The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  I can bear it no longer; I must live once more, must let my senses have free play—these senses of which I have been well-nigh deprived by the grand transcendental theories to which they have done their utmost to convert me. But I too will now confess how my heart leaps and the hot blood rushes through my veins. … I have no religion but this, that I love a well-shaped knee, a fair plump bosom, a slender waist, flowers with the sweetest odors, full satisfaction of all my desires, the granting of all that sweet love can ask. If I am obliged to have a religion (though I can live most happily without it), then it must be the Catholic, such as it was in the olden days, when priests and laity lived together,… and in the house of God itself there was daily revelry.24

  It was fitting that so ardent a lover of tangible reality should startle the idealistic nimbus that surrounded Fichte at Jena, and that remained behind him when he left for Berlin. In Erste Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (First Sketch of a System of Natural Philosophy, 1799), and in System des transzendentalen Idealismus (1800), Schelling defined the main problem of philosophy as the apparent impasse between matter and mind; it seems impossible to think of either producing the other; and he concluded (in one more return to Spinoza) that the best escape from the dilemma is to think of mind and matter as two attributes of one complex but unified reality. “All philosophy absolutely, which is based upon pure reason alone, is, or will become, Spinozism.” But that philosophy, Schelling thought, was so rigidly logical as to miss vitality. “A dynamic conception of nature must necessarily bring about one essential change in the views of Spinozism…. In its rigidity Spinozism could be regarded, like Pygmalion’s statue, as needing to be given a soul.”25*

  To make this dualistic monism more conceivable Schelling proposed to think of force or energy as the inner essence of both matter and mind. In neither case do we know what this force is, but since we see it taking in nature progressively subtler forms—from the mystery of communicated motion, through the attraction or repulsion of particles, the sensitivity of plants, or the groping, grasping pseudopodia of the amoeba, to the quick intelligence of the chimpanzee and the conscious reason of man, we may conclude that the basic reality, the one omnipresent God, is neither matter nor mind by itself but their union in one incredible panorama of forms and powers. Here Schelling was writing poetry as well as philosophy, and both Wordsworth and Coleridge found in him a fellow spirit struggling to build a new faith for souls overwhelmed by science and hungering for God.

  In 1803 he left Jena to teach in the recently opened University of Würzburg. He continued to write philosophical treatises, but they lacked the vigor of his Naturphilosophie. In 1809 his stimulating wife, Caroline, died, and seemed to take half of his vitality with her. He married again (1812), and wrote incontinently, but he published nothing after 1809. Besides, by that time, Hegel had become the unchallengeable Napoleon of philosophy.

  In his declining years Schelling found comfort in mysticism, and transcendental explanations for the apparent contradictions between a loving God and a nature “red in tooth and claw,” and between the determinism of science and the free will apparently needed for moral responsibility. He took from Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) the idea that God himself is a battleground between good and evil, so that nature oscillates between struggling for order and relaxing into chaos; and in man too there is something basically irrational.26 Ultimately (Schelling promised his readers) all evil will be overcome, and Divine Wisdom will succeed in transforming even the follies and crimes of mankind into good.27

  He had now the long discomfort of seeing Hegel gather all the crowns of philosophy, and then to survive him by twenty-three years while the “Young Hegelians” divided their master’s dialectical remains between communism and reaction. In 1841 King Frederick William IV called Schelling to the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, hoping that his conservatism would stem the radical tide. But Schelling could not hold his audience, and he was left stranded and wondering by the rush of events from philosophy to revolution.

  Even so, Wordsworth had already put Schelling’s pantheistic vitalism into majestic verse,28 and Coleridge had ascribed to him, with certain exceptions, “the completion, and the most important victories, of the [Kantian] revolution in philosophy.”29 And half a century after Schelling’s death, Henri Bergson, regenerator of vitalism, called Schelling “one of the greatest philosophers of all time.”30 Hegel would have demurred.

