Jacques
Maritain Center
1 See the following section.
2 Philosophy of History, J. Sibree trans., New York: Collier and Son, 1901, p. 427.
1 Philosophie der Religion, Lasson ed., III (Werke, XIV), pp. 26 f.
2 Ibid., I (Werke, XII), p. 29.
3 The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie, 2nd ed., New York: Macmillan, 1931, p. 808; London: Allen and Unwin, 1931.
1 Philosophie der Religion, Lasson ed., I, p. 40 (Werke, XII).
2 Ibid., I, p. 29.
3 Cf. A. Kojève, op. cit., pp. 156, 182-184, 192-195, 294.
4 J. Hyppolite, op. cit., p. 514.
5 "In religion and philosophy there is thus one substantial content, and only the manner of formation is different. . . . Philosophy is thus not opposed to religion; it comprehends it." Vorlesungen uber die Geschichte der Philosophie, Linleitung, Hoffmeister ed. (Sämtliche Werke, Lasson ed., XVa, Leipzig, 1940), pp. 185, 192.
1 Philosophy of History, Sibree trans., p. 99.
2 Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Preface to the 2nd ed. in Werke, Lasson 4th ed., V, p. 21.
3 Cf. Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Philosophy of Mind, # 568, trans. by W. Wallace, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894, pp. 177 f.
4 Ibid., p. 178.
5 In an immanentist philosophy such as Hegel's this expression takes on a special import. Is it enough for sin to be pardoned? And by what transcendent God would it be pardoned? Is it not necessary, rather, that it be blotted out of existence, in short that God perform the impossible by making what has been not to have been? Hegel thus found himself pre-occupied with a problem which, in a wholly anti-Hegelian perspective, was going to play a central role in Chestov's thought. "The Spirit," he writes, "can make what has happened not have happened. The action remains, to be sure, in the memory, but the Spirit strips itself of it; the finite, evil in general, is denied." "Der Geist kann das Geschehene ungeschehen machen; die Handlung bleibt wohl in der Erinnerung, aber der Geist streift sie ab. . . . das Endliche, Böse überhaupt ist vernichtet." (Phil. der Religion, III, in Werke, Lasson ed., XLV, p. 173.) "The wounds of the spirit heal and leave no scars behind. The deed is not the imperishable element; spirit takes it back into itself . . . . (Phenomenology, Baillie trans., p. 676.) Cf. Hyppolite, op. cit., p. 479: "In this dialectic the spirit reconciles evil within itself and becomes absolute spirit. The Christian dialectic of the remission of sins is the symbolic representation of a tragic philosophy of history, in which the finiteness of the acting spirit is ever converted into the ascensional movement of the spirit, wherein the past awaits its meaning from the future. It is in this transcending, this 'Aufhebung,' that the spirit takes hold of itself as absolute, not in the consciousness of sin, but in the consciousness of the forgiveness of sins."
1 Encyclopaedia, Philosophy of Mind, # 566, Wallace trans., p. 177.
2 Ibid., # 569, p. 178.
3 Encyclopädie, Einleitung, Lasson ed., # 5, Werke, V, p. 35. Cf. above, ch. VII, p. 132, note 2.
4 The same passage, Wallace trans., p. 8; Lasson ed., p. 35: ". . . dass der wahrhafte Inhalt unseres Bewusstseins in dem Obersetzen desselben in die Form des Gedankens und Begriffs erhalten, ja erst in sein eigentiimliches Licht gesetzt wird . . . ."
5 Hegel had already said: "God Himself is dead" in a totally different sense from that in which Christian theology speaks of the death of Christ. For Hegel this "hard word" means that God Himself or insofar as He is God is dead -- in the reversion of the universal consciousness of self into the depths of night -- in order to rise again insofar as God, that is to say, in order that this consciousness at last become for itself in the knowledge the community has of the spirit, which is the advent of Paraclete or the concrete spirit who lives in the community. Cf. Hyppolite, op. cit., pp. 546 f.
