The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Classics of the World and Worldview

[ 1 ] Like a flash of light that illuminates both the past and the future of the development of worldviews, a sentence uttered by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) in his “Philosophy of Nature” appears: “To philosophize about nature is tantamount to creating nature.” This sentence gives monumental expression to what Goethe and Schiller were imbued with: that productive imagination must play its part in the creation of a worldview. What nature freely gives us when we observe, look at, and perceive it does not contain its deepest meaning. Human beings cannot perceive this meaning from the outside. They must create it.

[ 2 ] Schelling's mind was particularly predisposed to such creation. In him, all intellectual powers strove toward imagination. He is an inventive mind without equal. But his imagination does not produce images like the artistic imagination, but concepts and ideas. Through this disposition of his mind, he was called upon to continue Fichte's train of thought. Fichte did not possess a productive imagination. With his demand for truth, he had reached the spiritual center of the human being, the “I.” If this is to be the source of a worldview, then those who hold this point of view must also be able to arrive at meaningful thoughts about the world and life from the perspective of the I. This can only be done with the help of the imagination. Fichte did not have this at his disposal. Therefore, he basically spent his entire life pointing to the ego and saying how it must acquire content in thoughts; but he himself did not know how to give it such content. We can see this clearly from the lectures he gave in 1813 at the University of Berlin on “The Science of Knowledge” (Posthumous Works, Volume 1). There he demands, for those who want to arrive at a worldview, “a completely new inner sensory tool, through which a new world is given that does not exist at all for ordinary people.” But Fichte does not go beyond this demand for a new sense. He does not develop what such a sense is supposed to perceive. Schelling sees in the thoughts that his imagination presents to his soul the results of this higher sense, which he calls intellectual intuition. He, who thus sees in what the spirit says about nature a product that the spirit creates, had to be interested above all in the question: How can that which originates from the spirit nevertheless be the real law governing nature? He sharply criticizes those who believe that we merely “transfer” our ideas “to nature,” because "they have no idea what nature is and should be to us... for we do not want nature to coincide with the laws of our spirit by chance (for example, through the mediation of a third party), but rather that it itself necessarily and originally not only expresses the laws of our spirit, but also realizes them, and that it is only nature and called nature insofar as it does so. ... Nature should be the visible spirit, the spirit the invisible nature. Here, then, in the absolute identity of the spirit within us and nature outside us, the problem of how a nature outside us is possible must be resolved." Nature and spirit are therefore not two different entities at all, but one and the same entity in two different forms. Schelling's actual opinion on this unity of nature and spirit has rarely been correctly understood. One must put oneself completely in his way of thinking if one does not want to understand it as trivial or absurd. To clarify this way of thinking, reference should be made here to a sentence in his book “On the World Soul” in which he discusses the nature of gravity. Many see a difficulty in this concept because it presupposes a so-called “effect at a distance.” The sun exerts an attractive force on the earth, even though there is nothing between the sun and the earth that mediates this attraction. One must imagine that the sun extends its sphere of influence through space to places where it is not. Those who live in coarse-minded conceptions see a difficulty in such a thought. How can a body act where it is not? Schelling reverses the whole thought process. He says: "It is very true that a body only acts where it is, but it is equally true that it is only where it acts. " When we see the sun acting on our earth through its gravitational pull, it follows that its being extends to our earth and that we have no right to relocate its existence only to the place where it acts through its visibility. The sun's being extends beyond the boundaries within which it is visible; only part of its essence can be seen; the other part reveals itself through its gravitational pull. This is roughly how we must imagine the relationship between the spirit and nature. The spirit is not only where it is perceived, but also where it perceives. Its essence extends to the most distant places where it can still observe objects. It encompasses and permeates all of nature known to it. When it thinks the law of an external process, this process does not remain outside, and the spirit merely picks up a mirror image, but rather its essence flows into the process; it permeates the process, and when it then finds the law of the process, it does not express it in its separate corner of the brain, but rather the law expresses itself. The mind has gone to where the law operates. If it had not paid attention to it, it would still have operated, but it would not have been expressed. Since the mind creeps into the process, as it were, the law is also expressed as an idea, as a concept, in addition to its effect. Only when the mind pays no attention to nature and looks at itself does it seem to it as if it were separate from nature, just as it seems to the eye that the sun is enclosed within a certain space, apart from the fact that it is also where it exerts its gravitational pull. So when I allow ideas that express the laws of nature to arise in my mind, it is just as true that I create nature as it is that nature creates itself within me.

[ 3 ] Now there are two ways to describe the one being that is both spirit and nature. One is: I point out the laws of nature that are actually at work. Or I show how the mind does it in order to arrive at these laws. In both cases, I am guided by one and the same thing. In one case, the lawfulness as it is effective in nature shows me; in the other case, the mind shows me what it begins to do in order to imagine the same lawfulness. In one case, I pursue natural science, in the other, spiritual science. Schelling describes how these two belong together in an appealing way: "The necessary tendency of all natural science is to move from nature to the intelligent. This and nothing else underlies the endeavor to bring theory into natural phenomena. — The highest perfection of natural science would be the complete spiritualization of all natural laws into laws of perception and thought. The phenomena (the material) must disappear completely and only the laws (the formal) remain. Hence, the more the laws of nature emerge in nature itself, the more the shell disappears, the phenomena themselves become more spiritual, and finally cease altogether. Optical phenomena are nothing more than a geometry whose lines are drawn by light, and this light itself is already ambiguous materiality. In the manifestations of magnetism, all material traces already disappear, and of the phenomena of gravity, which even natural scientists believed they could only comprehend as an immediate spiritual influence—an effect in the distance—nothing remains but its law, whose execution on a large scale is the mechanism of the movements of the heavens. The perfect theory of nature would be one by virtue of which the whole of nature dissolved into intelligence. The dead and unconscious products of nature are only failed attempts by nature to reflect itself, while so-called dead nature is in fact an immature intelligence, in whose phenomena the intelligent character already shines through, albeit unconsciously. — Nature only achieves its highest goal of becoming completely objective through the highest and final reflection, which is nothing other than man, or more generally, what we call reason, through which nature first returns completely to itself, and through which it becomes apparent that nature is originally identical with what is recognized in us as intelligent and conscious.

