Kritik. This journal was called
the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik and began
to appear in January, 1827. Schleiermacher was delib-
erately excluded from it, and the evangelical leader
Hengstenberg wrote: “à bas la philosophie. Alongside
the Word of God philosophy is a pleonasm” (Fritz
Schlawe, “Die Berliner Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft-
liche Kritik,”
Zeitschrift für Religion und Geistes-
geschichte, Cologne [1959], 11, 240-58, 343-56).
The Jahrbücher soon came to be known as the
“Hegelzeitung,” but it was not as exclusively Hegelian
as Hegel himself wished it to be. There were contri-
butions by the diplomat, literary critic, and historian
Varnhagen von Ense, whose reviews of historical works
are still of interest. He wrote of Sir Walter Scott's Life
of Napoleon, that Scott “... regards the French Revo-
lution exclusively from the shores and ships of Great
Britain.” Ranke contributed too. Nevertheless, it was
primarily an organ of the Hegelian School. In the first
volume, for example, E. Gans reviewed the fourth
volume of Savigny's Geschichte des Römischen Rechts
im Mittelalter (Heidelberg, 1826), in which, while
praising his erudition, he said that Savigny made no
attempt at an historical and rational assessment of the
place of the Roman law in the history of Europe, so
that the book as a whole “lacks thought.” An important
document in the history of Hegelianism is Hegel's
review in 1829 of Friedrich Göschel's Aphorismen über
Nichtwissen und Absolutes Wissen im Verhältnis zur
Christlichen Glaubenserkenntnis (Berlin, 1829). This
book, the work of a lawyer and civil servant with
whom Hegel was not then acquainted, began with a
dialectical criticism of Jacobi's view that God is beyond
the sphere of human knowledge, passed on to a discus-
sion of man's knowledge of God and relationship to
Him, and concluded with an account of the importance
of faith as well as knowledge. The author's general
position was that the categories in terms of which both
fideists like Jacobi and their rationalist critics thought
were inadequate for their subject matter. Hegel agrees
with Göschel that by means of speculative philosophy
a “self-alienation of man's natural existence and
knowledge” and “a spiritual rebirth” are achieved. He
quotes with approval Göschel's words: “The being and
knowledge of God in me contains, therefore, not only
the knowledge that God has of me, but the knowledge
that I have of Him...,” and goes on to say that those
who accuse the holders of this view of deifying man
fail to notice that to say that man is in God is not
to say that he is God. In discussing Göschel's account
of faith and knowledge Hegel remarks that “a philoso-
phy without a heart and a faith without understanding
are abstractions,” and goes on to say that since no one
can “understand the Holy Writ except through the
Holy Spirit,” it is philosophically inappropriate to try
to interpret the Bible merely on the basis of the texts
or to “spare oneself the trouble of examining the feel-
ing, the understanding, the logic which is conducting
the exegesis.”
It has been said that in these passages, and in a
passage of the Encyclopedia (§564), Hegel was influ
enced not only by Göschel but by the thirteenth-
century German mystic Meister Eckhart. Hegel men-
tions Eckhart once in his Lectures on the Philosophy
of Religion (Part One, C, I, On Faith) where he quotes
the famous passage: “The eye with which God sees
me is the eye with which I see him; my eye and his
eye are one....” Hegel's distinguished follower, Karl
Rosenkranz, says (Hegels Leben, Berlin [1844], p. 102)
that as a young man Hegel copied from various literary
periodicals extracts from Eckhart and Tauler, and in
his hegel als Deutsche Nationalphilosoph (Leipzig,
1870) Rosenkranz devotes a chapter to the German
mystics, and his chapter on Hegel's philosophy of reli-
gion interprets him as believing that man “... in faith
knows himself to be one with God. What is all this
virtuosity of culture, what are all his failures in the
ascetic struggle, what is all the happiness and unhappi-
ness of his existence, in comparison with this recon-
cilation?” (p. 205). It is interesting to note that Henry
Crabb Robinson reports in his diary (Dec. 10, 1825),
a meeting he had with the poet William Blake: “...
on my asking in what light he viewed the great ques-
tion concerning the divinity of Jesus Christ, he said:
'He is the only God'; but then he added: 'and so am
I and so are you'.” Like Hegel, Blake rejected the
empiricist thinkers of the seventeenth century. Ac-
cording to Robinson, Blake said on the same occasion:
“Bacon, Locke and Newton are the three great teachers
of atheism or of Satan's doctrine.” Hegel would have
said that they remain ensnared in the categories of the
finite.