1 Phil. of Hist., Sibree trans., p. 435.
2 Ibid., pp. 170 f.
3 The fact that "the Religious element was regarded as utterly alien to the secular" -- in other words, that man has been "driven into the Inward, the Abstract" -- is connected for Hegel to the belief "in Evil, as a vast power the sphere of whose malign dominion is the Secular" and depends on the same wunderbar historical phenomenon as the horrors of the trials for witchcraft (Phil. of Hist., p. 531; Lasson ed., II, in Werke, IX, 2nd ed., p. 891). Cf. ibid., p. 568: "There is no sacred, no religious conscience in a state of separation from, or perhaps even hostility to, Secular Right" (italics ours). Cf. also Encyclopaedia, Phil. of Mind, # 552, p. 160: "The precept of religion, 'Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's' is not enough: the question is to settle what is Caesar's, what belongs to the secular authority." And doubtless Hegel does not blink the fact "that the secular no less than the ecclesiastical authority have claimed almost everything as their own". But "the divine spirit must interpenetrate the entire secular life: whereby wisdom is concrete within it, and it carries the terms of its own justification".
4 "Of all Christian authors, the philosopher Hobbes is the only one who has clearly seen the evil and its remedy, and who has dared to propose a reunion of the heads of the eagle and the complete restoration of political unity, without which no State or government will ever be well constituted." Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. IV, ch. VIII, trans. by H. J. Tozer, London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1905, p. 223.
5 "The distinction between Religion and the World is only this -- that Religion, as such, is Reason in the soul and heart -- that it is a temple in which Truth and Freedom in God are presented to the conceptive faculty: the State, on the other hand, regulated by the selfsame Reason, is a temple of Human Freedom concerned with the perception and volition of a reality, whose purport may itself be called divine. Thus . . . moral rectitude in the State is only the carrying out of that which constitutes the fundamental principle of Religion." Phil. of Hist., pp. 427 f.
"This is the sense in which we must understand the State to be based on Religion. States [184]
and Laws are nothing else than Religion manifesting itself in the relations of the actual world." Ibid., p. 522.
"For in affirming that the State is based on Religion -- that it has its roots in it -- we virtually assert that the former has proceeded from the latter; and that this derivation is going on now and will always continue; that is, the principles of the State must be regarded as valid in and for themselves, which can only be insofar as they are recognized as determinate manifestations of the Divine Nature." Ibid., p. 101.
Cf. Philosophy of Right, # 270, trans. by T. M. Knox, Oxford, 1942, p. 166: "If religion is in this way the groundwork which includes the ethical realm in general, and the state's fundamental nature -- the divine will -- in particular, it is at the same time only a groundwork; and it is at this point that state and religion begin to diverge. The state is the divine will, in the sense that it is mind present on earth, unfolding itself to be the actual shape and organization of a world."
Cf. also Encyclopaedia, Phil. of Mind, # 552, Wallace trans., pp. 154 ff.
1 Phil. of Hist., p. 552.
2 "That harmony which has resulted from the painful struggles of History, involves the recognition of the Secular as capable of being an embodiment of Truth. . . . It is now perceived that Morality and Justice in the State are also divine and commanded by God, and that in point of substance there is nothing higher or more sacred." Phil. of Hist., p. 528.
After the crises of the modern world and the "run of the Church", whose "corruption" provoked the Lutheran Reform and which was henceforth in "a position of inferiority to the World-Spirit" (ibid., pp. 516 f.), "Spirit, once more driven back upon itself, produces its work in an intellectual shape, and becomes capable of realizing the Ideal of Reason from the Secular principle alone". Ibid., p. 170 (italics ours).
The following texts, which offer the totalitarian State a breviary of its right to persecute the Church, are in perfect accord with those principles:
"When individuals, holding religious views in common, form themselves into a church, a Corporation, they fall under the general control and oversight of the higher state officials." Phil. of Right, # 270, Knox trans., p. 169.
