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The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. by Various

V >> Various >> The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII.



VOLUME VII


GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

BETTINA VON ARNIM

KARL LEBRECHT IMMERMANN

KARL FERDINAND GUTZKOW

ANASTASIUS GRUeN

NIKOLAUS LENAU

EDUARD MOeRIKE

ANNETTE ELISABETH VON DROSTE-HUeLSHOFF

FERDINAND FREILIGRATH

MORITZ GRAF VON STRACHWITZ

EMANUEL GEIBEL

GEORG HERWEGH





THE GERMAN CLASSICS

Masterpieces of German Literature

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH



PATRONS' EDITION
IN TWENTY VOLUMES


ILLUSTRATED






1914



THE GERMAN PUBLICATION SOCIETY

CONTRIBUTORS AND TRANSLATORS


VOLUME VII

* * * * *





CONTENTS OF VOLUME VII


#Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel#

The Life of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. By J. Loewenberg.

Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree.

The Philosophy of Law. Translated by J. Loewenberg.

Introduction to the Philosophy of Art. Translated by J. Loewenberg.

#Bettina von Arnim#

The Life of Bettina von Arnim. By Henry Wood.

Goethe's Correspondence with a Child. Translated by Wallace Smith Murray.

#Karl Lebrecht Immermann#

Immermann and His Drama _Merlin_. By Martin Schuetze.

Immermann's _Muenchhausen_. By Allen Wilson Porterfield.

The Oberhof. Translated by Paul Bernard Thomas.

#Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow#

Gutzkow and Young Germany. By Starr Willard Cutting.

Sword and Queue. Translated by Grace Isabel Colbron.

German Lyric Poetry from 1830 to 1848. By John S. Nollen.

#Anastasius Gruen#

A Salon Scene. Translated by Sarah T. Barrows.

#Nikolaus Lenau#

Prayer. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork.

Sedge Songs. Translated by Kate Freiligrath-Kroeker.

Songs by the Lake. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork.

The Postilion. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork.

To the Beloved from Afar. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork.

The Three Gipsies. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork.

My Heart. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork.

#Eduard Moerike#

An Error Chanced. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork.

A Song for Two in the Night. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork.

Early Away. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork.

The Forsaken Maiden. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork

Weyla's Song. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork

Seclusion. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork

The Soldier's Betrothed. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork

The Old Weathercock: An Idyll. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork

Think of It, My Soul. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork

Erinna to Sappho. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork

* * * * *

Mozart's Journey from Vienna to Prague. Translated by Florence Leonard

#Annette Elizabeth von Droste-Huelshoff#

Pentecost. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork

The House in the Heath. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork

The Boy on the Moor. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork

On the Tower. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork

The Desolate House. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork

The Jew's Beech-Tree. Translated by Lillie Winter

#Ferdinand Freiligrath#

The Duration of Love. Translated by M.G. in _Chambers' Journal_

The Emigrants. Translated by C.T. Brooks

The Lion's Ride. Translated by C.T. Brooks

The Spectre-Caravan. Translated by J.C. Mangan

Had I at Mecca's Gate been Nourished. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork

Wild Flowers. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork

The Dead to the Living. Translated by Bayard Taylor

Hurrah, Germania! In _Pall Mall Gazette_, London

The Trumpet of Gravelotte. Translated by Kate Freiligrath-Kroeker

#Moritz Graf von Strachwitz#

Douglas of the Bleeding Heart. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork

#Georg Herwegh#

The Stirrup-Cup. Translated by William G. Howard

#Emanuel Geibel#

The Watchman's Song. Translated by A.I. du P. Coleman

The Call of the Road. Translated by A.I. du P. Coleman

Autumn Days. Translated by A.I. du P. Coleman

The Death of Tiberius. Translated by A.I. du P. Coleman




ILLUSTRATIONS--VOLUME VII

Arco. By Benno Becker

Georg Wilhelm Frederich Hegel. By Schlesinger

Royal Old Museum in Berlin. By Schinkel

Bettina von Arnim

The Goethe Monument. By Bettina von Arnim

Karl Lebrecht Immermann. By C.T. Lessing

The Master of the Oberhof. By Benjamin Vautier

The Oberhof. By Benjamin Vautier

The Freemen's Tribunal. By Benjamin Vautier

Lisbeth. By Benjamin Vautier

Oswald, the Hunter. By Benjamin Vautier

Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow

The Potsdam Guard. By Adolph von Menzel

King Frederick William I of Prussia. By R. Siemering

King Frederick William I and His "Tobacco Collegium". By Adolph von Menzel

Anastasius Gruen

Nikolaus Lenau

Evening on the Shore. By Hans am Ende

Eduard Moerike. By Weiss

Annette von Droste-Huelshoff

The Farm House. By Hans am Ende

Ferdinand Freiligrath. By J Hasenclever

Dusk on the Dead Sea. By Eugen Bracht

Death on the Barricade. By Alfred Rethel

George Herwegh

Emanuel Geibel. By Hader

Journeying. By Ludwig Richter





THE LIFE OF GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

BY J. LOEWENBERG, PH.D.