[ 4 ] Schelling wove the facts of nature into an artistic web of thoughts, so that all its phenomena stood before his creative imagination like an ideal harmonious organism. He was inspired by the feeling that the ideas that appear in his imagination are also the true creative forces of natural processes. Spiritual forces therefore underlie nature; and what appears dead and lifeless to our eyes originally comes from the spiritual realm. When we focus our minds on it, we reveal the ideas, the spiritual nature of nature. Thus, for us, in Schelling's sense, natural things are revelations of the spirit, behind whose outer shell it hides, as it were. In our own inner selves, it then reveals itself in its true form. We thus know what spirit is and can therefore also rediscover the spirit hidden in nature. The way in which Schelling revives nature as spirit has something in common with what Goethe believes to be found in the perfect artist. In Goethe's opinion, the artist proceeds in the creation of works of art in the same way as nature proceeds in its creations. We would thus have before us in the artist's work the same process through which everything that lies spread out before us in external nature came into being. What nature conceals from our view is presented to us in a perceptible form in artistic creation. Nature shows us only the finished works; how it made them, we must guess from these works. We have the creatures before us, not the creator. In the artist, we perceive both creation and creature at the same time. Schelling now wants to penetrate nature's creation through its products; he puts himself in the place of creative nature and lets it arise in his soul in the same way that the artist lets his work of art arise. So what, according to Schelling, are the ideas contained in his worldview? They are the ideas of the creative spirit of nature. That which preceded things and created them appears in the individual human spirit as a thought. This thought relates to its original real existence in the same way that the memory of an experience relates to the experience itself. Thus, for Schelling, human science becomes a memory of the spiritual models that created things before they existed. A divine spirit created the world; ultimately, it also creates human beings in order to form in their souls as many tools through which it can remember its creation. When Schelling devotes himself to contemplating the phenomena of the world, he does not feel himself to be an individual being at all. He appears to himself as a part, a limb of God. He does not think, but God thinks in him. God contemplates his own creative activity in him.

[ 5 ] Schelling sees the creation of a work of art as a miniature creation of the world; in the contemplative observation of things, he sees a memory of the creation of the world on a grand scale. In the worldview, the ideas themselves appear in our minds, which underlie things and have brought them forth; we leave out of the world everything that the senses say about it and retain only what pure thinking provides. In the creation and enjoyment of the work of art, the intimate interpenetration of the idea with what is revealed to the senses occurs. In Schelling's view, nature, art, and worldview (philosophy) are thus opposed to each other in such a way that nature presents the finished, external products, worldview the generating ideas, and art both in harmonious interaction. Artistic activity stands in the middle between creative nature, which produces without knowing the ideas on the basis of which it creates, and the thinking mind, which knows these ideas without being able to create things with their help. Schelling expresses this in the sentence: "The ideal world of art and the real world of objects are thus products of one and the same activity; the meeting of both (the conscious and the unconscious) without consciousness gives rise to the real world, and with consciousness to the aesthetic world. The objective world is only the original, still unconscious poetry of the spirit, the general organon of philosophy—and the keystone of its entire vault—the philosophy of art."

[ 6 ] The intellectual activities of human beings: thinking contemplation of the world and artistic creation, appear to Schelling not only as individual activities of the individual personality, but, when understood in their highest significance, also as activities of the primordial being, God. In truly dithyrambic sentences, Schelling describes the feeling that arises in the soul when it realizes that its life is not merely an individual one, limited to a point in the universe, but that its actions are divine and universal. When it says, “I know, I recognize,” this means, in a higher sense, that God remembers his actions before the existence of things; and when it produces a work of art, this means that God repeats in small scale what he accomplished in large scale in the creation of the whole of nature. "The soul, then, is not the principle of individuality in man, but that by which he rises above all selfhood, by which he becomes capable of self-sacrifice, unselfish love, and, what is highest, the contemplation and knowledge of the essence of things, and thus of art. It is no longer concerned with matter, nor does it interact directly with it, but only with the spirit, as the life of things. Even though it appears in the body, it is nevertheless free from the body, whose consciousness floats in it, in the most beautiful formations, like a light dream that does not disturb it. It is not a property, an ability, or anything of the sort in particular; it does not know, but it is knowledge; it is not good, but it is goodness; it is not beautiful, as the body can be, but it is beauty itself.“ (”On the Relationship of the Fine Arts to Nature")

[ 7 ] This kind of thinking echoes German mysticism, which had a representative in Jacob Böhme (1575–1624). In Munich, where he lived from 1806 to 1841 with brief interruptions, Schelling enjoyed the stimulating company of Franz Benedikt Baader, whose philosophical ideas were entirely in line with those older teachings. This prompted him to immerse himself in this world of ideas, which was entirely in line with the point of view he himself had arrived at in his thinking. When one reads the above quotations from the speech “On the Relationship of the Fine Arts to Nature,” which he gave in 1807 at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Munich, one is reminded of Jacob Böhme's view: “When you look at the depths and the stars and the earth, you see your God, and in him you live and exist, and the same God also rules you.” “You are created from this God and live in him; all your knowledge also resides in this God, and when you die, you will be buried in this God.”

[ 8 ] With his progressive thinking, Schelling's view of the world became a view of God, or theosophy. He was already fully grounded in such a view of God when he published his “Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Subjects” in 1809. All questions of worldview now took on a new light for him. If all things are divine, how is it that evil exists in the world, since God can only be perfect goodness? If the soul of man is in God, how is it that it pursues its own selfish interests? And if it is God who acts in me, how can I, who do not act as an independent being, still be called free?