"On the other hand, the doctrine of the church is not purely and simply an inward concern of conscience. As doctrine it is rather the expression of something, in fact the expression of a subject-matter which is most closely linked, or even directly concerned with ethical principles and the law of the land. Hence at this point the paths of church and state either coincide or diverge at right angles. The difference of their two domains may be pushed by the church into sheer antagonism since, by regarding itself as enshrining the content of religion -- a content which is absolute -- it may claim as its portion mind in general and so the whole ethical sphere, and conceive the state as a mere mechanical scaffolding for the attainment of external, non-mental, ends. It may take itself to be the Kingdom of God, or at [185] least as the road to it or its vestibule, while it regards the state as the kingdom of this world, i.e. of the transient and the finite. In a word, it may think that it is an end in itself, while the state is a mere means. These claims produce the demand, in connexion with doctrinal instruction, that the state should not only allow the church to do as it likes with complete freedom, but that it should pay unconditional respect to the church's doctrines as doctrines, whatever their character, because their determination is supposed to be the task of the church alone." Ibid., p. 170.
"Now it is, of course, a matter of history that in terms and under conditions of barbarism, all higher forms of intellectual life had their seat only in the church, while the state was a mere mundane rule of force, caprice, and passion. . . . But it is far too blind and shallow a proceeding to declare that this situation is the one which truly corresponds with the Idea." Ibid., p. 171.
"It is philosophic insight which sees that while church and state differ in form, they do not stand opposed in content, for truth and rationality are the content of both. Thus when the church begins to teach doctrines (though there are and have been some churches with a ritual only, and others in which ritual is the chief thing, while doctrine and a more educated consciousness are only secondary), and when these doctrines touch on objective principles, on thoughts of the ethical and the rational, then their expression eo ipso brings the church into the domain of the state. In contrast with the church's faith and authority in matters affecting ethical principles, rightness, laws, institutions, in contrast with the church's subjective conviction, the state is that which knows. Its principle is such that its content is in essence no longer clothed with the form of feeling and faith but is determinate thought." Ibid., p. 171 (italics ours).
"It is only thereafter that the state, in contrast with the particular sects, has attained to universality of thought -- its formal principle -- and is bringing this universality into existence. . . . Hence so far from its being or its having been a misfortune for the state that the church is disunited, it is only as a result of that disunion that the state has been able to reach its appointed end as a self-consciously rational and ethical organization." Ibid., pp. 173 f. (italics ours).
1 Cf. the long developments in # 573 of the Encyclopaedia, Phil. of Mind, Wallace trans., pp. 181-196.
2 Ibid., p. 194.
3 It would be too easy -- and hardly philosophical -- to avoid the question, as Jean Hyppolite does (op. cit., p. 524), by writing: "It is impossible to accuse Hegel of pantheism in the popular sense, if pantheism makes one of the terms of the opposition disappear in the other." Besides, it is not a matter of accusing but of stating. The same author abounds in assertations which reveal Hegelian doctrine as the most authentic pantheism, not popular but highly and learnedly elaborated, when he tells us, for example, that according to this doctrine "all consciousness of self is for itself double: it is God and man in the bosom of a single consciousness" (ibid., p. 183); "the infinite essence is realized in finite existence and the finite existence raises itself to essentiality", in such a way that a God who would be "above the battle" -- that is to say, who would not be Himself engaged in the agonies of the finite -- would be only an "abstract God" (ibid., p. 473); "God is not beyond the knowledge which religion has of him. . . . He is knowledge of self in man and by man who thus shares in the divine life" (ibid., p. 523); "the absolute spirit goes beyond the finite spirit, but is, however, only through it, if it is true that only in this reconciliation (which supposes separation and unity) is the spirit authentically absolute because it becomes so" (ibid., p. 525); "in creation God becomes Self" (ibid., p. 544); etc.
4 Encyclopaedia, Phil. of Mind, # 554, p. 168.
5 Emile Bréhier, Histoire de la philosophie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1946, II, 3, p. 778. "As those primitive gods who would die without the offerings of their faithful," the same author notes (p. 781), "one may literally say that the God of Hegel owes his existence to religion."
6 Geschichte der Philosophie, Einleitung in Werke, XVa, p. 175. Hegel adds (pp. 175 f.): "We ought to conceive of the Spirit as free; the freedom of the Spirit means that he is by himself, that he understands himself. His nature consists in encroaching on the Other, where he refinds, reunites, possesses, and enjoys himself."