Assistant in Philosophy, Harvard University


Among students of philosophy the mention of Hegel's name arouses at once
a definite emotion. Few thinkers indeed have ever so completely
fascinated the minds of their sympathetic readers, or have so violently
repulsed their unwilling listeners, as Hegel has. To his followers Hegel
is the true prophet of the only true philosophic creed, to his
opponents, he has, in Professor James's words, "like Byron's corsair,
left a name 'to other times, linked with one virtue and a thousand
crimes.'"

The feelings of attraction to Hegel or repulsion from him do not emanate
from his personality. Unlike Spinoza's, his life offers nothing to stir
the imagination. Briefly, some of his biographical data are as follows:
He was born at Stuttgart, the capital of Wuertemberg, August 27, 1770.
His father was a government official, and the family belonged to the
upper middle class. Hegel received his early education at the Latin
School and the Gymnasium of his native town. At both these institutions,
as well as at the University of Tuebingen which he entered in 1788 to
study theology, he distinguished himself as an eminently industrious,
but not as a rarely gifted student. The certificate which he received
upon leaving the University in 1793 speaks of his good character, his
meritorious acquaintance with theology and languages, and his meagre
knowledge of philosophy. This does not quite represent his equipment,
however, for his private reading and studies carried him far beyond the
limits of the regular curriculum. After leaving the University he spent
seven years as family tutor in Switzerland and in Frankfurt-on-the-Main.
Soon after, in 1801, we find him as _Privat-Docent_; then, in 1805, as
professor at the University of Jena. His academic activities were
interrupted by the battle of Jena. For the next two years we meet him as
an editor of a political journal at Bamberg, and from 1808 to 1816 as
rector of the Gymnasium at Nuremberg. He was then called to a
professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg. In 1818 he was called to
Berlin to fill the vacancy left by the death of Fichte. From this time
on until his death in 1831, he was the recognized dictator of one of the
most powerful philosophic schools in the history of thought.

It is no easy task to convey an adequate idea of Hegel's philosophy
within the limits of a short introduction. There is, however, one
central thought animating the vast range of his whole philosophic system
which permits of non-technical statement. This thought will be more
easily grasped, if we consider first the well-known concept of
permanence and change. They may be said to constitute the most
fundamental distinction in life and in thought. Religion and poetry have
always dwelt upon their tragic meaning. That there is nothing new under
the sun and that we are but "fair creatures of an hour" in an
ever-changing world, are equally sad reflections. Interesting is the
application of the difference between permanence and change to extreme
types of temperament. We may speak loosely of the "static" and the
"dynamic" temperaments, the former clinging to everything that is
traditional, conservative, and abiding in art, religion, philosophy,
politics, and life; the latter everywhere pointing to, and delighting
in, the fluent, the novel, the evanescent. These extreme types, by no
means rare or unreal, illustrate the deep-rooted need of investing
either permanence or change with a more fundamental value. And to the
value of the one or the other, philosophers have always endeavored to
give metaphysical expression.

[Illustration: SCHLIESINGER GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL]

Some thinkers have proclaimed change to be the deepest manifestation of
reality, while others have insisted upon something abiding behind a
world of flux. The question whether change or permanence is more
essential arose early in Greek philosophy. Heraclitus was the first one
to see in change a deeper significance than in the permanence of the
Eleatics. A more dramatic opposition than the one which ensued between
the Heracliteans and the Eleatics can scarcely be imagined--both schools
claiming a monopoly of reason and truth, both distrusting the senses,
and each charging the other with illusion. Now the significance of
Hegel's philosophy can be grasped only when we bear in mind that it was
just this profound distinction between the permanent and the changing
that Hegel sought to understand and to interpret. He saw more deeply
into the reality of movement and change than any other philosopher
before or after him.

