Hegel E-Book

Horst Althaus

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 687

Beschreibung

This accessible and highly readable book is the first full-length biography of Hegel to be published since the largely outdated treatments of the nineteenth century. Althaus draws on new historical material and scholarly sources about the life and times of this most enigmatic and influential of modern philosophers. He paints a living portrait of a thinker whose personality was more complex than is often imagined, and shows that Hegel's relation to his revolutionary times was also more ambiguous than is usually accepted. Althaus presents a broad chronological narrative of Hegel's development from his early theological studies in Tübingen and the associated unpublished writings, profoundly critical of the established religious orthodoxies. He traces Hegel's years of philosophical apprenticeship with Schelling in Jena as he struggled for an independent intellectual position, up to the crowning period of influence and success in Berlin where Hegel appeared as the advocate of the modern Prussian state. Althaus tells a vivid story of Hegel's life and his intellectual and personal crises, drawing generously on the philosopher's own words from his extensive correspondence. His central role in the cultural and political life of the time is illuminated by the impressions and responses of his contemporaries, such as Schelling, Schleiermacher and Goethe. This panoramic introduction to Hegel's life, work and times will be a valuable resource for scholars, students and anyone interested in this towering figure of philosophy.

Leseprobe

Hegel

An Intellectual Biography

Horst Althaus

Translated by Michael Tarsh

Polity Press

English translation © Polity Press 2000

First published in Germany as Hegel und die heroischen Jahre der Philosophie

© Carl Hanser Verlag 1992.

This translation published in 2000 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0-7456-1781-6ISBN 978-0-7456-8338-6 (ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and has been applied for from the Library of Congress.

Typeset in 10 on 12 pt Sabonby Ace Filmsetting Ltd, Frome, Somerset

Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books, Bodmin, Cornwall

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents

1   Origins

2   The Tübingen Stift

3   Between Monarchy and Republic

4   The Tutoring Years

5   Schelling’s Apprentice

6   Jena contra Tübingen

7   Between Berne and Frankfurt

8   Theological Writings

9   A Stuttgart Romance

10   Farewell to Frankfurt

11   The Frankfurt Writings

12   The Unpaid Lecturer

13   Domestic Affairs

14   A Difference with Schelling

15   The Phenomenology of Spirit

16   Journalist in Bamberg

17   A Turning Point

18   Headmaster in Nuremberg

19   The Science of Logic

20   Professor in Heidelberg

21   Feudalism or Monarchy?

22   From Baden to Prussia

23   The Prussian State Philosopher?

24   The Philosophy of Right

25   The Philosophy of History

26   A Journey to the Low Countries

27   The Philosophy of Art

28   The Austrian Journey

29   The History of Philosophy

30   The Journey to France and the Stay in Weimar

31   The Philosophy of Religion

32   Absolute Monarch in the Empire of Philosophy

33   The End

Bibliography

Index

Translator’s Note

The following text is an abridged version of the German original, particularly with regard to material likely to be of more direct interest to a German audience. The abridgements were made in agreement with the author and the German publisher. The bibliography has been developed and extended in relation to English-language translations and publications.

1

Origins

When Hegel was born in Stuttgart on 27 August 1770 the very landscape of the place seems already to have left a powerful mark upon the character that would subsequently emerge. Hegel was born a native of Württemberg, and always continued – even in later years as a salaried official of the Prussian state – to consider himself as a Württembergian.

According to family tradition the Hegels were descended from immigrants from the Steiermark or Kärnten region, persecuted Protestants who had sought protection in Württemberg in the middle of the sixteenth century. One of these immigrants was a Johann Hegel, potter by profession, who had settled in Grossbottwar in the Neckar region and eventually managed to become mayor of this little town. His numerous descendants in Württemberg included the Pastor Hegel who baptized Friedrich Schiller and the philosopher’s father, Georg Ludwig Hegel, ducal secretary and later counsellor of state. The philosopher’s grandfather had been chief intendant in Altensteig in the Black Forest, whilst his mother, Maria Magdalena, came from an old Stuttgart family of the seventeenth century which had spawned theologians, lawyers and officials, and which could be traced back on the maternal side to the Württemberg reformer Johannes Brenz.

For a young man with the family background that Hegel possessed and the interests that he would later develop, Württemberg in the latter half of the eighteenth century was an extremely auspicious place in which to be born. Alongside Saxony and the Saxon-Thuringian principalities, the state of Württemberg could boast the most developed educational system in the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’. Prussia at the time still lagged far behind in this respect, and the only teachers it could call upon in any abundance were retired soldiers and war-wounded veterans who were very poorly remunerated for their educational services.

The exemplary educational institutions were all to be found in Saxony and Württemberg. Saxony could draw on schools in Meissen, Grimma and Schulpforta to supply its future state officials and civil servants, and especially the clerics and high-school teachers whom the country constantly required, and the philologists who, having read their Homer and developed an elegant Latin style, would leave their institutes of learning feeling properly equipped for any post or task. There was a highly developed system of financial assistance available which was administered in accordance with two essential criteria for selection of candidates: the steadfast faith and appropriate behaviour of a good Lutheran Christian, and the grammatical mastery of the classical languages. If things were in good order here, then it was felt that everything else could be left to take care of itself.

In Hegel’s time the Swabians of Württemberg represented the only Protestant German community south of the river Main which occupied a self-enclosed territory with jurisdiction of its own, and that since 1565, the year in which, after protracted sectarian conflicts, the State Assembly irrevocably declared the Lutheranism of the Augsburg Confession as the sole official religion of state. In this respect the Württemberg Swabians clearly distinguished themselves from the Swabians who still occupied ancient Habsburg territory under remarkable arrangements and structures of political rule which, dissociated from one another as they largely were, never succeeded in developing into any cultural or political unity. So-called ‘Austrian Swabia’, together with Vorarlberg and Breisgau, formed part of lower Austria and was governed until 1752 from Innsbruck, and subsequently from Freiburg. The region in question, with its various flatlands on the upper Danube as well as in the north, belonged amongst the outlying territories of the Habsburg crown, although it also boasted a number of ‘Free Cities’ and principalities. But under the rule of Karl Eugen the idea of ‘Swabia’ came increasingly to be identified with Württemberg because the dukedom, with its approximately 500,000 inhabitants, constituted a strong centralized state in marked contrast to the scattered Swabian settlements beyond its borders with their largely Catholic populations. On the one hand an absolutist regime of an eighteenth-century monarch with leanings towards the Enlightenment and a centralized, pragmatic and secularized system of public administration, and on the other an antiquated expression of Imperial rule with strong feudal remnants that tamely resisted the state and its all-powerful monarchy. What the categories of ‘state’, ‘monarchy’ and ‘feudalism’ effectively signified as political and historical factors at this time can be most fruitfully studied in relation to Swabia, where these forms all coexisted with one another, variously in cooperation or conflict as the case might be. In addition Württemberg was characterized by the presence of a state church which since the Reformation had continued to exercise its undiminished influence, through all other political changes, and which still closely controlled the lives of its subjects from the cradle to the grave.