1 Phil. der Religion, Lasson ed., III in Werke, XIV, p. 38.
2 Encyclopaedia, Phil. of Mind, # 564, p. 176.
3 The "element of existence" "in which absolute knowledge becomes possible" is "universal self-consciousness present in 'the universal divine man' ". J. Hyppolite, op. cit., p. 574.
4 Of the two kinds of evil -- sin, the evil of free will or of the person, and suffering, the evil of nature -- the second is evil in a less detestable sense. This is why Plato said he would rather be punished, even unjustly, than guilty. It is of the essence of the material universe to entail suffering, and more generally privation. From the very fact that He creates the world God is also the cause of the suffering which matter renders inevitable -- generatio unius corruptio alterius -- but He is the cause of it only per accidens, or in a manner extrinsic to His intention. What He intends are the existence and good of the world -- to which, however, suffering and privation are bound. (And it is only in Him, because of the transcendent simplicity of His willing, that such a per accidens causation can be purely per accidens or extra-intentional: willed, but without being even in a secondary way an object of intention.) But the evil par excellence, moral evil or sin, God does not will in any way, [188]
even extra-intentionally. He is not the cause of it, even per accidens; He is absolutely not the cause of it.
Let us add that according to the Judeo-Christian revelation man was created in a state above nature, in which he did not know suffering. For man suffering -- the evil of nature -- came after sin -- the evil of free will -- for which the created agent is alone responsible. It is the consequence of the first sin, of the fall, and, moreover, of the whole backlog of sin accumulated in the human race since then. God did not make man to suffer, but to be happy.
1 Cf. our work Existence and the Existent, New York: Pantheon Books, Inc., 1948.
1 We refer here to private notes which were kindly communicated to us by their author.
2 The "succession of spiritual shapes (Geistern)" which constitutes universal history is "a gallery of pictures, each of which is endowed with the entire wealth of Spirit". Phenomenology, Baillie trans., 2nd ed., p. 807.
3 On this re-establishment of eternity by time, cf. Jean Hyppolite, op. cit., pp. 548-549: "That the effective spirit, that of history, become its own self-knowledge, and that this self-knowledge show itself to its consciousness in history, this certainty implies the dialectical reconciliation of finite human existence and essence, but that this reconciliation be apprehended as our work, this double exigency leads to a divine Humanity which states in a temporal way an eternal truth. Do not all the difficulties of the Hegelian system come together in this last relation of the finite and the infinite, of the singular and the universal, under the form of time and eternity?"
1 Phenomenology, p. 81 (italics ours).
2 Ibid., p. 808.
3 "The infinite Spirit should not be thought of as beyond the finite spirit, beyond man who acts and sins, for he is himself eager to share in the human drama. His true infinity, his concrete infinity, is not realized without this fall" (Hyppolite, op. cit., p. 507). "One must learn that this fall forms a part of the absolute itself, that it is a moment of the total truth. The absolute Self cannot be expressed without this negativity; it is an absolute Yes only while saying No to a No, only while overcoming the necessary negation" (ibid., p. 509).
4 Ibid., p. 545 (cf. Phenomenology, p. 770).
5 "Knowledge, as the disannulling of the unity of mere Nature, is the 'Fall', which is no casual conception, but the eternal history of Spirit. For the state of innocence, the paradisiacal condition, is that of the brute. Paradise is a park, where only brutes, not men, can remain." Phil. of Hist., p. 411; cf. Hyppolite, op. cit., p. 545.
6 John, XIV, 17.
7 Here is the true "master and lord of the world" (Phenomenology, p. 505), the true "living God" (ibid.), the true "monas monadum" and "Person of Persons" (Phil. of Hist., pp. 409 f.), to take up the terms which Hegel himself used concerning the miserable exemplar [191] of the idea offered by the Caesar of imperial Rome -- "titanic self-consciousness, which takes itself to be the living God" but which, being only a wretched "solitary single person", a merely "formal" and abstract self incapable of subduing the unleashed forces which emerge within him, finds "his procedure and his self-enjoyment" only in "titanic excess" (Phenomenology, pp. 504 f.). The veritable Herr der Welt -- what we are calling the Emperor of the world -- is the concrete personality, the Self of the infinite Spirit in process of fully possessing itself. It will also be noted that if, for Hegel, Faith "is an escape from the real world . . . and yet is the same substance which, as in a mirror trick, appears here in the aspect of the powers of this world, in the form of absolute being, of God" (Hyppolite, op. cit., p. 405), this is because for Hegel God only realizes Himself through the world and the powers of this world and only comes into His own there.