  III. HEGEL: 1770–183 I

  By reading Kant, Schopenhauer wrote about 1816, “the public was compelled to see that what is obscure is not always without significance.” Fichte and Schelling, he thought, took undue advantage of Kant’s success with obscurity. But (Schopenhauer continued)

  the height of absurdity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant masses of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most beautiful mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument of German stupidity.31

  1. Skeptic’s Progress

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was alive and flourishing when this dirge was published (1818); he survived another thirteen years. He came of a Stuttgart middle-class family steeped in mysticism and piety. The family property was mortgaged to send Georg to study theology at Tübingen Seminary (1788–93). Hölderlin the poet was there, and Schelling came in 1790; together they deplored the ignorance of their teachers, and applauded the victories of Revolutionary France. Hegel developed a special fondness for Greek drama, and his praise of Greek patriotism foreshadowed his own final political philosophy:

  To the Greek the idea of his fatherland, the state, was the invisible, the higher reality for which he labored. … In comparison with this idea his own individuality was as nothing; it was its endurance, its continued life, that he sought…. To desire or pray for permanence or eternal life for himself as an individual could not occur to him.32

  After graduating from the seminary with a degree in theology, Hegel disappointed his parents by refusing to enter the ministry. He supported himself by tutoring at Bern in the home of a patrician with a substantial library; there, and later at Frankfurt, he read Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Montesquieu, Locke, Voltaire, Hume, Kant, Fichte; how could his ailing Christian faith resist such a phalanx of doubters? The natural rebelliousness of a vigorous youth reveled in the pagan feast.

  In the year 1796 he wrote a Life of Jesus (Das Leben Jesu), which remained unpublished till 1905. It was in part an anticipation of Das Leben Jesu (1835), with which David Strauss, a follower of Hegel, launched a full-scale attack upon the Gospel story of Christ. Hegel described Jesus as the son of Joseph and Mary; he rejected the miracles ascribed to Christ, or explained them naturally; he pictured Christ as defending the individual conscience against priestly rules; he ended with the burial of the crucified rebel, and said nothing of a resurrection. And he gave a definition of God which he was to hold to the end: “Pure reason, incapable of any limitation, is the Deity itself.”33

  In 1799 Hegel’s father died, leaving him 3,154 florins. He wrote to Schelling asking advice in finding a town with a good library and ein gutes Bier.34 Schelling recommended Jena, and offered to share his quarters with him. In 1801 Hegel came, and was allowed to lecture at the university as a Privatdozent, remunerated only by his pupils, who numbered eleven. After three years of such servitude he was appointed professor extraordinarius; and a year later, on Goethe’s intervention, he received his first stipend—one hundred thalers. He never became a popular teacher, but at Jena, as later in Berlin, he inspired in several students a special attachment that penetrated the rough surface of his language to the arcane vigor of his thought.

  In 1801 he began, but left unfinished and unpublished, a significant essay, Kritik der Verfassung Deutschlands (On the Constitution of Germany, published in 1893). Looking out upon Germany, he wa
s reminded of the petty principalities that had divided Renaissance Italy and opened it to foreign conquest, and he remembered Machiavelli’s plea for a strong prince who would hammer these scattered pieces into a nation. He put no faith in the Holy Roman Empire, and foretold its early collapse. “Germany is no longer a state. … A group of human beings can call itself a state only if it is joined together for the common defense of the entirety of its property.” He called for the unification of Germany, but he added: “Such an event has never been the fruit of reflection, but only of force… The common multitude of the German people… must be gathered into one mass by the force of a conqueror.”35

  Presumably he had no notion of summoning Napoleon, but when, in 1805, Napoleon overwhelmed both the Austrians and the Russians at Austerlitz, Hegel may have begun to wonder whether this man was destined to unify not only Germany, but all Europe. When, in the following year, the French Army was approaching Jena, and the future of Europe seemed at stake, Hegel saw Napoleon riding through Jena (October 13, 1806), and wrote to his friend Niethammer:

  I saw the Emperor—that world-soul—riding out to reconnoiter the city. It is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual, concentrated here at a single point, astride a single horse, yet reaching across the world and ruling it…. To make such progress from Thursday to Monday is possible only for that extraordinary man, whom it is impossible not to admire…. All now wish good fortune to the French Army.36

  On the next day the French Army prevailed; and some French soldiers, eluding the eye of the world-soul, began to plunder in the city. One group entered Hegel’s rented room. Seeing the Cross of the Legion of Honor on a corporal’s coat, the philosopher expressed the hope that so distinguished a man would treat a simple German scholar honorably. These invaders settled for a bottle of wine, but the spread of looting frightened Hegel into taking refuge in the office of the university vice-president.

  On February 5, 1807, Christina Burkhardt, wife of Hegel’s landlord, gave birth to a boy whom the absent-minded professor recognized as one of his anonymous works. As the Duke of Saxe-Weimar was hard put to finance the Jena faculty, Hegel thought it a good time to try another city, woman, and task. On February 20 he left Jena to become editor of the Bamberger Zeitung. Amid the turmoil he published (1807) Phänomenologie des Geistes. No one seems to have suspected that this would later be ranked as his masterpiece, and as the most difficult and seminal contribution to philosophy between Kant and Schopenhauer.

  Irked by governmental censorship of his paper, Hegel left Bamberg (1808) to become headmaster of a Gymnasium in Nuremberg. He labored conscientiously in this new field, teaching as well as directing, but he longed for a secure and fitter berth in a distinguished and solvent university. On September 16, 1811, age forty-one, he married Marie von Tucher, the twenty-year-old daughter of a Nuremberg senator. Shortly thereafter Christina Burkhardt surprised the couple with a visit in which she offered them Hegel’s four-year-old son, Ludwig. His wife met the situation bravely by adopting the boy into her family.

  Dreaming of a post in Berlin, Hegel accepted in 1816 an invitation from the University of Heidelberg to be its first professor of philosophy. His class began with five students, but grew to twenty before the term was over. There he published (1817) his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. It pleased both the intelligentsia and the government of Berlin much more than his Logik, which had appeared there in 1812. Soon the Prussian Minister of Education invited him to come and fill the chair of philosophy which had been left vacant since the death of Fichte (1814). Hegel, now forty-seven, bargained until the remuneration finally offered him atoned for his long wait. Besides the two-thousand-thaler yearly salary he asked something to compensate for the high rents and prices in Berlin, for the furniture he had bought, and would now have to sell at a loss, for the cost of travel to Berlin with his wife and children; furthermore, he would like “a certain quantity of produce.”37 All this having been granted, Hegel on October 22, 1818, began at the University of Berlin the long tenure that would end with his death. In those thirteen years his lectures, notoriously dull but finally meaningful, drew larger and larger audiences, until students came from almost every country in Europe—and beyond—to hear him. Now he gave form and order to the most complete and influential system of thought in the history of post-Kantian Europe.

  2. Logic as Metaphysics

  He begins with logic, not in our modern sense as the rules of reasoning, but in the ancient and classic sense as the ratio, or rationale, or basic meaning and operation, of anything, as when we use geology, biology, or psychology for the meaning and operation of the earth, life, or mind. So, to Hegel, logic studies the meaning and operation of anything. Generally he leaves the operations to science, as science leaves the meaning to philosophy. He proposes to analyze not the words in reasoning but the reason or logic in realities. To the source and sum of these reasons he will give the name of God, very much as ancient mystics identified the deity with the Logos—the reason and wisdom of the world.*

  The perceiving mind gives specific meaning to objects by studying their relationships, in space and time, with other objects remembered or perceived. Kant had given to such relationships the name of categories, and had listed twelve, chiefly: unity, plurality, and totality; reality, negation, and limitation; cause and effect, existence and nonexistence, contingency and necessity. Hegel adds many more: determinate being, limit, multiplicity, attraction and repulsion, likeness and difference… Each object in our experience is a complex web of such relationships; this table, for example, has specific place, age, form, strength, color, weight, odor, beauty; without such specific relations the table would be merely a confusion of obscure and separate sensations; with them the sensations become a united perception. This perception, illuminated by memory and pointed by purpose, becomes an idea. Hence, for each of us, the world is our sensations—external or internal—coordinated by the categories into perceptions and ideas, mingled with our memories, and manipulated by our wills.