[ 9 ] Schelling seeks to answer these questions through contemplation of God, no longer through contemplation of the world. It would be completely inappropriate for God to create a world of beings that he would have to continually guide and direct as dependent beings. God is only perfect if he can create a world that is equal to himself in perfection. A God who can only bring forth beings that are more imperfect than himself is himself imperfect. God therefore created human beings who do not need his guidance, but who are themselves free and independent like him. A being that has its origin in another therefore does not need to be dependent on that other. For it is no contradiction that he who is the son of a human being is himself human. Just as the eye, which is only possible within the whole organism, nevertheless has an independent life of its own, so too does the individual soul, which is understood in God but is not therefore effective through him, like a part of a machine. "God is not a God of the dead, but of the living. It is impossible to see how the most perfect being could find pleasure even in the most perfect machine. However one may conceive of the nature and sequence of beings from God, it can never be a mechanical one, a mere effecting or placing, whereby the effected is nothing in itself; nor can it be emanation, whereby the emanating would remain the same as that from which it emanated, thus having nothing of its own, nothing independent. The sequence of things from God is a self-revelation of God. But God can only reveal himself in that which is similar to him, in free beings acting of their own accord; for whose existence there is no reason other than God, but who are as God is. If God were a God of the dead and all worldly phenomena were merely a mechanism whose processes could be traced back to him as their mover and source, then one would only need to describe God's activity, and one would have understood everything within the world. One could understand all things and their activity from God. But this is not the case. The divine world has independence. God created it, but it has its own essence. Thus it is divine; but the divine appears within an entity that is independent of God, within a non-divine entity. Just as light is born out of darkness, so the divine world is born out of non-divine existence. And from the non-divine comes evil, comes selfishness. God therefore does not have power over the totality of beings; he can give them light, but they themselves emerge from the dark night. They are the sons of this night. And God has no power over what is darkness in them. They must work their way up through the night to the light. That is their freedom. One could also say that the world is God's creation out of the non-divine. The ungodly is therefore the first and the divine only the second.

[ 10 ] At first, Schelling sought the ideas in all things, that is, their divine nature. In this way, the whole world was transformed for him into a revelation of God. But then he had to progress from the divine to the ungodly in order to understand the imperfect, the evil, the selfish. Now the entire process of the world's becoming became for him a progressive overcoming of the ungodly by the divine. The individual human being originates from the ungodly. He works his way out of this toward divinity. We can also observe the progression from the ungodly to the divine in the course of history. The ungodly was originally the ruling force in the world. In ancient times, people surrendered to their nature. They acted naively out of selfishness. Greek culture is based on this foundation. It was an age when humans lived in harmony with nature, or, as Schiller expressed it in his essay “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” nature itself was, and therefore did not yet seek it. With Christianity, this state of innocence in humanity disappears. Mere nature is denounced as the ungodly, evil is opposed to the divine, to the good. Christ appeared to bring forth the light of the divine within the night of the ungodly. This is the moment when “the earth becomes desolate and empty for the second time,” the moment of “the birth of the higher light of the spirit,” which "was in the world from the beginning, but was not understood by the darkness that was at work for itself; and in a revelation that is still closed and limited; and it appears in order to confront personal and spiritual evil, also in a personal, human form, and as a mediator to restore the relationship between creation and God at the highest level. For only the personal can heal the personal, and God must become man so that man may come back to God."

[ 11 ] Spinozism is a worldview that seeks in God the reason for all world events, and for this reason derives all processes from eternal, necessary laws, just as mathematical truths are derived from principles. Such a worldview was not enough for Schelling. Like Spinoza, he also believed that all beings were in God; but, in his opinion, they are not determined by God alone, but rather by the ungodly within them. He accuses Spinoza of the “lifelessness of his system, the harshness of its form, the paucity of its concepts and expressions, the relentless severity of its determinations, which is perfectly compatible with its abstract approach.” Schelling therefore finds Spinoza's “mechanical view of nature” entirely logical. But nature does not show this consistency at all. "All of nature tells us that it is by no means there by mere geometric necessity; there is no pure reason in it, but personality and spirit [...], otherwise the geometric mind, which has reigned for so long, would have penetrated it long ago and its idol of universal and eternal laws of nature would have been proven more true than has been the case so far, since it must rather recognize the irrational relationship of nature to itself more and more every day." Just as man is not merely intellect and reason, but also combines other faculties and powers within himself, so, according to Schelling, this should also be the case with the divine primordial being. A God who is pure, unadulterated reason appears as personified mathematics; a God, on the other hand, who cannot proceed according to pure reason in his creation of the world, but must constantly struggle with the ungodly, can be conceived as “a wholly personal, living being.” His life bears the greatest analogy to that of humans. Just as humans seek to overcome the imperfect in themselves and strive for an ideal of perfection, so such a God is imagined as eternally struggling, whose activity is the progressive overcoming of the ungodly. Schelling compares Spinoza's God to the “oldest images of deities, which appeared all the more mysterious the less they displayed individual, living traits.” Schelling gives his God increasingly individual traits. He describes him as a human being when he says: “If we consider the terrible things in nature and the spirit world and the far greater things that a benevolent hand seems to cover us with, then we cannot doubt that the deity reigns over a world of horrors, and God, according to what is hidden from him and through him, can be called terrible and fearsome, not in the improper sense, but in the proper sense.”

[ 12 ] Schelling could no longer view such a God in the same way that Spinoza viewed his God. A God who determines everything from within himself according to the laws of reason can also be understood through reason. A personal God, as Schelling imagined him in his later years, is unpredictable. For he does not act according to reason alone. In a mathematical example, we can predict the result by mere thought; in the case of a person acting, we cannot. With a person, we must wait and see what action he will decide upon at a given moment. Experience must be added to rational knowledge. Pure rational science was therefore not sufficient for Schelling's view of the world or God. He therefore calls everything gained from reason negative knowledge, which must be supplemented by positive knowledge. Those who want to know the living God must not rely solely on necessary rational conclusions; they must immerse themselves with their whole personality in the life of God. Then they will experience what no conclusions, no pure reason can give them. The world is not a necessary effect of the divine cause, but a free act of the personal God. What Schelling believed he had not “recognized” through rational consideration, but rather ‘beheld’ as the free, unpredictable acts of God, he expounded in his “Philosophy of Revelation” and his “Philosophy of Mythology.” He did not publish either work himself, but only used their content as the basis for lectures he gave at the University of Berlin after Friedrich Wilhelm IV had summoned him to the Prussian capital. They were not published until after Schelling's death (1854).