1 Cf. La signification de l'athéisme contemporain, Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1949, pp.26 f. (text modified); an English translation of this essay appears in The Range of Reason, New York: Scribners, 1952; London: Geoffrey Bles, pp. 110 f.
1 Cf. the last lines of the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Sibree trans., p. 569: "What has happened, and is happening every day, is not only not 'without God', but is essentially His Work" (italics ours).
1 Jenenser Realphilosophie, II, Die Vorlesungen von 1805/06 (Werke, XX), pp. 261 f.
2 Phil. of Hist., p. 526.
3 Ibid., p. 552.
4 Phenomenology, p. 474.
5 Let us not forget that for Hegel in the dialectic of the particular
striving towards individuality each makes itself known only by being
ready to "injure" the other "unto death". "Each particular ought to put
himself as a totality in the consciousness of the other in such a way
that he engages against the other, for the preservation of some
particularity, his entire phenomenal totality, his life: and similarly
each should necessarily have as his end the death of the other. I can
know myself in the consciousness of the other as this particular
totality [that is to say, as individual or human person] only to the
extent that I put myself in his consciousness as being in my exclusion
Jenenser Realphilosophie, I, Die
Vorlesungen von 1803/04, J. Hoffmeister ed. in Werke, XIX,
pp. 228 f.
1 Phil. of Right, Addition to # 324, Knox trans., pp. 295 f.
(italics ours).
2 "The Meaning of Contemporary Atheism", in The Range of Reason,
New York: Scribners, 1952, p. 111; London: Bles, 1953.
3 Saint Justin Martyr, The First Apology, ch. 6, trans. by T. B.
Falls in The Fathers of the Church ed., New York, 1948, pp. 38 f.
4 Saint Paul, Philippians, II, 6 and 7.
1 Phil. of Hist., Sibree trans., p. 104.
2 Ibid., p. 134.
3 Ibid., p. 104. Bréhier, op. cit., p. 773: "the history
of the degrees of the coming of the spirit." Phil. of Hist., p. 125:
"the development of Spirit in Time"; cf. ibid., p. 107:
"Universal History exhibits the gradation in the development of that
principle whose substantial purport is the consciousness of
Freedom."
4 Ibid., p. 84: "God governs the world: the actual working of
his government -- the carrying out of his plan -- is the History of
the World" (italics ours).
5 Ibid., p. 569. Cf. p. 60: This theodicy, attempted by Leibniz
"metaphysically in his method, i.e., in indefinite abstract
categories", consists in a "harmonizing" of "the thinking Spirit" with
"the ill that is found in the World", attained by perceiving "the
ultimate design of the World" and "the fact this design has been
actually realized in it, and that evil has not been able permanently to
assert a competing position".
6 Phenomenology, p. 658.
7 Hyppolite, op. cit., p. 479. It is history, as Kojève
(op. cit., p. 459) writes from his point of view, "which judges
men, their actions and their opinions, and in the final analysis also
their philosophic opinions".
1 Phil. of Hist., p. 84.
2 Bréhier, op. cit., p. 772. The citation from Hegel is
taken from Phil. der Religion, Lasson ed., I, Begriff der
Religion in Werke, XII, p. 73.
3 It is in a totally different sense that Hegel speaks of the divine or
unwritten law. The latter is for him the subterranean law of nature
which expresses the non-self-conscious immediateness of that which
merely is, and that which it is incumbent on woman (Antigone) to
manifest. Cf. Phenomenology, pp. 452, 478 f. Elsewhere (Phil.
of Hist., p. 87) in order to confirm the supreme rationality of the
laws of the State Hegel refers to "the divine commands . . . not of
yesterday, nor of today" invoked by Antigone. It is rather surprising
for the latter to find herself thus in the long run being made
responsible for sanctifying Creon.