Württemberg is a country rich in towns, but, with the exception of the princely residences of Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg, there is little real separation between ‘town’ and ‘country’ as such. The countryside effectively begins in the towns and penetrates deep within them, its plots and allotments already forming part of the latter, its rows of houses incorporating stables for cattle and store-rooms for agricultural equipment used out in the fields beyond the town. Even in 1849 Friedrich Theodor Vischer could describe Tübingen as a rather ‘dirty and desolate little village’ where cows were still being driven through the narrow streets. Stutttgart is not like Dresden any more than Lessing is like Schiller, and even less like Leipzig which already appeared to Goethe, even before Hegel was born, as a ‘little Paris’. None the less, the princely residence of Stuttgart and its roughly twenty thousand inhabitants was a comfortable and attractive place, with its parks, gardens, promenades and businesses, with its stores and shops serving the demands of court, and formed a striking contrast with the surrounding countryside. The area around the New Palace, the English Garden which faces towards Cannstatt, the neatly regular streets in the suburbs and the Residential Palace in Ludwigsburg, all these are classical expressions of the eighteenth century.

It is difficult to free ourselves from the image of Franz Eugen’s Württemberg as a kind of educational forcing house – not least because of Schiller’s early experiences there which drove him to abandon the state and its residential capital. Nor were the characteristic features of political absolutism lacking here either: witness the exercise of arbitrary government, the examples of financial extravagance, an established culture of court ‘mistresses’ with Franziska von Hohenheim as the conspicuous centre of attention, and the fortress of Hohenasperg which essentially functioned as a political prison. The fate of the poet Schubart, whom the Duke had deviously tempted to set foot in Württemberg territory and then confined to prison there under the most wretched conditions for ten years, had shocked people throughout the German lands of the ‘Empire’, including Frederick the Great, who eventually succeeded in getting him released. But the political system was largely felt to be an artificial intrusion, and hardly exercised any deeper effects upon the predominantly agricultural life of the country. The memory of the precious ‘System of Ancient Law’ (Das gute alte Recht) had never completely disappeared. The latter very much represented the feudalism which Hegel would later bitterly reject, but it also stood for the other more attractive aspect of a system where the estates could still offer some resistance to the power of the absolute monarch.

But it was precisely this absolutist power which encouraged modernizing tendencies in the educational system in contrast to the ecclesiastical monopoly of influence that had formerly prevailed. What the Duke expected from the Karlsschule was less a supply of young blood for the pulpit or schoolroom, something which in Swabia had been abundantly available for centuries already, but rather, in addition to military officers, a reliable source of trained doctors and professional people for the technical and administrative elite of the country. And he would enlist such people wherever they could be found. As a pupil at the Karlsschule Schiller, for example, had studied medicine and natural sciences without even considering theology as an option.

None the less, the pragmatically oriented educational policy so in evidence here was much less characteristic of Württemberg generally. It would be a long time before it could even begin to compete with the theological traditions of Swabian education. The prospective theologian had to embark upon a path that led from minor seminaries to the University of Tübingen, and typically speaking from schools like those at Maulbronn or Babeuren to the Tübingen Stift. And, as in Saxony, there was also a highly developed system of financial support for the selected students. They would eventually arrive at an ecclesiastical institution without further pretensions, namely a seminary expressly designed to lead to the eventual ordination of an officially accredited preacher, the archetypal figure in whom the ‘Swabian system’ would find its ultimate fulfilment!

And this was also the path which Hegel’s father, the secretary of the ducal finance office, imagined for his eldest son. Wilhelm entered the German School at the age of three, and the Latin School at the age of five, but the original plan to send him finally to one of the Württemberg seminaries which prepared students to enter the university was dropped. Instead he attended the Stuttgart Gymnasium from the age of seven – only the year before the family had moved from the less select Eberhardstrasse to new and prosperous quarters in the Röderschen Gasse.

This was both a backward and a forward step. It was a backward step in so far as it deviated from the standard Swabian pattern of optimal educational choice; but it was something of a forward step from the perspective of Stuttgart court society and its conventions, since the Gymnasium Illustre paid generous tribute to more elevated educational aims. According to his station, Hegel’s father, if not exactly a man of the ducal court, was certainly a man of the ducal administration. But the Gymnasium was not the foremost school in Stuttgart. It was the Karlsschule that attracted the best teachers and the personal attentions of the Duke, and it was here that Hegel’s brother Ludwig was sent. There was no question of sending Hegel there on account of the practical orientation of the teaching and Hegel’s professed intention to become a minister. Unlike Schelling and Hölderlin and other young students from the smaller towns and regions of the area, Hegel did not find himself forced into entering one of the cloister schools in the country.

At the Gymnasium Hegel showed himself to be an exemplary student who responded to the authority of his teachers and specifically sought out further personal contact with them. This was particularly true for his class teacher Löffler, who had once presented the eight-year-old Hegel with the Eschenberg translation of Shakespeare’s works, and whom Hegel liked to accompany on his walks.