[ 13 ] With such views, Schelling proved himself to be the boldest and most courageous of those philosophers who were inspired by Kant to adopt an idealistic worldview. Under the influence of this inspiration, philosophizing about things that lie beyond what the human senses can observe and what thinking says about observations was abandoned. People sought to be content with what lies within observation and thinking. But while Kant concluded from the necessity of such modesty that nothing could be known about otherworldly things, the post-Kantians declared: since observation and thinking do not point to any otherworldly divine, they themselves are the divine. And of those who declared this, Schelling was the most energetic. Fichte took everything into the self; Schelling spread the self over everything. He did not want to show, like Fichte, that the self is everything, but rather that everything is self. And Schelling had the courage to declare not only the ideas of the self to be divine, but the entire human spiritual personality. He made not only human reason divine, but also the human purpose in life into the divine personal essence. A world explanation is called anthropomorphism when it originates from humans and imagines that the course of the world as a whole is based on an essence that guides it in the same way that humans guide their own actions. Even those who base events on a general world reason explain the world anthropomorphically. For this general world reason is nothing other than human reason made universal. When Goethe says, “Man never understands how anthropomorphic he is,” he is thinking of the fact that even the simplest statements we make about nature contain hidden anthropomorphisms. When we say that a body continues to roll because another body has pushed it, we are forming such an idea of our ego. We push a body and it rolls on. When we see a ball moving toward another and then rolling on, we imagine that the first pushed the second, analogous to the pushing effect we ourselves exert. Ernst Haeckel finds that the anthropomorphic dogma "compares God's creation and governance of the world with the artistic creations of an ingenious technician or mechanical engineer and with the government of a wise ruler. God the Lord as creator, sustainer, and ruler of the world is thus presented in his thinking and acting as thoroughly human-like." Schelling had the courage to adopt the most consistent anthropomorphism. He ultimately declared man, with his entire purpose in life, to be a deity. And since this purpose in life includes not only the rational but also the irrational, he was able to explain the irrational within the world. To this end, however, he had to supplement the rational view with another that does not have its source in thought. He called this higher view, in his opinion, “positive philosophy.” It "is the true free philosophy; those who do not want it may leave it alone, I leave it up to everyone, I only say that if, for example, someone wants the real course of events, if he wants a free creation of the world, etc., he can only have all this by means of such a philosophy. If rational philosophy is enough for him, and he demands nothing more than this, then he may stick with it, but he must give up wanting to have with rational philosophy and in it what it simply cannot have, namely the real God and the real course of events and a free relationship between God and the world." Negative philosophy will "remain primarily the philosophy for the school, positive philosophy that for life. Only through both together will the complete consecration be given that one must demand of philosophy. It is well known that in the Eleusinian initiations a distinction was made between the lesser and greater mysteries, the lesser being regarded as a preliminary stage to the greater. ... Positive philosophy is the necessary consequence of correctly understood negative philosophy, and so one can well say: in negative philosophy the lesser mysteries of philosophy are celebrated, in positive philosophy the greater mysteries."

[ 14 ] If inner life is explained as the divine, then it seems inconsistent to stop at one part of this inner life. Schelling did not commit this inconsistency. The moment he said that explaining nature means creating nature, he set the direction for his entire view of life. If the thoughtful contemplation of nature is a repetition of its creation, then the fundamental character of this creation must also correspond to that of human activity: it must be an act of freedom, not one of geometric necessity. However, we cannot recognize free creation through the laws of reason; it must be revealed by other means.

[ 15 ] The individual human personality lives in and through the divine primordial being; nevertheless, it possesses its full freedom and independence. Schelling considered this idea to be one of the most important within his worldview. Because of this idea, he believed that his idealistic school of thought represented progress over earlier views; because these, by grounding the individual being in God, also thought of it as determined solely by God, thus robbing it of freedom and independence. "For until the discovery of idealism, the actual concept of freedom is lacking in all newer systems, in Leibniz's as well as in Spinoza's; and a freedom such as many of us have conceived, who moreover boast of the most vivid feeling of it, namely that it consists in the mere dominion of the intelligent principle over the sensual and the desires, such a freedom could not be derived from Spinoza with difficulty, but quite easily and even more definitely." A man who thought only of such freedom and who, with the help of ideas borrowed from Spinozism, sought to bring about the reconciliation of religious consciousness with a thoughtful view of the world, of theology with philosophy, was Schelling's contemporary Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834). In his “Speeches on Religion to the Cultured Among Its Despisers” (1799), he uttered the sentence: "Join me in reverently sacrificing to the manes of the holy, departed Spinoza! He was imbued with the high world spirit, the infinite was his beginning and his end, the universe his only and eternal love; in holy innocence and deep humility, he reflected himself in the eternal world and saw how he, too, was its most gracious mirror.“ For Schleiermacher, freedom is not the ability of a being to set the direction and goal of its life for itself, in complete independence. For him, it is only ”development out of itself." But a being can very well develop from within itself and yet be unfree in a higher sense. If the primordial being of the world has planted a very specific seed in the individual, which the individual then develops, then the path it must follow is precisely predetermined; and yet it develops only from within itself. Such freedom, as Schleiermacher conceives it, is therefore quite conceivable in a necessary world order in which everything takes place with mathematical necessity. That is why he can also say: “Freedom therefore extends as far as life itself. ... Even the plant has its freedom.” Because Schleiermacher knew freedom only in this sense, he was also able to seek the origin of religion in the most unfree feeling, in “absolute dependence.” Human beings feel that they must relate their existence to another being, to God. Their religious consciousness is rooted in this feeling. A feeling as such is always something that must be linked to something else. It only has a second-hand existence. Thoughts and ideas have such an independent existence that Schelling can say of them: “Thoughts are indeed produced by the soul, but the thought that is produced is an independent power, continuing to act on its own, indeed growing in the human soul to such an extent that it overpowers and subjugates its own mother.” Therefore, anyone who seeks to grasp the divine primordial being in thought takes it into themselves and has it within themselves as an independent power. A feeling can then attach itself to this independent power, just as a feeling of satisfaction attaches itself to the idea of a beautiful work of art. Schleiermacher, however, does not want to take possession of the object of religion, but only of the feeling. He leaves the object, God, completely undefined. Man feels dependent, but he does not know the being on which he is dependent. All the concepts we form of the deity do not correspond to its high nature. That is why Schleiermacher also avoids going into any specific concepts about the deity. The most indefinite, emptiest idea is the one he prefers. “It was religion when the ancients regarded every peculiar mode of life throughout the world as the work of a deity; they had taken the peculiar mode of action of the universe as a definite feeling and designated it as such.” That is why one cannot take any real pleasure in the subtle words Schleiermacher said about the nature of immortality: "The goal and character of a religious life is not that immortality outside of time and beyond time, or rather only after this time, but still in time, but rather the immortality that we can already have directly in this temporal life, and which is a task that we are constantly engaged in solving. Becoming one with the infinite in the midst of finitude and being eternal in every moment—that is the immortality of religion." If Schelling had said this, one could associate a certain idea with it. It would then mean that man creates the idea of God within himself. This is nothing other than God himself remembering his own essence. The infinite thus lives on in the idea of God in the individual being. It is present in the finite. The finite therefore participates in infinity itself. But since Schleiermacher says this, it remains completely shrouded in fog. It expresses the mere dark feeling that we are dependent on an infinite being. It is the theologian in Schleiermacher that prevents him from advancing to specific ideas about the primordial nature of the world. He wants to raise religiosity and piety to a higher level. For he is a personality of rare depth of mind. Religious feeling should be a dignified one. Everything he says about this feeling is of a noble nature. He defended the morality that prevails in Schlegel's “Lucinde,” which transcends all barriers of tradition and social concepts and is born purely of his own arbitrariness; he was allowed to do so because he was convinced that man can be pious even if he accomplishes the most daring things in morality. “There is no healthy feeling that is not pious,” he was allowed to say. He understood piety. What Goethe expresses in his later years in the poem “Trilogy of Passion”:

In the purity of our hearts there surges a striving
to voluntarily surrender ourselves to something higher, purer, unknown
out of gratitude,
unraveling the eternally unnamed;
we call it: being pious.

Schleiermacher knew this feeling. That is why he was able to describe religious life. He did not want to recognize the object of devotion. Every kind of theology may define it in its own way. Schleiermacher wanted to create a realm of piety that is independent of the nature of the deity. In this sense, he is a reconciler of faith and knowledge.

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[ 16 ] “In recent times, religion has increasingly contracted the educated expansion of its content and withdrawn into the intensity of piety or feeling, often of a kind that manifests a very meager and barren content.” So wrote Hegel in the preface to the second edition of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1827); and he continued: "As long as it has a creed, a doctrine, a dogma, it has that with which philosophy can concern itself and in which it can unite with religion. However, this is not to be taken in the divisive, poor understanding in which modern religiosity is caught up, and according to which it presents the two as if one excluded the other, or as if they were so separable that they could only be united from the outside. Rather, it is also evident from what has been said so far that religion can exist without philosophy, but philosophy cannot exist without religion; rather, it includes it within itself. True religion, the religion of the spirit, must have such a content; the spirit is essentially consciousness, and thus of the content made objective; as feeling, it is the non-objective content itself [...] and only the lowest level of consciousness, indeed in the form of the soul common to animals. Thinking makes the soul, with which even animals are endowed, into spirit, and philosophy is only an awareness of that content, the spirit and its truth, also in the form and manner of that essence which distinguishes it from animals and makes it capable of religion." The entire intellectual physiognomy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) presents itself to our mind when we hear such words from him, through which he wanted to express clearly and sharply that he sees thinking as the highest activity of man, the one through which he alone can gain a position on the highest questions. Hegel declared the feeling of dependence, regarded by Schleiermacher as the creator of piety, to be genuinely animalistic; and he expressed the paradox: if this feeling of dependence were to constitute the essence of Christianity, then the dog would be the best Christian. Hegel is a personality who lives entirely in the element of thought. “Because man is a thinking being, neither common sense nor philosophy will ever allow itself to be elevated to God from and on the basis of an empirical worldview. This elevation has no other basis than the thinking, not merely sensual, animalistic contemplation of the world.” Hegel makes what can be gained through thinking the content of the worldview. For what man gains by means other than thinking can be nothing more than a preliminary stage to a worldview. "The elevation of thought above the sensual, its transcendence of the finite to the infinite, the leap made by breaking away from the sensual to the supersensual—all this is thought itself; this transition is only thought. If such a transition is not to be made, then this means that there should be no thought. In fact, animals do not make such a leap; they remain with sensory perception and intuition; they therefore have no religion." What humans can elicit from things through thinking is therefore the highest that is available to them in these things. They can therefore only call this their essence. For Hegel, thought is thus the essence of things. All sensory perception, all scientific observation of the world and its processes ultimately boils down to humans forming thoughts about the connection between things. Hegel's work begins where sensory perception and scientific observation have reached their goal — with thought. The scientific observer observes nature; Hegel observes what the scientific observer says about nature. The former seeks, through his scientific method, to reduce the diversity of natural phenomena to a unity; he explains one process from another; he strives for order, for an organic overview of the whole, which presents itself to his senses as a disordered multiplicity. Hegel seeks order and harmonious overview in the results of the natural scientist. He adds to the science of nature the science of thoughts about nature. All thoughts that one has about the world naturally form a unified whole, just as nature is also a unified whole. The scientific observer gains his thoughts from individual things; therefore, they initially appear in his mind as individual things, one next to the other. When we consider them side by side, they come together to form a whole, within which each individual is a link. This whole of thoughts is what Hegel's philosophy aims to be. Just as the natural scientist who seeks to determine the laws of the starry sky does not believe that he can construct the starry sky from these laws, so Hegel, who seeks the lawful connections within the world of thought, does not believe that he can find any scientific laws from thoughts that can only be determined through empirical observation. The repeated assertion that Hegel wanted to draw complete and unlimited knowledge of the whole world from pure thought is based on nothing more than a naive misunderstanding of his view. He said clearly enough: "What is to be understood is the task of philosophy; for what is reasonable is real, and what is real is reasonable. If philosophy paints its gray in gray, then a form of life has grown old; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only at dusk." This means nothing other than that the actual insights must already be there when the thinker arrives and illuminates them from his point of view. One should not demand of Hegel that he should have derived new laws of nature from pure thought, for that was not his intention at all. No, he wanted nothing more than to shed philosophical light on the sum of the laws of nature that existed in his time. No one demands that the natural scientist create the starry sky, even though he conducts his research on it; Hegel's views are declared fruitless because he, who thought about the connection between the laws of nature, did not at the same time create these laws of nature.

[ 17 ] What man ultimately arrives at by immersing himself in things is their essence. It underlies them. What man perceives as his highest knowledge is at the same time the deepest essence of things. The thought that appears in man is therefore also the objective content of the world. One can say: thought is first in the world in an unconscious way; then it is taken up by the human mind; it appears to itself in the human mind. Just as humans, when they look at nature, ultimately find the thought that makes its phenomena comprehensible to them, so too, when they look within themselves, they ultimately find the thought there as well. Just as the essence of nature is thought, so too is the essence of humans thought. In human self-awareness, thought looks at itself. The essence of the world comes to itself. Thought works in other creatures of nature; its effectiveness is not directed at itself, but at others. Nature therefore contains thought; but in thinking humans, thought is not only contained, it not only works, but is directed at itself. Thought also lives out in external nature, but there it flows into something else; in humans, it lives within itself. Thus, for Hegel, the entire world process appears as a thought process. And all the events of this process present themselves as preliminary stages to the highest event that exists: the thinking grasp of thought itself. This event takes place in human self-consciousness. Thought thus works its way progressively to its highest form of manifestation, in which it comprehends itself.