To see how far the traditional notion of the natural law was foreign to
Hegel's mind (the more so since for a long time, but especially since
Hobbes, the notion of the natural law as an ideal order had been lost
in that of a state of nature taken as a situation of fact) cf.
Encyclopaedia, Phil. of Mind, # 502, Wallace trans., p. 112.
1 "The Will is Free only when it does not will anything alien,
extrinsic, foreign to itself (for as long as it does so, it is
dependent), but wills itself alone -- wills the Will. This is absolute
Will -- the volition to be free. Will making itself its own object is
the basis of all Right and Obligation -- consequently of all statutory
determinations of Right, categorical imperatives, and enjoined
obligations. The Freedom of the Will per se is the principle and
substantial basis of all Right -- is itself absolute, inherently
eternal Right, and the Supreme Right in comparison with other specific
Rights; nay, it is even that by which Man becomes Man, and is therefore
the fundamental principle of Spirit." Phil. of Hist., p. 552.
In virtue of this notion of natural law one must say that "the
authority of ethical laws is infinitely higher" than that of the laws
to which natural objects are subject (Phil. of Right, # 146,
Knox trans., p. 106), but the moral laws in question are those of
Sittlichkeit and of obedience due to the State. As Hegel makes
clearer further on (ibid., # 148, p. 107) "an immanent and
logical 'doctrine of duties' can be nothing except the serial
exposition of the relationships which are necessitated by the Idea of
freedom and are therefore actual in their entirety, to wit in the
state".
2 Cf. Raissa Maritain, "Abraham and the Ascent of Conscience" in The
Bridge, 1 (1955), pp. 23-52, and our work, Man and the
State, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951, ch. IV; London:
Hollis and Carter, 1954.
1 Kojève, op. cit., p. 153 (à propos of
Phenomenology, Baillie trans., pp. 667 ff.). See below, pp. 206-207.
2 Cf. Phil. of Hist., p. 81.
3 "A World-historical individual . . . is devoted to the One Aim,
regardless of all else. It is even possible that such men may treat
other great, even sacred interests, inconsiderately; conduct which is
indeed obnoxious to moral reprehension. But so mighty a form must
trample down many an innocent flower -- crush to pieces many an object
in its path." Ibid., pp. 79 if.
4 Ibid., p. 120.
5 "Their whole life," Hegel writes in a specially eloquent passage,
"was labor and trouble; their whole nature was naught else but their
master-passion. When their object is attained they fall off like empty
hulls from the kernel. They die early, like Alexander; they are
murdered, like Caesar; transported to St. Helena, like Napoleon. This
fearful consolation -- that historical men have not enjoyed what is
called happiness, and of which only private life . . . is capable --
this consolation those may draw from history, who stand in need of it;
and it is craved by Envy." Ibid., pp. 77 f.
6 Ibid., p. 85.
1 "For Hegel, the individual judges himself by success. In order
'to be right', he has to impose his idea on others, in other words to
realize it. This is why there are absolute values. States judge
themselves in a similar way, by universal history. The true 'test' is
action: one criticizes himself by putting his idea to work; one
criticizes others by fighting them unto death." Kojève, op.
cit., p. 92.
2 Pensées, # 298, trans. by W. F. Trotter, New York: Modern
Library ed., 1941, p. 103.