Very early in his life, judging by the recently published writings of
his youth, Hegel became interested in various phases of movement and
change. The vicissitudes of his own inner or outer life he did not
analyze. He was not given to introspection. Romanticism and mysticism
were foreign to his nature. His temperament was rather that of the
objective thinker. Not his own passions, hopes, and fears, but those of
others invited his curiosity. With an humane attitude, the young Hegel
approached religious and historical problems. The dramatic life and
death of Jesus, the tragic fate of "the glory that was Greece and the
grandeur that was Rome," the discrepancies between Christ's teachings
and the positive Christian religion, the fall of paganism and the
triumph of the Christian Church--these were the problems over which the
young Hegel pondered. Through an intense study of these problems, he
discovered that evil, sin, longing, and suffering are woven into the
very tissue of religious and historical processes, and that these
negative elements determine the very meaning and progress of history and
religion. Thereupon he began a systematic sketch of a philosophy in
which a negative factor was to be recognized as the positive vehicle in
the development of the whole world. And thus his genius came upon a
method which revealed to him an orderly unfolding in the world with
stages of relative values, the higher developing from the lower, and all
stages constituting an organic whole.

The method which the young Hegel discovered empirically, and which the
mature rationalist applied to every sphere of human life and thought, is
the famous Dialectical Method. This method is, in general, nothing else
than the recognition of the necessary presence of a negative factor in
the constitution of the world. Everything in the world--be it a
religious cult or a logical category, a human passion or a scientific
law--is, so Hegel holds, the result of a process which involves the
overcoming of a negative element. Without such an element to overcome,
the world would indeed be an inert and irrational affair. That any
rational and worthy activity entails the encounter of opposition and the
removal of obstacles is an observation commonplace enough. A
preestablished harmony of foreseen happy issues--a fool's paradise--is
scarcely our ideal of a rational world. Just as a game is not worth
playing when its result is predetermined by the great inferiority of the
opponent, so life without something negative to overcome loses its zest.
But the process of overcoming is not anything contingent; it operates
according to a uniform and universal law. And this law constitutes
Hegel's most central doctrine--his doctrine of Evolution.

In order to bring this doctrine into better relief, it may be well to
contrast it superficially with the Darwinian theory of transformation.
In general, Hegel's doctrine is a concept of value, Darwin's is not.
What Darwinians mean by evolution is not an unfolding of the past, a
progressive development of a hierarchy of phases, in which the later is
superior and organically related to the earlier. No sufficient criterion
is provided by them for evaluating the various stages in the course of
an evolutionary process. The biologist's world would probably have been
just as rational if the famous ape-like progenitor of man had chanced to
become his offspring-assuming an original environment favorable for such
transformation. Some criterion besides the mere external and accidental
"struggle for existence" and "survival of the fittest" must be furnished
to account for a progressive evolution. Does the phrase "survival of the
fittest" say much more than that those who happen to survive _are_ the
fittest, or that their survival proves their fitness? But that survival
itself is valuable: that it is better to be alive than dead; that
existence has a value other than itself; that what comes later in the
history of the race or of the universe is an advance over what went
before-that, in a word, the world is subject to an immanent development,
only a comprehensive and systematic philosophy can attempt to show.

The task of Hegel's whole philosophy consists in showing, by means of
one uniform principle, that the world manifests everywhere a genuine
evolution. Unlike the participants in the biological "struggle for
existence," the struggling beings of Hegel's universe never end in
slaying, but in reconciliation. Their very struggle gives birth to a new
being which includes them, and this being is "higher" in the scale of
existence, because it represents the preservation of two mutually
opposed beings. Only where conflicts are adjusted, oppositions overcome,
negations removed, is there advance, in Hegel's sense; and only where
there is a passage from the positive through its challenging negative to
a higher form inclusive of both is there a case of real development.

The ordinary process of learning by experience illustrates somewhat
Hegel's meaning. An individual finds himself, for instance, in the
presence of a wholly new situation that elicits an immediate, definite
reaction. In his ignorance, he chooses the wrong mode of behavior. As a
consequence, trouble ensues; feelings are hurt, pride is wounded,
motives are misconstrued. Embittered and disappointed with himself, he
experiences great mental sorrow. But he soon learns to see the situation
in its true light; he condemns his deed and offers to make amends. And
after the wounds begin to heal again, the inner struggles experienced
commence to assume a positive worth. They have led him to a deeper
insight into his own motives, to a better self-comprehension. And he
finally comes forth from the whole affair enriched and enlightened. Now
in this formal example, to which any content may be supplied, three
phases can be distinguished. First, we have the person as he meant to be
in the presence of the new situation, unaware of trouble. Then, his
wrong reaction engendered a hostile element. He was at war with himself;
he was not what he meant to be. And finally, he returned to himself
richer and wiser, including within himself the negative experience as a
valuable asset in the advance of his development.