[ 18 ] Thus, when one looks at any thing in reality, any process, one will always see a certain form of development of thought in that thing or process. The world process is the progressive development of thought. Except for the highest stage of this development, all other stages contain a contradiction. There is thought in them, but it has more in it than it reveals at such a low stage. It therefore overcomes its contradictory manifestation and rushes to a higher one that corresponds more to it. It is therefore contradiction that drives the development of thought forward. When the observer of nature observes things while thinking, he therefore forms contradictory concepts of them within himself. When the philosophical thinker then takes up these thoughts gained from the observation of nature, he finds contradictory ideal constructs in them. But it is precisely this contradiction that enables him to construct a whole edifice of thought from the individual thoughts. He seeks out what is contradictory in a thought. And it is contradictory because the thought points to a higher stage of its development. Through the contradiction it contains, each thought thus points to another, toward which it rushes in the course of its development. Thus, the philosopher can begin with the simplest thought, which is completely empty of content, with abstract being. He is driven out of it by the contradiction inherent in this thought itself to a higher and less contradictory level, and then further, until he reaches the highest stage, the thought living within itself, which is the highest expression of the spirit.

[ 19 ] Hegel thus grasped the human spirit in its highest activity, thinking, and then attempted to show what meaning this highest activity has within the whole world. It represents the event in which the primordial being poured out into the whole world finds itself again. The highest activities through which this rediscovery takes place are art, religion, and philosophy. The thought is present in the work of nature; but here it is alienated from itself; it does not appear in its original form. When one looks at a real lion, it is nothing other than the embodiment of the idea of a “lion”; but here we are not concerned with the idea of a lion, but with the physical being; this being itself has nothing to do with the idea. Only when I want to understand it do I seek the idea. A work of art depicting a lion carries within itself what I can only comprehend in the real being. The physical form is only there to make the idea appear. Man creates works of art so that he can see before him in external perception what he otherwise only comprehends in thought. In reality, the idea can only appear in its own form in human self-consciousness. What in reality only appears here, man imprints on sensual matter so that it also appears to appear in him. When Goethe stood before the works of art of the Greeks, he was compelled to say: there is necessity, there is God. In Hegel's language, in which God is the content of the world's thoughts, which comprehends itself in human self-consciousness, this would mean: the highest revelations of the world gaze back at us from the works of art, which in reality are only granted to us within our own minds. Philosophy contains the thought in its purest form, in its very essence. The highest manifestation that the divine primordial being, the world of thought, can assume is contained in philosophy. In Hegel's sense, one can say: the whole world is divine, i.e., filled with thought, but in philosophy the divine appears quite directly in its divinity, while in other manifestations it assumes the forms of the non-divine. Religion stands between art and philosophy. Thought does not yet live in it as pure thought, but in images, in symbols. This is also the case with art, but in art the image is one borrowed from external perception; the images of religion are spiritualized.

[ 20 ] All other expressions of human life are like imperfect precursors to these highest manifestations of thought. The entire historical life of humanity is composed of such precursors. Therefore, anyone who follows the external course of historical events will find many things that do not correspond to pure thought, which is the object of reason. But those who look deeper will see that rational thought is nevertheless realized in historical development. It is realized only in a way that appears ungodly in its immediate outward appearance. One can therefore say, on the whole: “Everything that is real is rational.” And what matters is that in the whole of history, the idea, the historical world spirit, is realized. The individual is only a tool for the realization of the purposes of this world spirit. Because Hegel recognizes the highest essence of the world in the idea, he also demands that the individual subordinate himself to the general idea that governs world development. "These are the great men in history whose actual particular purposes contain the substance that is the will of the world spirit. This substance is their true power; it is in the general unconscious instinct of mankind; they are inwardly driven to it and have no further attitude than to resist the one who has taken upon himself the execution of such a purpose in his own interest. The peoples rather gather around his banner; he shows them and carries out what is their own immanent purpose. — If we take a further look at the fate of these world-historical individuals, they have had the good fortune to be the executors of a purpose that was a step in the progress of the general spirit. By making use of these instruments, reason can be said to employ a stratagem, for it allows them to carry out their own purposes with all the fury of passion, and not only remains unscathed, but brings itself forth. The particular is usually too insignificant in relation to the general: individuals are sacrificed and abandoned. World history thus presents itself as the struggle of individuals, and in the field of this particularity, things proceed quite naturally. Just as in animal nature the preservation of life is the purpose and instinct of the individual, but here reason, the universal, prevails and the individuals fall, so it is in the spiritual world. Passions destroy each other; reason alone watches, pursues its purpose, and asserts itself." The individual can only comprehend the universal spirit in contemplation, in his thinking. Only in contemplating the world is God fully present in him. Where man acts, where he intervenes in active life, he is a member and can therefore only participate in universal reason as a member. Hegel's theory of the state also flows from such thoughts. With his thinking, man is alone; with his actions, he is a member of the community. The rational order of the community, the thought that permeates it, is the state. For Hegel, individuality as such is only valuable insofar as universal reason, thought, appears in it. For thought is the essence of things. A natural product does not have the power to manifest the idea in its highest form; man has this power. He will therefore only achieve his destiny if he makes himself the bearer of the idea. Since the state is the realized idea, and the individual human being is only a member within it, man must serve the state and not the state man. "If the state is confused with civil society and its purpose is set as the security and protection of property and personal freedom, then the interest of the individual as such is the ultimate purpose for which they are united, and it follows from this that being a member of the state is something arbitrary. — But it has a completely different relationship to the individual; being an objective spirit, the individual himself has only objectivity, truth, and morality insofar as he is a member of it. The union as such is itself the true content and purpose, and the destiny of individuals is to lead a general life; their further particular satisfaction, activity, and manner of behavior has this substantial and generally valid as its starting point and result." What about freedom within such a conception of life? Hegel does not accept the concept of freedom that grants the individual human personality an unconditional right to set the goal and purpose of its activity for itself. For what value would it have if this individual personality did not take its goal from the rational world of thought, but decided according to complete arbitrariness? In his opinion, that would be precisely what constitutes unfreedom. Such an individual would not correspond to its essence; it would be imperfect. A perfect individual can only want to realize its essence, and the ability to do so is its freedom. However, this essence is embodied in the state. If a person acts in accordance with the state, then they act freely. "The state, in and of itself, is the moral whole, the realization of freedom, and it is the absolute purpose of reason that freedom be real. The state is the spirit that stands in the world and realizes itself in it with consciousness, while in nature it realizes itself only as the other of itself, as a sleeping spirit. ... It is God's way in the world that the state exists; its basis is the power of reason realizing itself as will." Hegel is never concerned with things as such, but always with their rational, intellectual content. Just as he sought ideas everywhere in his observation of the world, he also wanted life to be guided by the perspective of thought. That is why he fought against vague ideals of state and society and set himself up as the defender of what actually exists. According to Hegel, anyone who raves about a vague ideal in the future believes that universal reason has been waiting for them to appear. It must be made particularly clear to such people that reason is already present in everything that is real. He called Professor Fries, his colleague in Jena and his successor in Heidelberg, the “commander of all shallowness” because he had formed such an ideal of the future out of the “mush of the heart.” In his search for ideas in reality, Hegel sometimes went alarmingly far. For example, when he explains the rationality of the philosophy chair at Berlin University: “At this university, the ‘university of the center,’ philosophy must also find its excellent cultivation as the center of all intellectual education, science, and truth.” “This science has taken refuge with the Germans and lives on only in them. We are entrusted with the preservation of this sacred light, and it is our calling to nurture and nourish it and to ensure that the highest thing that man can possess, the self-awareness of his being, does not die out and perish.”