Hegel showed himself meticulous in complying with his duties at school. Plato and his Socrates, together with Homer and Aristotle, were naturally the focus of daily attention on his part. Amongst the Greek tragic poets he was particularly inspired by Sophocles’ Antigone as well as Euripides. He read the classical authors like Livy, Cicero and Longinus (whom he also translated) and Epictetus. His early experience in reading Greek came with the study of the New Testament. And since the young Württemberg schoolboy was already expected to become a cleric in due course, he had to study some Hebrew as well, a subject for which the curriculum allowed two hours’ study a week, just the same as for Greek. As far as more recent German literature was concerned Hegel acquainted himself with Goethe’s Werther, Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and Schiller’s play Fiesco. But the book which seemed to have particularly absorbed his attention at this time was Sophie’s Journey from Memel to Saxony by Johann Timotheus Hermes, a vast novel in six volumes describing the adventures of a young woman during the Seven Years War and the Russian occupation of East Prussia. The author allows himself, very much in the manner of Fielding or Richardson, to discourse at length about the realities of everyday life, with vivid scenes set in taverns and domestic houses featuring cooks and stable boys, and post-horses in the country, etc. Hegel found it impossible, as he confesses in his diary, to tear himself away from the book, which was indeed one of the most popular literary works of the century. Schopenhauer later took the opportunity of pouring contempt on Hegel’s judgement: ‘My favourite book is Homer, Hegel’s is Sophie’s Journey.’

Hegel essentially used his personal diary from the very beginning to record rationalistic precepts and observations, and rather precocious ones at that for someone of his age. There is no evidence here of participation in youthful pranks or transgressions of any kind, and Hegel the schoolboy and student seems never to have been young at all. Early on he responds to the problems and difficulties which social life can bring with a rather disarming good-humouredness. Harmless camaraderie, games of chess and card-playing with very low stakes characterize his spare time and clearly give much enjoyment. He looks on pretty girls with pleasure, but only at a safe distance. Failing to go to church one Sunday was the extent of his boldness, and merits a corresponding entry in the diary. He was even prepared to visit a Catholic church and observe proceedings there in order to compare it all with his own Lutheran background. He praised the priest’s sermon on that occasion, though not without recording his considerable antipathy to the ceremony of the Mass itself.

The burning question as to who would give the final school address at the end of the year – ‘On the Corrupted State of the Arts and Sciences amongst the Turks’ – was settled diplomatically by the authorities through entrusting the task to five pupils. As the top of his year Hegel was the last one to speak at the annual ceremony, something he did with all due solemnity, and much praise for his teachers of course. The address revealed all the characteristic stylistic features of a school speech. There is one point, however, which is rather more than a standard gesture of humility and seems to express a genuinely heartfelt Hegelian sentiment: ‘We can already learn to see now, although it is too late for some, that such neglect [of study and learning] will procure the disadvantageous effects that our teachers have warned about.’ In other words: what we ourselves neglect to do is lost for ever, and through our own deed.

That seems the appropriate tone for a self-searching Lutheran sinner with downcast eyes, one who none the less is sure of delivery from the errors and the confusions of youth and already desirous of attaining a maturity which will protect him from the errors he must remorsefully admit to now. A eulogy for a maturity which apparently cannot be acquired too early and for a rationality of outlook which should be seriously cultivated from the first. This confession, and the insights it harboured, represents more than a rhetorical topos and honestly reflects the attitudes of a precocious young man expressing his own experience on leaving school. He gladly recognizes that it is far better to live in Württemberg than in the Turkish Empire and is more than willing to offer heartfelt thanks to the Duke and his teachers for that.

2

The Tübingen Stift

Hegel entered the portals of the University of Tübingen in the autumn of 1788. His matriculation papers specify the exact date as 27 October and enter him in the Faculty of Theology. There had never been any real alternative as far as Hegel was concerned. This course had already been decided upon long before he graduated from the Stuttgart Gymnasium and it was in complete accordance with his father’s wishes.

Hegel had already made a successful application for a specific grant to support his studies and this, together with specific permission from the Duke, allowed him to enrol at the University Stift or seminary without further ado. The Stift, originally founded by Duke Ulrich, was located in a former Augustinian monastery that had been dissolved in 1547 and was now used to train and educate prospective Lutheran pastors and high-school teachers who were native citizens of Württemberg.

The ‘Ephor’ or Director of the Stift was the same Jacob Friedrich Abel who had once been Schiller’s teacher in Stuttgart. The actual day-to-day running of the institution was largely in the hands of the so-called ‘Repetenten’. The characteristic discipline of a seminary was maintained throughout the essentially semi-monastic institution. The various punishments and rewards which the students had acquired were carefully added up three times a year to provide a powerful yardstick for assessing their overall performance. All transgressions were punished with specific disciplinary measures called ‘Caritionen’, which ranged from threats to withdraw the standard wine ration at meal times to actual periodic incarceration.

With its barely three hundred students the University of Tübingen at this time was a supremely undistinguished institution, essentially little more than a training ground for people who would eventually serve in the churches and schools of Württemberg, while students destined for professions in the law or medicine would attend the Karlsschule in Stuttgart instead. The Enlightenment culture of the time, to which even a place like Tübingen was not entirely immune, was still essentially Enlightenment in the tradition of Christian Wolff, and knowledge of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which had already appeared in 1781, was largely the secret prerogative of more forward and precocious minds. And Hegel himself was certainly not amongst these. But quite irrespective of Kant or Wolff, Rousseau or Herder, the university teachers like Storr and Schnurrer, Flatt and Rosier effectively exercised their own narrow authority in the lecture halls. They gave priority to Christian dogmatics over exegesis or ecclesiastical history, and emphasized simple biblical faith of an orthodox or pietistic kind. These exemplary teachers of traditional theology presented the young Hegel, who had already accepted the superiority of Greek culture as a student at the Stuttgart Gymnasium, with the theoretical and practical reality of ‘Christianity’, as a phenomenon of ‘world history’, as a new principle in relation to the classical world.

Hegel reacted to the academic teaching at Tübingen with his own enormous capacity for lethargy. This was lethargy as an escape mechanism, as a means of intellectual survival. The Hegel of these years in Tübingen revealed a certain idleness, a general tendency to allow things to go their own way. This is also true for the numerous occasions on which he transgressed the Seminary rules (as many as eighteen times in 1790): he was punished and reproached by the administration for failing to attend lectures, for neglecting the accepted dress code, for going on drinking expeditions at night and sleeping in till the following midday, and for absenting himself from prayers. A year later he was punished with solitary confinement for leaving the Stift without permission and returning late from vacation.