This process of falling away from oneself, of facing oneself as an enemy
whom one reconciles to and includes in one's larger self, is certainly
a familiar process. It is a process just like this that develops one's
personality. However the self may be defined metaphysically, it is for
every self-conscious individual a never-ceasing battle with conflicting
motives and antagonistic desires--a never-ending cycle of endeavor,
failure, and success through the very agency of failure.

A more typical instance of this rhythmic process is Hegel's view of the
evolution of religion. Religion, in general, is based on a dualism which
it seeks to overcome. Though God is in heaven and man on earth, religion
longs to bridge the gulf which separates man and God. The religions of
the Orient emphasize God's infinity. God is everything, man is nothing.
Like an Oriental prince, God is conceived to have despotic sway over
man, his creature. Only in contemplating God's omnipotence and his own
nothingness can man find solace and peace. Opposed to this religion of
the infinite is the finite religion of Greece.

Man in Greece stands in the centre of a beautiful cosmos which is not
alien to his spirit. The gods on high, conceived after the likeness of
man, are the expression of a free people conscious of their freedom. And
the divinities worshiped, under the form of Zeus, Apollo,
Aphrodite--what are they but idealized and glorified Greeks? Can a more
complete antithesis be imagined? But Christianity becomes possible after
this struggle only, for in Christianity is contained both the principle
of Oriental infinity and the element of Hellenic finitude, for in a
being who is both God and man--a God-man--the gulf between the infinite
and finite is bridged. The Christian, like the Greek, worships
man--Jesus; but this man is one with the eternal being of the Orient.
Because it is the outcome of the Oriental and Greek opposition, the
Christian religion is, in Hegel's sense, a higher one. Viewing the
Oriental and the Hellenic religions historically in terms of the
biological "struggle for existence," the extinction of neither has
resulted. The Christian religion is the unity of these two struggling
opposites; in it they are conciliated and preserved. And this for Hegel
is genuine evolution.

That evolution demands a union of opposites seems at first paradoxical
enough. To say that Christianity is a religion of both infinity and
finitude means nothing less than that it contains a contradiction.
Hegel's view, strange as it may sound, is just this: everything includes
a contradiction in it, everything is both positive and negative,
everything expresses at once its Everlasting Yea and its Everlasting No.
The negative character of the world is the very vehicle of its progress.
Life and activity mean the triumph of the positive over the negative, a
triumph which results from absorbing and assimilating it. The myth of
the Phoenix typifies the life of reason "eternally preparing for
itself," as Hegel says, "a funeral pile, and consuming itself upon it;
but so that from its ashes it produces the new, renovated, fresh life."
That the power of negativity enters constitutively into the rationality
of the world, nay, that the rationality of the world demands negativity
in it, is Hegel's most original contribution to thought. His complete
philosophy is the attempt to show in detail that the whole universe and
everything it contains manifests the process of uniformly struggling
with a negative power, and is an outcome of conflicting, but reconciled
forces. An impressionistic picture of the world's eternal becoming
through this process is furnished by the first of Hegel's great works,
the _Phenomenology of Spirit_. The book is, in a sense, a cross-section
of the entire spiritual world. It depicts the necessary unfolding of
typical phases of the spiritual life of mankind. Logical categories,
scientific laws, historical epochs, literary tendencies, religious
processes, social, moral, and artistic institutions, all exemplify the
same onward movement through a union of opposites. There is eternal and
total instability everywhere. But this unrest and instability is of a
necessary and uniform nature, according to the one eternally fixed
principle which renders the universe as a whole organic and orderly.

Organic Wholeness! This phrase contains the rationale of the restless
flow and the evanescent being of the Hegelian world. It is but from the
point of view of the whole that its countless conflicts, discrepancies,
and contradictions can be understood. As the members of the body find
only in the body as a whole their _raison d'etre_, so the manifold
expressions of the world are the expressions of one organism. A hand
which is cut off, as Hegel somewhere remarks, still looks like a hand,
and exists; but it is not a real hand. Similarly any part of the world,
severed from its connection with the whole, any isolated historical
event, any one religious view, any particular scientific explanation,
any single social body, any mere individual person, is like an amputated
bodily organ. Hegel's view of the world as organic depends upon
exhibiting the partial and abstract nature of other views. In his
_Phenomenology_ a variety of interpretations of the world and of the
meaning and destiny of life are scrutinized as to their adequacy and
concreteness. When not challenged, the point of view of common sense,
for instance, seems concrete and natural. The reaction of common sense
to the world is direct and practical, it has few questions to ask, and
philosophic speculations appear to it abstract and barren. But, upon
analysis, it is the common sense view that stands revealed as abstract
and barren. For an abstract object is one that does not fully correspond
to the rich and manifold reality; it is incomplete and one-sided.