3 Cf. above, p. 198, note 3.
1 Phenomenology, pp. 615-641.
3 Phenomenology, p. 407.
4 Phil. of Hist., p. 119. This is why "Moral claims that are
irrelevant must not be brought into collision with world-historical
deeds and their accomplishment. The Litany of private virtues --
modesty, humility, philanthropy and forbearance -- must not be raised
against them" (ibid., p. 120). Cf. Phil. of Right, # 337,
Knox trans., p. 215: "At one time the opposition between morals and
politics, and the demand that the latter should conform to the former,
were much canvassed. On this point only a general remark is required
here. The welfare of a state has claims to recognition totally
different from those of the welfare of the individual. The ethical
substance, the state, has its determinate being, i.e. its right,
directly embodied in something existent, something not abstract but
concrete, and the principle of its conduct and behaviour can only be
this concrete existent and not one of the many universal thoughts
supposed to be moral commands. When politics is alleged to clash with
morals and so to be always wrong, the doctrine propounded rests on
superficial ideas about morality, the nature of the state, and the
state's relation to the moral point of view." From the viewpoint of
objective morality, of Sittlichkeit, "the so-called injustice
proper to politics" is thus fully justified. Hegel writes further:
"Justice and virtue, wrongdoing, power and vice, talents and their
achievements, passions strong and weak, guilt and
[201]
innocence, grandeur in individual and national life, autonomy, fortune
and misfortune of states and individuals, all these have their specific
significance and worth in the field of known actuality; therein they
are judged and therein they have their partial, though only partial
justification. World-history, however, is above the point of view
from which these things matter. Each of its stages is the presence
of a necessary moment in the Idea of the world mind, and that moment
attains its absolute right in that stage. The nation whose life
embodies this moment secures its good fortune and fame, and its deeds
are brought to fruition" (ibid., # 345, p. 217; italics ours).
And still further: "In contrast with this its absolute right of being
the vehicle of this present stage in the world mind's development, the
minds of the other nations are without rights, and they, along with
those whose hour has struck already, count no longer in world history"
(ibid., # 347, p. 218).
1 Phil. of Hist., # 140, pp. 97 f.
2 Cf. above, p. 195, note 5.
1 Phil. of Hist., p. 60. This end of the universe is "the
consciousness of its own freedom on the part of Spirit, and
ipso facto, the reality of that freedom" (ibid., p. 64).
Cf. Phenomenology, pp. 137 f. Elsewhere in the same work (p.
808) Hegel writes that "the goal of the process [that is to say, of
World History] is the revelation of the depth of spiritual life, and
this is the Absolute Notion. . . . The goal . . . is Absolute Knowledge
or Spirit knowing itself as Spirit."
1 The notion of happiness plays a role in Moralität but
without constituting a real ultimate end, for it is purely abstract and
empirical. Cf. above, ch. VIII, pp. 156-
157, and Encyclopaedia, Phil. of Mind, ## 505 f., Wallace
trans., p. 115.
2 Phil. of Hist., p. 425.
3 Cf. Geschichte der Philosophie, I, Michelet ed., in
Sämtliche Werke, XIII, Berlin, 1833, pp. 395 if. In this
passage Hegel gives as an example the immanent finality characteristic
of living beings, but without seeing that it poses exactly the same
problem as the finality observable in the material world generally,
even in the non-living part of it. If "the animal is its own end", this
is because it is the product of a creative Intelligence which has thus
established its essence, the "form" of which is a "soul" or entelechy.
1 Cf. John of Saint Thomas, Cursus Philosophicus, Nat. Phil., I
pars, quaest. XIII (Reiser ed., 1949, II, pp. 270-287).
2 Cf. Geschichte der Philosophie, I, Michelet ed.,
Sämtliche Werke, VIII, p. 397. "This activity which
determines itself, which is then also active towards something else,
which enters into opposition, but finally abolishes it, dominates it,
reflects therein upon itself, this is the end, the nous,
thought" (italics ours).
3 Cf. above, ch. VII, p. 135.
4 Hyppolite, op. cit., pp. 568-583.
5 This difficulty is of the same type as that to which attention was
called in the passage from Jean Hyppolite cited above,
p. 189, note 3.
1 Cf. Hyppolite, op. cit., pp. 348 f., 479, 501 ff.
2 Phenomenology, p. 488. Elsewhere (Phil. of Hist., p.
81): "The brute alone is simply innocent." The God of Hegel certainly
is not.
1 The expression comes from Hegel himself, from the Jena period. The
organic natural Law, he taught at that time, is based on the
supreme moral value and the supreme law of the beautiful totality
(die schöne Totalität), of the "absolute moral
totality" which "is nothing other than a people". Cf.
Phenomenology, pp. 377 f., and Schriften zur Politik und
Rechtsphilosophie, 2nd ed., Werke, VII, p. 371 (cf.
Hyppolite's preface to the French translation of the Philosophie des
Rechts, Paris, 1940, pp. 12 f.) and also p. 415 and Phil. of
Hist., pp. 102 ff.
2 A. Kojève, op. cit., p. 95.