The official documents up till 1791 remark upon a certain deterioration in his conduct but continue to praise his intellectual abilities and industry. His frequent absence from lectures is also duly noted. It seemed rather characteristic of the Stift that, without being generally permissive, it none the less permitted a certain leeway for the students. One could not really describe the standard punishments as draconian in character, and the nocturnal studies which Hegel preferred were obviously accepted as some compensation for his various absences.

Hölderlin, exactly the same age as Hegel, had also entered the Stift the same year. Although he was also enrolled to study theology, his thoughts dwelt constantly upon the land of Greece and the ancient Greeks themselves, upon their gods, temples and works of art. In his own immaculate appearance he was said to resemble a youthful ‘messenger of the gods’ himself! For his part Hölderlin had pursued the preferred Swabian educational path, passing directly from the cloister school at Maulbronn to the university in Tübingen. He suggests that he was originally placed above Hegel in the so-called ‘Location’ (a ranking list in terms of academic performance) since we find him reluctantly admitting to his mother in 1790 that he has now fallen behind Hegel and Märklin in his studies. The relevant documents do not actually confirm this but they do show that Hegel himself was demoted and placed behind the same Märklin, a fellow student of his from Stuttgart. Leutwein, a year ahead of Hegel and a good friend of his at the time, ascribed this demotion to a certain spirit of independence on Hegel’s part, which was certainly not encouraged at the Stift. Hegel had not exactly recommended himself to the authorities by what Leutwein calls his ‘eccentric behaviour’, something further underlined by his irregular attendance at lectures. Leutwein expressly reproaches Hegel with a general ‘desultoriness of approach’, with inconsistent industry, wide-ranging but disorganized reading, and a constant tendency to change the focus of his interests.

In Hegel’s mind, however, the real reason for his demotion lay in the Stift’s interested concern with Märklin’s uncle, who later became director of the Denkendorf seminary. The demotion seems to have left Hegel with a ‘permanent sense of hurt’ which he none the less succeeded in concealing outwardly. Even in Berlin in later years Hegel would still ask after his friend Märklin’s circumstances whenever he received visitors from Württemberg. The young man with whom Hegel had found himself in such intense competition at the Stift later became the Abbot of Heilbronn. As far as the philosopher’s later life is concerned, Leutwein himself drew a positive conclusion from Hegel’s supposed setback at the university: ‘If he had remained third in his year, Berlin would certainly never have got to look on him and he would not have given the German fatherland so much to talk about.’

This demotion seems to have spurred Hegel on to overcome his former lethargy and idleness and he now showed a capacity for hard work unusual for him. Intellectual energies that no one had suspected in him were suddenly released almost at a stroke. There was no more time now for retiring to bed early and he began to spend weeks on end studying at night. The blow which had befallen him had become an inner incentive for change.

He may have been disadvantaged with respect to Märklin because of his own lack of familiarity with the latest intellectual currents and trends. And perhaps the decision to demote him was not particularly unfair anyway, since Hegel had preferred to spend his nights drinking and playing cards with boon companions rather than discussing the philosophy of Kant which Märklin himself was studying at the time. Hegel, who was quite familiar with near contemporary works like the vast picaresque novel Sophie’s Journey or with Hippel’s Life Story, had not yet attained such heights, and even if he had read the relevant texts he did not feel confident enough to express an opinion about them. His own preferred authors at this time were Plato and Aristotle, and certain pieces by Schiller, Spinoza, Jacobi, Herder and, above all, Rousseau. The French Revolution had already stormed the ramparts of the Ancien Régime in the name of Rousseau, and it was not long before news of these events began to penetrate the threshold of the Stift. The general call for ‘freedom’ soon found speedy and enthusiastic acceptance amongst the students there.

Everyone was talking of the new coming century as if it would prove the century of freedom itself. Hegel was looked upon as one of the most ardent advocates of the Revolution. The pages of his Stammbuch or personal album are filled with typical exclamations of the time which, though entered in another hand, obviously reflected Hegel’s own sentiments: ‘Vive la liberté’, ‘Vive Jean-Jacques’, and Schiller’s In tyrannos or ‘Death to Tyrants’ – the celebrated motto with which the poet had recently prefaced his play The Robbers. According to Johann Eduard Erdmann, Hegel must have been regarded at the time as a republican with Jacobin sympathies. These sympathies were further strengthened when Schelling entered the Stift in the autumn of 1790. By then Hegel had acquired the equivalent of a doctorate of philosophy.

Five years younger than Hegel or Hölderlin, Schelling was born in Leonberg, the son of a Lutheran pastor and a theologian by early training. He graduated from the cloister school in Bebenhausen. With Schelling the idea of the ‘Golden Age of Swabia’ actually became a legend. He was only fifteen years old when he entered the Stift, had already ‘skipped’ three school years, and now impressed everyone with his knowledge of languages and his unparalleled ability to synthesize ideas in bold and unpredictable ways. In short he was everything that Hegel was not. Schelling was the authentic ‘genius’ in the romantic Sturm und Drang sense of the word who effortlessly put Hegel and Hölderlin in the shade. In total contrast to either of them, Schelling was a precocious offspring of the Swabian clerical aristocracy.

But the image of the ‘trinity of friends’ is a deceptive one. It is an image that can only be artificially constructed in retrospect. Not one of the three, who actually chanced to share a room with one another shortly before Hegel’s departure from Tübingen, had any inkling of the future in which they would come to be seen as bonded together for ever.

Schelling’s entry to the Stift significantly strengthened the republican faction there. Clearly marked out as he was by his volatile temperament and the infective enthusiasm he could lend to any subject, Schelling was immediately suspected by the Duke of organizing student demonstrations at which the ‘Marseillaise’ had been sung by the participants. When the Duke visited the Stift personally to investigate the matter he presented Schelling, who had almost automatically assumed responsibility for everything, with the offending German translation of the song and said: ‘There is a fine little song composed in France and often sung by Marseille bandits. Is the young man familiar with it?’ Schelling gave the remarkably self-possessed reply: ‘Majesty, all of us transgress in so many ways’, and the Duke, who regarded himself as a good Christian, was quite lost to find an appropriate response.