  The categories are not things, they are ways and tools of understanding, giving form and meaning to sensations. They constitute the rationale and logic, the structure and reason, of each experienced feeling, thought, or thing. Together they constitute the logic, reason, Logos of the universe, as conceived by Hegel.

  The simplest and most universal of the categories through which we may seek to understand our experience is pure Being (Sein)—being as applied to all objects or ideas without particularization. The universality of this basic category is its fatality: by lacking any distinguishing form or mark it cannot represent any existing object or idea. Hence the concept of pure Being is in effect equivalent to its opposite category—Nonbeing or Nothing (Nichts). Hence they readily mingle; that which was not is added to Being, and deprives it of its indeterminateness or purity; Being and Nonbeing become something, however negative. This mysterious Becoming (Werden) is the third category, the most useful of all, since without it nothing could be conceived as happening or taking form. All subsequent categories flow from similar combinations of apparently contradictory ideas.

  This Hegelian prestidigitation, producing the world (like Adam and Eve) out of a conjunction, recalls the medieval idea that God created the world out of nothing. But Hegel protests that his categories are not things; they are ways of conceiving things, of making their behavior intelligible, often predictable, sometimes manageable.

  He asks us to allow some modification in the principle of contradiction (so sacred in the old logic)—that A cannot be not-A. Very well; but A may become not-A, as water can become ice or steam. All reality, as conceived by Hegel, is in a process of becoming; it is not a static Parmenidean world of Being but a fluid Heracleitean world of Becoming; all things flow. All reality, in Hegel, all thoughts and things, all history, religion, philosophy, are in constant evolution; not by a natural selection of variations, but by the development and resolution of internal contradictions, and the advance to a more complex sta
ge.

  This is the famous Hegelian (formerly Fichtean) dialectic (literally the art of conversation) of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis: an idea or situation potentially contains its opposite, develops it, struggles against it, then unites with it to take another transient form. A logical discussion would follow the dialectical structure of exposition, opposition, and reconciliation. Sensible deliberations—the weighing of ideas and desires on the scale (libera) of experience—would do likewise. Interruption, as Mme. de Staël insisted, is the life of conversation—but is its death if the contradiction is not pertinent and resolved. Opposition absorbed is the secret of wisdom and the perfection of victory. A true synthesis rejects neither the affirmative nor the negative, but finds room for elements of each. Karl Marx, a disciple of Hegel, thought that capitalism contained the seeds of socialism; that the rival forms of economic organization must clash in a war to the death; and that socialism would prevail. A more consistent Hegelian would have predicted a union of both, as in Western Europe today.

  Hegel was the most thoroughgoing of Hegelians. He undertook to “deduce” the categories—to show how each of them necessarily resulted from the resolution of contradictions in its predecessors. He organized his arguments, tried to divide each of his works, on a triadic form. He applied his dialectic to realities as well as to ideas: the repetitive process of contradiction, conflict, and synthesis appears in politics, economics, philosophy, and history. He was a realist in the medieval sense: the universal is more real than any of its contained particulars: man includes all men, briefly alive or durably dead; the state is realer, more important and longer living, than any of its citizens; beauty has immortal power, makes many wrecks and rhymes, though Pauline Bonaparte is dead and perhaps Aphrodite never lived. Finally the compulsive philosopher carried his parade of categories to the most real, inclusive, and powerful of them all—the Absolute Idea that is the universal of all things and thoughts, the Reason, structure, or law that upholds the cosmos, the Logos that crowns and rules the whole.