[ 21 ] Hegel's extensive defense of the real and the existing earned him severe criticism even from those who were sympathetic to his ideas. It should not be overlooked that this defense came at a time when the worst carriers of reaction were at work within reality. A follower of Hegel, Johann Eduard Erdmann, writes about this: "The decisive preponderance accorded to Hegelian philosophy over all contemporary systems, especially in the mid-1820s, is due to the fact that the momentary calm that followed the fierce struggles in the political, religious, and ecclesiastical-political spheres corresponded to a philosophy that reproached its enemies and praised friends, called ‘restoration philosophy’. It is this in a much broader sense than those who coined the name intended."

[ 22 ] However, it should not be overlooked that it was precisely through his sense of reality that Hegel created a highly life-affirming view. With his “philosophy of revelation,” Schelling sought to create a view of life. But how foreign are the concepts of his view of God to the immediate reality of everyday life! Such a view could at most have value for those solemn moments in life when people withdraw from everyday life and surrender to the highest moods, when they perform, so to speak, not worldly service but only divine service. Hegel, on the other hand, wanted to imbue people with the feeling that they also serve the universal divine in everyday reality. For him, the divine extends down to the smallest things, while for Schelling it retreats to the highest regions of existence. Because he loved reality and life, Hegel sought to present them as rationally as possible. He wanted people to take every step with reason. Basically, he did not underestimate the individual personality. We see this in statements such as these: "The richest is the most concrete and subjective, and that which withdraws into the simplest depth is the most powerful and comprehensive. The highest, most sharpened point is pure personality, which, solely through the absolute dialectic that is its nature, equally encompasses everything within itself and holds it, because it makes itself the freest — to simplicity, which is the first immediacy and generality." But in order to become “pure personality,” the individual must also permeate himself with all that is reasonable and make it his own. For “pure personality” is at the same time the highest to which man can develop, but it is by no means what he already is by nature. Once he has risen to this level, Hegel's words apply to him: “That man knows God is, according to essential community, a communal knowledge, for man knows God only insofar as God knows himself in man: this knowledge is God's self-consciousness, but equally a knowledge of man, and this knowledge of God by man is knowledge of man by God. The spirit of man to know God is only the spirit of God himself.” Only a human being in whom this is realized deserves, in Hegel's opinion, the name of personality in the highest sense of the word. For in him, reason and individuality coincide; he realizes the God within himself, to whom he gives the organ in his consciousness to look at himself. All thoughts would remain abstract, unconscious, ideal constructs if they did not become living reality in human beings. Without human beings, God in his highest perfection would not exist at all. He would be the unfinished world being. He would know nothing of himself. Hegel portrayed this God before his realization in life. The content of this portrayal is logic. It is a structure of lifeless, rigid, mute thoughts. Hegel himself calls it the “realm of shadows.” It is supposed to show, in a sense, what God is like in his innermost eternal essence before the creation of nature and the finite spirit. But since self-contemplation is a necessary part of God's essence, the content of logic is still the dead God who longs for existence. In reality, this realm of pure, abstract truth does not exist anywhere; only our intellect can separate it from the living reality. In Hegel's sense, there is no finished primordial being existing anywhere, but only one that is in eternal motion, in constant becoming. This eternal being is “the eternally real truth, in which eternally active reason is free for itself, and for which necessity, nature, and history serve only as its revelation and vessels of its glory.” Hegel wanted to show how the world of ideas takes hold of itself in human beings. He expressed Goethe's view in a different form: “When the healthy nature of man acts as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as in a great, beautiful, dignified, and valuable whole, when harmonious comfort grants him pure, free delight, then the universe, if it could feel itself, would rejoice at having reached its goal and admire the summit of its own becoming and being” (cf. page 71 [97] above). Translated into Hegel's language, this means: when humans recognize their own essence through thought, this act has not only an individual, personal meaning, but a completely universal one; the essence of the universe reaches its summit, its completion, in the self-knowledge of humans, without which it would remain a fragment.

[ 23 ] Hegel's conception of cognition does not understand it as the grasping of content that exists somewhere in the world without it, nor as an activity that creates images of real events. What is created in Hegel's sense of thinking cognition does not exist anywhere else in the world, only in cognition. Just as a plant produces a flower at a certain stage of its development, so the universe produces the content of human cognition. And just as the flower does not exist before its creation, so too does the content of thought not exist in the world before it emerges in the human mind. A worldview that believes that cognition should only produce images of already existing content makes humans idle spectators of the world, which would be perfectly complete without them. Hegel, on the other hand, makes humans active participants in world events, which would lack their culmination without them.