Compared with the self-confidence of Schelling, Hegel had something of the fellow traveller about him, and appeared even rather awkward and recalcitrant in nature. One can only speculate about what finally encouraged him to start organizing his time more productively and gradually focusing his own wide-ranging reading and writing, something which had certainly already been noticed by the authorities at the Stift. He was clearly regarded there as something of an eclectic who possessed a great deal of knowledge in many areas but which he seemed quite unable to bring together. Eclecticism is understood in this context as a manifestation of uncontrolled and undisciplined reflection, in contrast to that practical knowledge and understanding of the ways of the world so highly prized in a princely residential town, an understanding that needs no scholarly learning and presupposes a certain loss of that rural innocence which we would assume the students from Maulbronn, Denkendorf and Bebenhausen initially brought with them to Tübingen

But is this opposition between reflection and naïve simplicity, supposedly mirroring the opposition of town and country, really valid? Could one plausibly describe a young man like Schelling as naïve? A character like his seems rather to reveal evidence of a certain over-cultivation than any of the characteristic features of the humble Swabian student from the Neckar valley. As far as Hegel’s character was concerned the rather ‘old-fashioned’ impression which he made on his student contemporaries was not a matter of affectation. It was certainly the butt of affectionate humour, as we can see from Hegel’s personal album in which his friend Fallot from Mömpelgard drew a little picture of a bald, bent and bearded Hegel on crutches, together with the words ‘May God Preserve the Old Man’.

If a successful caricature is capable of revealing something of the inner and outer characteristics through exaggeration, then Fallot’s casual sketch testifies to Hegel’s apparent infirmity, his ungainliness, his total lack of elegance. With regard to Schelling the contrast could hardly be a more glaring one. Hegel’s appearance of premature age was probably due more to his general awkwardness than to his precocious and comprehensive knowledge or the pedantic fashion in which he pursued his studies. In fact there were many others who effortlessly outshone him academically at the Tübingen Stift, as he was rather painfully aware. Hegel faltered along behind the others. The sermons which he, like all the theology students, had to preach were fairly disastrous. These were held, according to custom, during meal times amongst the students and formed part of the daily devotion at table along with readings and accompanying exegesis from Scripture. The chosen speaker received special board that day. The manner in which Hegel delivered his sermon was halting and difficult to follow. On his leaving certificate he would eventually read, in Latin, that ‘he did not excel as a preacher’. If this prospective cleric had ever wished to rise to eminence within the hierarchical Württemberg ecclesiastical establishment, then the outlook was not promising.

In fact one of his principal interests at the time appears to have been one Auguste Hegelmeier, the daughter of a recently deceased professor of theology and a very attractive young woman who was well aware of the great impression she made upon the students. Hegel liked to join in with her other admirers who would gather of an evening in the tavern to spend an hour in her company. But things went no further than this. Hegel’s sister relates that he never ‘aroused any particular hopes for the future’ amongst the opposite sex and she probably had good reason for thinking so. Hegel’s prospects as far as a Church position was concerned were hardly secure, given his decided lack of talent in the pulpit and his consequent doubts about his suitability as a minister anyway.

According to a later report by his friend Leutwein, Hegel tended at the Stift to ‘wander around in a cavalier fashion in the realm of knowledge’, to occupy his time with subjects which were sometimes peripheral or unrelated to the official curriculum, sometimes far in advance of its requirements. He retained his fondness for making copious excerpts, just as he had in Stuttgart. He would take a single sheet of paper, inscribe a suitable title for his excerpt in the top margin, and insert the page in the appropriate file. We know from his later lectures on the history of philosophy that he occupied himself intensively with Aristotle at a very early period and was particularly irritated to have to work with an almost unreadable ancient edition (the Basle edition of 1531 or possibly 1550) without an accompanying Latin translation of the text. The dialectical Aristotle meant as much to Hegel at this time as the Gnostic systems did to Schelling, as Albert Schwegler reported in his reminiscences of Hegel published in 1839. Hölderlin chose the lines of Pylades in Goethe’s Iphigenie when he came to inscribe Hegel’s personal album: ‘Enthusiasm and love are the pinions to mighty deeds!’ Immediately below the quotation someone had also written Lessing’s Spinozan motto in Greek: hen kai pan. ‘The One and All’ was a shared formula of Hegel and Hölderlin which Schelling too could enthusiastically endorse.

3

Between Monarchy and Republic

Naturally there were very considerable differences of political opinion between Hegel and his father in Stuttgart: the partisan of the new revolutionary convention in France and the civil servant in the Duke’s employ could hardly be expected to see eye to eye on things. And yet there do not seem to have been any great profound tensions in the relations between father and son. During the months before and immediately after his official examination Hegel’s closest personal contact appears to have been with his friend Stäudlin. The writer and lawyer Gottfried Friedrich Stäudlin was twelve years older than Hegel, and had made something of a name for himself as editor of the first Swabian Musenalmanach or literary and cultural journal. In his capacity as a reviewer for this journal Stäudlin had come into some conflict with Schiller who edited a rival publication of his own called ‘Anthology’, although Stäudlin subsequently managed to patch up the quarrel to some extent. This was something that would soon prove to be of considerable personal significance for Hölderlin since, through Hegel’s mediation, the poet himself had formed a very close friendship with Stäudlin. And it was through him that Hölderlin first made the personal acquaintance of Schiller when he came from Jena to visit Württemberg. As a result of this meeting Schiller recommended Hölderlin to his older friend and patron Frau von Kalb as a possible private tutor (‘Hofmeister’) for her son. Thus it was that Hölderlin came to leave Tübingen for Jena, where he would eventually be followed first by Schelling and later by Hegel. It was therefore Stäudlin who can be credited in part with shaping the future relationship of the three friends from Tübingen.