Precisely such an object is the world of common sense. Its concreteness
is ignorance. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt
of by common sense. Its work-a-day world is not even a faint reflex of
the vast and complex universe. It sees but the immediate, the obvious,
the superficial. So instead of being concrete, it is, in truth, the very
opposite. Nor is empirical science with its predilection for "facts"
better off. Every science able to cope with a mere fragmentary aspect of
the world and from a partial point of view, is forced to ignore much of
the concrete content of even its own realm. Likewise, art and religion,
though in their views more synthetic and therefore more concrete, are
one-sided; they seek to satisfy special needs. Philosophy
alone--Hegelian philosophy--is concrete. Its aim is to interpret the
world in its entirety and complexity, its ideal is to harmonize the
demands of common sense, the interests of science, the appeal of art,
and the longing of religion into one coherent whole. This view of
philosophy, because it deals with the universe in its fulness and
variety, alone can make claim to real concreteness. Nor are the other
views false. They form for Hegel the necessary rungs on the ladder which
leads up to his own philosophic vision. Thus the Hegelian vision is
itself an organic process, including all other interpretations of life
and of the world as its necessary phases. In the immanent unfolding of
the Hegelian view is epitomized the onward march and the organic unity
of the World-Spirit itself.

The technical formulation of this view is contained in his _Logic_.
This book may indeed be said to be Hegel's master-stroke. Nothing less
is attempted in it than the proof that the very process of reasoning
manifests the same principle of evolution through a union of opposites.
Hegel was well aware, as much as recent exponents of anti-intellectualism,
that through "static" concepts we transmute and falsify the "fluent"
reality. As Professor James says "The essence of life is its continuously
changing character; but our concepts are all discontinuous and
fixed ... When we conceptualize we cut out and fix, and exclude everything
but what we have fixed. A concept means a _that-and-no-other_." But are
our concepts static, fixed, and discontinuous? What if the very
concepts we employ in reasoning should exemplify the universal flow of
life? Hegel finds that indeed to be the case. Concepts we daily use,
such as quality and quantity, essence and phenomenon, appearance and
reality, matter and force, cause and effect, are not fixed and
isolated entities, but form a continuous system of interdependent
elements. Stated dogmatically the meaning is this: As concavity and
convexity are inseparably connected, though one is the very opposite
of the other--as one cannot, so to speak, live without the other, both
being always found in union--so can no concept be discovered that is
not thus wedded to its contradiction. Every concept develops, upon
analysis, a stubbornly negative mate. No concept is statable or
definable without its opposite; one involves the other. One cannot
speak of motion without implying rest; one cannot mention the finite
without at the same time referring to the infinite; one cannot define
cause without explicitly defining effect. Not only is this true, but
concepts, when applied, reveal perpetual oscillation. Take the terms
"north" and "south." The mention of the north pole, for example,
implies at once the south pole also; it can be distinguished only by
contrast with the other, which it thus _includes_. But it is a north
pole only by _excluding_ the south pole from itself--by being itself
and not merely what the other is not. The situation is paradoxical
enough: Each aspect--the negative or the positive--of anything appears
to exclude the other, while each requires its own other for its very
definition and expression. It needs the other, and yet is independent
of it. How Hegel proves this of all concepts, cannot here be shown.
The result is that no concept can be taken by itself as a
"that-and-no-other." It is perpetually accompanied by its "other" as
man is by his shadow. The attempt to isolate any logical category and
regard it as fixed and stable thus proves futile. Each category--to
show this is the task of Hegel's _Logic_--is itself an organism, the
result of a process which takes place within its inner constitution.
And all logical categories, inevitably used in describing and
explaining our world, form one system of interdependent and
organically related parts. Hegel begins with an analysis of a concept
that most abstractly describes reality, follows it through its
countless conflicts and contradictions, and finally reaches the
highest category which, including all the foregoing categories in
organic unity, is alone adequate to characterize the universe as an
organism. What these categories are and what Hegel's procedure is in
showing their necessary sequential development, can here not even be
hinted at.