Grillparzer characterized Hegel's opinion on the relationship between thought and the world in a significant statement:

It is possible that you teach us prophetically the divine thought,
But human thinking, my friend, you surely condemn to ruin.

[ 24 ] Here, the poet means by human thinking that which presupposes its content as already existing in the world and wants to be nothing more than a reflection of it. For Hegel, this statement is not a reproach. For in his view, this kind of thinking about something else is not yet the highest, most perfect kind of thinking. When one thinks about a thing in nature, one seeks a concept that “corresponds” to its external object. One then understands what the external object is through the thought one forms. One is dealing with two things: the thought and the object. But if one wants to ascend to the highest point of view that man can climb, then one must not shy away from asking what the thought itself is. To do this, however, we have no other means than the thought itself. In the highest cognition, therefore, the thought grasps itself. It no longer seeks agreement with anything else. It deals only with itself. This thinking, which has no connection to anything external, to any object, appears to Grillparzer as a destroyer of the thinking that provides insights into the manifold things of sensory and spiritual reality spread out in time and space. But just as the painter does not destroy nature when he reproduces its lines and colors on canvas, so the thinker does not destroy the ideas of nature when he expresses them in their spiritual purity. It is strange that people want to see thinking as an element hostile to reality because it abstracts from the fullness of sensory content. Yes, does not the painter abstract from all other characteristics of an object by merely giving color, tone, and line? Hegel met all such objections with his clever joke. When the primordial being active in the world "slips and falls from the ground where it walks into the water, it becomes a fish, an organic being, a living being. If it now slips in the same way and falls into pure thought—for pure thought is not its ground either—then, plummeting into it, it should become something bad, finite, something that one should actually be ashamed to speak of, if it were not for official reasons and because it cannot be denied that there is a logic there. Water is such a cold, bad element, and yet life is so comfortable in it. Should thinking then be a much worse element? Should the absolute even be bad in it and behave badly in it?

[ 25 ] It is entirely in Hegel's spirit to claim that the primordial being of the world created lower nature and humankind; at this point, it has decided to leave it to humans to create, in addition to the external world and themselves, thoughts about things. Thus, the primordial being, in union with humans, creates the entire content of the world. Humans are co-creators of being, not idle spectators, not cognizant ruminators of what would exist even without their existence.

[ 26 ] What man is in his innermost being, he is not through another, he is through himself. That is why Hegel does not regard freedom as a divine gift that has been bestowed upon man once and for all, but as a result that he gradually attains in the course of his development. From life in the outer world, from satisfaction in purely sensual existence, he rises to the understanding of his spiritual nature, his own inner world. In this way, he also makes himself independent of the outer world; he follows his inner nature. The spirit of the people contains natural necessity and feels, in relation to its customs, completely dependent on what is custom and tradition, moral view, outside the individual human being. But gradually, the personality breaks free from this moral worldview established in the outside world and penetrates into its inner self, recognizing that it can develop moral views and give moral precepts from its own spirit. Human beings rise to the perception of the primordial being that reigns within them, which is also the source of their morality. They no longer seek their moral precepts in the external world, but in their own souls. They now depend only on themselves ($ 552 from Hegel's “Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences”). This independence, this freedom, is therefore not something that comes to humans from the outset; it is acquired in the course of historical development. World history is the progress of humanity in the consciousness of freedom.

[ 27 ] Because Hegel sees in the highest expressions of the human spirit processes in which the primordial essence of the world finds the conclusion of its development, its becoming, all other phenomena become preliminary stages to this highest summit; and this summit itself appears as the purpose toward which everything else strives. This idea of purposefulness in the universe is different from that which conceives of the creation and governance of the world as the work of an ingenious technician or machine designer who has arranged all things according to useful purposes. Goethe sharply rejected such utilitarian doctrines. On February 20, 1831, he said to Eckermann (cf. Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann, Part II): Man "does not refrain from carrying his habitual view of life into science and asking about the purpose and usefulness of the individual parts of an organic being. This may work for a while, and he may get by in science for a while; but very soon he will encounter phenomena where such a narrow view is insufficient, and where, without a higher foundation, he will become entangled in contradictions. Such teachers of utility may well say: the ox has horns to defend itself. Well, I ask: why does the sheep not have any? And if it does, why are they wrapped around its ears so that they are of no use to it? But it is something else when I say: the ox defends itself with its horns because it has them. The question of “why?” is not scientific at all. One gets a little further with the question “how?” For when I ask: How does the ox have horns? this leads me to consider its organization and at the same time teaches me why the lion has no horns and cannot have them." Nevertheless, Goethe sees in a different sense in all of nature a purposeful arrangement that ultimately achieves its goal in man, that is, arranges all its works in such a way that man ultimately finds his destiny. We read in his “Winckelmann”: “For what purpose do the suns and planets and moons, the stars and Milky Ways, the comets and nebulae, the worlds that have come into being and are coming into being, serve, if not ultimately for a happy human being to enjoy his existence?” Goethe is also convinced that the essence of all phenomena comes to light as truth in and through human beings (cf. p. 71 [97] above). How everything in the world is designed so that humans have a worthy task and can accomplish it: understanding this is the goal of this worldview. What Hegel expounds at the end of his “Philosophy of Nature” appears to be a philosophical justification of Goethe's statements: "In living beings, nature has perfected itself and made peace with itself by transforming itself into something higher. The spirit has thus emerged from nature. The goal of nature is to kill itself and break through its shell of the immediate, the sensual, to burn itself like a phoenix in order to emerge from this exteriority rejuvenated as spirit. Nature has become something else in order to recognize itself again as an idea and reconcile itself with itself. ... As the purpose of nature, the spirit precedes it, for it has emerged from it." This worldview was able to place humans so highly because it allows them to realize what lies at the foundation of the entire world as a primal force, a primal being; what is prepared for its realization through the entire progression of all other phenomena, but is only achieved in humans. Goethe and Hegel are in complete agreement on this idea. What the former gained from his observation of nature and the spirit, the latter expresses on the basis of clear, pure thinking.

[ 27 ] What Goethe undertook with individual natural processes, explaining them through their becoming, their development, Hegel applied to the entire cosmos. Goethe demands of those who want to understand the essence of the plant organism:

Becoming now observe how, step by step, the plant,
guided gradually, forms into blossoms and fruit.

Hegel wants to understand all world phenomena in the sequence of their becoming, from the simplest, dull activity of inert matter up to the self-aware spirit.