At this time Hegel was having to consider his own immediate future options. This he duly did, though without any signs of apparent urgency. He had already made some tentative moves in this direction before the examination, making the relevant enquiries through various intermediaries. Thus a certain Herr von Sinner, who, though not himself a personal acquaintance of Hegel, had learned about him through another graduate of the Stift called Hauff, had mentioned Hegel’s name in response to the enquiries of the von Steiger family in Berne who were currently seeking an appropriate personal tutor. The family had initially considered another graduate of the Stift called Schwinzdraheim for the position, and Herr von Steiger desired more detailed information about the candidate. Sinner took the necessary steps but, on learning about the supposedly questionable ‘conduite’ of the candidate, he advised against employing him after all and suggested Hegel in his place. It appears that Sinner may have been trying to ingratiate himself with von Steiger by strongly advising against the one candidate in favour of the other and imagined that he could arrange everything himself without more ado. For the patrician von Steiger this was clearly not nearly enough, however, and he made further enquiries through another intermediary, a teacher from Berne called Rütte, who contacted Johannes Brodhag, the proprietor of The Golden Ox in Stuttgart, in the idea that he might have had direct personal experience with the suspect candidate. In the end Rütte received the same report of Schwinzdraheim’s ‘dubious reputation’ along with a corresponding recommendation of Hegel. The Stuttgart proprietor went further and enquired at the Ducal Consistory whether Hegel would be permitted to leave Württemberg to take up such a post. In order to speed things along Brodhagen even went to see Hegel himself at home. At first Hegel hesitated because he considered the proposed salary of 15 louis d’or a year to be too low: he suggested instead 25 louis d’or ‘along with some corresponding perks’ and requested in any case a fortnight in which to consider the matter.

There were also other people who entertained some reservations about Hegel’s tutoring prospects: Ephor Schnurrer for one. Even before Hegel had passed the examination in his presence Schnurrer had written to the former student Scholl in terms which reveal something of his estimate of Hegel’s character: ‘I really doubt whether he [Hegel] has learned properly how to make those kinds of sacrifices which are inevitably coupled, at least at the beginning, with the position of private tutor.’

Here we see a man who in his capacity as a university teacher clearly knew Hegel’s personal character rather well, candidly expressing the difficulties attendant upon the career of private tutoring in general and particularly in relation to Hegel himself. Being a private tutor at this time meant serving as a very subordinate employee in educational matters, and being a useful and advantageous adjunct to some noble family. Such service could range from the most agreeable personal intimacy between teacher and student on the one hand to the lowly status of a lackey on the other. A personal tutor could be the educator of princes, or simply a travel companion for young gentlemen on tour, something which Lessing did not regard as beneath him and which Herder had considered a great privilege. Everything really depended upon chance and luck, as well as upon personal aptitude, tactfulness and a general capacity to fit in with other people. On the other hand the possible advantages of such employment could easily be outweighed by the particular difficulties it brought with it.

Hegel had good reason therefore to request a fortnight’s reflection and to try and discover, so far as possible, something of the conditions and circumstances with which he would have to reckon. The time of his own original Jacobin enthusiasm was certainly behind him and republican Berne probably did not appear a particularly enticing prospect. But the prospect of assuming an official clerical post was equally unattractive to this newly qualified young theologian with a very poor reputation for delivering sermons (duly noted in his final university report). If Hegel needed time to reflect and consider other possible options, his hesitancy revealed the extremely ambiguous feelings he harboured about the offer of employment in Switzerland. However, on 11 September Hegel was able to write to Rütte in Berne that ‘no further impediments now stand in the way of my accepting this position in the von Steiger household’.

On account of the impending examination he had to postpone his arrival in Berne until the first week of the following month. He asked von Steiger to request official permission from the relevant ecclesiastical authorities for him to leave Württemberg, confirmed an increase in his proposed salary of 5 louis d’or, and promised to contribute his utmost ‘towards the education of the daughter of Herr Hauptmann’.

On 20 September, only ten days after Schnurrer’s letter to Scholl, Stäudlin reported to Schiller: ‘From his friend Magister Hegel he [Hölderlin] has learnt that you yourself are currently in a position to offer a similar tutoring position in the Jena area. Since Hegel has already accepted the engagement as house tutor in Berne and definitely abandoned any other intentions he may have had, H[ölderlin] has with the greatest urgency asked me whether you yourself might put in a good and influential word on his behalf with regard to the said position.’

The letter reveals the nature of the choice: K. F. von Steiger or Charlotte von Kalb, Berne or Jena – the town which represents the world of practical politics or the town which represents Schiller. Hegel had decided in favour of the Republic of Berne.

Hegel did not have to produce his own dissertation in Tübingen. He graduated after successfully defending a dissertation ‘De Ecclesia Wirtembergicae Renascentis Calamitatibus’ written by Le Bret, the Chancellor of the University. He had similarly matriculated as ‘Magister’ by defending the dissertation ‘De limite officiorum’ by Professor Böck rather than anything written by himself. In both cases, therefore, the task was to defend an existing position, which appears to possess authority by virtue of its established existence: simply an authority which justifies its existence in and of itself, and a justification which also and simultaneously supports the rationality of what exists with its authority! There is no sign of any opposition or resistance here on Hegel’s part. Magister and Candidate Hegel kept conspicuously and scrupulously to the traditional rules. The idea of expressing and defending one’s own theses in the circle of one’s academic colleagues was something more characteristic of Schelling than of Hegel. So too Hegel’s friend and rival Märklin had already distinguished himself by a knowledge of Kant’s philosophy which Hegel would not acquire for a long time yet. Perhaps we should give credence therefore to the final university report which Hegel received on 20 September 1793. It states that while Hegel was ‘not without competence in philology’ (‘non ignarus’), he certainly did not appear very promising in philosophy (‘Philosophiae nullam operam impendit’).

4

The Tutoring Years

Hegel’s decision to leave for Berne and experience the life of a house tutor for himself was a crucial step for him. In the first place it marked the end of his years as a student, a time which he had passed in a rather distracted and unsettled way. Of course it also marked his departure from his homeland in the Dukedom of Württemberg and the beginning of a very different life in a republican Swiss city-state.

During the long reign of Karl Eugen the state of Württemberg had suffered a major decline. In the last twenty-three years the Duke had attempted to heal the wounds which he had himself inflicted on the country during the previous thirty-three through the financial extravagance of the Court, the oppressive burden of taxation, arbitrariness in government and acts of personal brutality. This was no easy prospect and indeed he never succeeded in accomplishing it. Even amongst the other German potentates and princes of the time, Karl Eugen enjoyed no enviable reputation. It says a good deal about his regime that the Emperor and the governments of Prussia, England and Denmark were all called upon at one time or another to act in defence of the Württembergian Constitution which the Duke had violated so ruthlessly. It was the Estates which had made this appeal as protectors of the ‘Old System of Rights’ against a government which for all its efforts had never quite been able utterly to destroy the idyll of Swabian freedom. In 1770, the year in which Hegel was born, the Duke was forced to accept the so-called ‘Adjustment’ and make numerous concessions to the older liberal demands of the Swabian tradition. In 1793, the year in which Hegel departed for Berne, the government of Karl Eugen finally met its end. The victorious progress of the revolution in France had also begun to make itself felt in Tübingen in the form of processions and demonstrations, in the defiant planting of ‘freedom trees’, in the founding of republican clubs: it was obvious that the time of the old order was over.

Whether any great hopes were to be entertained with regard to the Republic of Berne was another matter entirely. And it is difficult to know whether Hegel harboured any such hopes when he set out on his journey to Switzerland.

At that time Berne was certainly still the most powerful of the Swiss republics, a city state whose past, without its rulers remotely realizing the fact, was far more illustrious than its future would ever be. The Grand Council in Berne represented something like the sovereign power in an absolutist state; its members were elected, but only from out of the ranks of the ruling and similarly prospective families of the city. Every ten years, at Easter time, the vacant places had necessarily to be filled appropriately. Hegel was in a good position to observe and record the proceedings and the attendant circumstances at first hand.

Karl Friedrich von Steiger, in whose service Hegel was employed as personal tutor to his six-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter, belonged to one of the families of the ruling oligarchy of Berne. Hegel’s employer and master of the household was a member of the Grand Council and a nephew of Christoph Steiger, whose tenure as Councillor marked the beginning of a protracted struggle against the political pretensions and abuses committed by the Berne oligarchy, and one in which the old system slowly but surely met its end.

The Berne residence of the von Steigers was Junkerngasse 51. The house had been sold that year to the von Steigers by the family Wattenwyl, and the family had therefore only recently moved in. The family property at Tschugg in the Vogtei Erlach region lay in the Jura mountains between the lakes Bielersee and Neuenburgersee. It was here that Hegel spent his first tutoring years during the summer and the winter months. The obvious familial pride displayed by the von Steigers, in a town well used to the manifestations of rank and privilege, was hardly calculated to encourage a smooth relationship between the parties, and there seems to have been little personal warmth or sympathy involved on either side. Hegel’s official title as ‘House Tutor’, as expressed in the original written negotiations, was, despite the highly respectable residences of the von Steigers, somewhat exaggerated; and in his Berne passport Hegel was merely described as ‘Gouverneur des enfants de notre cher et féleal citoyen Steiguer de Tschougg’. There is nothing whatever to suggest that the von Steigers regarded their tutor as any different from all the other similar graduates of educational institutions who were simply eager to secure their daily bread and find some advancement where they could. He must have appeared to them as another modest and straightforward young man, a Swabian with German with a knowledge of Greek and Latin (though this was certainly not required for the daughter), and with some history, geography, geometry, literature and the requisite Reform-Protestant instruction. And there is nothing whatever to suggest that the modest young tutor in their employ ever caused them to think otherwise of him. But there is plenty to suggest that the master of the house trusted his Swabian tutor with various other duties in addition.

The position certainly offered some corresponding advantages. It allowed Hegel plenty of time for private study and the residence at Tschugg put a large library at his disposal which he exploited to the full. It is impossible to discover whether Hegel ever frequented the imposing classical reading room of the Berne City Library, but it is difficult to imagine that he did not given that it was situated in the close vicinity of the von Steigers’ Berne residence. One of Hegel’s principal activities ever since his early school years in Stuttgart was his practice of making substantial excerpts and gathering all sorts of written material, perhaps with a view to some special and particular use in the future. The von Steigers spoke French amongst themselves and this undoubtedly encouraged him in his active knowledge of the language as well. Otherwise the dominant influence during these Berne years for Hegel proved to be the study of the Scottish political economists.

Hegel’s acquaintance with English writings in the field of political economy would eventually be revealed in its own way at the beginning of 1799 with his close study of and commentary upon Sir James Steuart’s Investigation into the Principles of Political Economy (a German translation of which had appeared with Cotta). Steuart was a political economist of moderate views who belonged to the last phase of the English mercantile system of economic thought. Steuart’s two-volume work, originally published in London in 1767 under the title An Essay on the Science of Economy for Free Nations, discusses subjects like population, agriculture, industry, trade and commerce, gold, coinage, borrowing rates, travel and communications, the banking system, the monetary exchange system, public credit and the tax system – all of them themes which appear rather remote from the previous concerns of this Württembergian theologian and dutiful subject of the state. Not questions concerning the proper Pauline-Lutheran doctrine of ‘Justification by Faith’ or the coming of ‘The Kingdom of God’, but issues of land cultivation and agricultural production, of exports and imports, of tariffs and property rights, etc. Although Steuart himself was already operating with distinctions like the cost of production and the cost of selling, with the principles of supply and demand, this did not prevent his fame subsequently being eclipsed by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776. Hegel’s first acquaintance with the field of national and political economy reflected a stage of economic thought which had already been undermined and rendered obsolete by the new doctrine of free trade, although it was certainly one that recognized a secure and fundamental role for ‘property’ in the sphere of the state and civil society. We can clearly see here the original source of observations which will appear explicitly in Hegel’s writings in Berne and Frankfurt, when he writes, for example, that:

In the states of modern times the security of property is the hinge upon which the entire body of legislation turns, the point to which most of the citizen’s rights are related. In many a free republic of the ancient world [on the other hand] the constitution of the state itself exercised control over the right to private property, the very thing which is the central concern of all our authorities and constitutes the pride of our states …

This passage clearly reveals the double-edged character of Hegel’s critical analysis. The actual day-to-day life of the von Steiger family also provides Hegel with a particularly vivid picture, quite apart from any theoretical reflections, of the social and political world of a great house at the centre of a once powerful republic already on the wane – a little version of the story described by Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a copy of which Hegel had found in the Tschugg library. In Berne there was open access to witness the political deliberations and observe developments as they unfolded, something which he certainly took advantage of himself, and the kind of open political processions and celebrations that were also to be seen here were quite unknown in Württemberg.

During these otherwise rather tedious years in Berne Hegel seems to have spent his evenings socializing and probably even singing with friends around a regular table in the tavern: at least this is what is suggested from the correspondence which Hegel later carried on in Frankfurt with the painter and artisan Sonnenschein. Johann Valentin Sonnenschein, a native of Ludwigsburg, whose artistic creations include the Laurel Room of the Stuttgart palace known as ‘Die Solitüde’, had left the service of the Duke of Württemberg for reasons of health and moved with his wife and child to Switzerland, where he became a teacher at the School of Art in Berne. ‘We often sing “The joys of radiance divine” [Schiller’s famous lines later set by Beethoven] in your memory’, as he wrote to Hegel on 13 November 1797 long after the latter had already left the city, in order to remind him of the evenings they had once spent together. However, the most interesting acquaintance which Hegel made in Berne was certainly that with Konrad Engelbert Oelsner. As a direct witness of the revolutionary events of 1792, and a man personally acquainted with men of all political persuasions, Oelsner, who was the ambassador of the City of Frankfurt in Paris, used his Letters from Paris to express his fears about the possible collapse of the new French republic. Hegel himself drew Schelling’s attention to these letters, which had appeared in Archenholz’s historical-political journal Minerva and indeed must be counted amongst the first eye witness reports of the French revolutionary scene to appear in German.

Otherwise Hegel was busy during this Berne period with fulfilling various other duties which his employer had entrusted to him. In Tschugg he had temporarily assumed the function of general supervisor for von Steiger’s affairs with an obligation to keep his employer fully informed about all developments in his absence. Thus in the summer of 1795 Hegel reports that work on laying gravel down in the front yard cannot be completed yet because the workers are otherwise employed with the crops. He also informs von Steiger about the return of his wife from the spa, and expresses his general satisfaction with the progress of the children in his charge. Everything communicated in precise detail in the distanced and objective form appropriate to his position.

It is a striking fact that nowhere in the surviving letters from this period does Hegel explicitly refer either to the revolutionary events unfolding in France or to the effects of the same in Berne, even though the Revolution was taking an increasingly drastic turn at this time. On 16 October 1793 Marie Antoinette was sent to the guillotine, only to be followed by Robespierre on 28 June 1794. Apart from a single reference to the defeat of ‘Robespierre’s faction’ in one of his letters to Schelling, Hegel says nothing about the developments. Hegel’s remark, in the same letter of 24 December 1794, that ‘you will certainly already be aware that Carrier has gone to the guillotine’ seems to treat the fact as a natural result and inevitable consequence of events. One must of course remember that throughout this period in Berne Hegel found himself physically at the very centre of the counter-revolutionary movement in Switzerland, which through the coalition with Austria and Prussia was actively taking strong measures to hinder the influence of revolutionary-minded individuals and of revolutionary ideas in general. In addition Hegel was actually living under the roof of von Steiger, one of the most vigorous supporters of the conservative cause, in the very midst therefore of the anti-revolutionary party. The typical Prussian admiration for the Berne Republic, an attitude that had been expressly shared by Frederick the Great, was founded not least on the political manoeuvrings of the von Steigers who were long-standing confidants of the government in Berlin. But the reason for Hegel’s reticence in this respect could also lie in his awareness of the powers of censorship at the time. He constantly had to reckon with the possibility that his correspondence would be intercepted and read by the authorities. We can probably surmise as much from his recommendation to Schelling in the postscript to his letter of 16 April 1795 where he says: ‘Be so good as not to stamp your letters to me in future, for that way they will arrive more safely.’

While he was living in Switzerland Hegel made a couple of major excursions: one to Geneva in May 1795 and one to the Bernese Alps in July 1796. In his personal diary Hegel provided a quite detailed description of his tour of the Swiss mountains in the company of three other house tutors from Saxony, by the names of Thomas, Stolde and Hohenbaum. The travellers set off early on the 24 July at four o’clock in the morning and eventually arrived at Thün around ten o’clock. There they boarded a boat to Interlaken where they commenced their journey through the Bernese Alps on foot. Their route led them over Grindelwald and Scheidegg to Meringen, then further on through the Berne region as far as Andernmatt and thence over Flüelen to the lake of Vierwaldstättersee towards Lucerne.

Hegel’s trek through the mountains was hardly comparable to Goethe’s trip through the same region which proved to be such a moving experience of living nature for him. Hegel’s descriptions of the journey nowhere reveal any sense of awe or astonishment in the face of the overpowering might of the mountains around him. Even the glacial formations of Grindelwald could hardly stir his interest in their geological constitution. And why not? ‘The sight of them presents nothing of further interest to the view. One can only really describe it as another kind of snow which offers nothing of any further interest for the spirit.’ Here we see Hegel the house tutor, who also happens to be a certified graduate of theology when required, testing out the physicotheological proof for the existence of God in the harsh presence of a nature devoid of vegetation and finding the demonstration wanting! As he contemplates the upper slopes of the region in all its barren bleakness the Enlightenment notion of a nature perfectly fitted to serve our human needs and purposes strikes him as an absurdity: ‘I doubt whether the most devout of theologians would dare to ascribe the virtue of utility for man to nature herself in these mountain regions …’ The sheer ‘might and necessity of nature’ cannot properly be understood or appreciated in Hegel’s eyes, whereas at least the waterfalls at the Staubbach present us with ‘an image of free and spontaneous play’ and thereby introduce a lighter tone into the otherwise gloomy dereliction of this mountain world.

The path taken by our four mountain tourists followed a route which was particularly popular at the time. While it was not dangerous, it was certainly exerting and rather uninspiring. By the end of it all Hegel had procured for himself a pair of extremely sore and painful feet. The food along the way was not always particularly enticing either, and Hegel was hardly disposed to regard the grilled marmot he was offered in the local inns as a culinary delicacy. However, Hegel was pleased to record one thing at least, namely that he now understood the local language of these Alpine dwellers rather better than he did that of the Bernese townspeople. And after all, in order to know what such people think, one must possess some ‘knowledge of the older form of the German language’ which has survived in these regions better than it has in Germany itself.