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History and Theodicy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Kostas Papaioannou
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Extract

No other culture, no other epoch has portrayed nature with as much nostalgia, has projected, discovered and venerated in nature so rich a complex of meaning as the one which, gradually and paradoxically, ended by sanctifying history. Around the time of the French Revolution the frontiers of the universe suddenly seemed to melt away into infinity: the emancipation which the Enlightenment had worked in the domain of religion, philosophy, morality, education was a prelude to the inauguration of a new world which, with the effervescence of a spring wine, flooded the carefully delineated and organized landscape of traditional humanism. The powerful wind of Sturm und Drang now blew across the world, closed and arranged like a garden, in which man had hitherto seen the theater of his actions and his sentiments. From Rousseau on nature is no longer the enemy of the spirit, but the life-giving force of a world fulfilled in and for itself. No longer does nature draw its movement and meaning from man, but on the contrary it obliges him to strain his limited forces and pushes him out of himself and toward the great Whole, the ἕν καὶ πἇν from which he had painfully torn himself.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 14 , Issue 53 , March 1966, pp. 38 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © 1966 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 Saint-Just, Œuvres (Works), 1946, pp. 157 and 241.

2 Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Researches on Human Liberty), 1809, SW. VII, 345. The image is already representative of the "Imaginary Museum" of romanticism.

3 Cited by Dilthey, Die geistige Welt.

4 Schelling, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature), 1797, SW. II, 40 sq.

5 Schelling, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature), in fine.

6 Hegel, Theologische Jugendschriften, ed. Nohl 1907 (cited hereafter as Nohl), p. 376.

7 Nohl, p. 249.

8 Dokumente zu Hegels Entwicklung, 1936, pp. 324-5.

9 Nohl, p. 374.

10 Nohl, pp. 243, 246, 368.

11 To use the expression of Cassirer: Das Erkenntnisproblem, III, 292.

12 Nohl, p. 230.

13 Dokumente etc., p. 265.

14 Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Meiner, 1949, pp. 176, 183, 329, 258.

15 Dokumente etc., pp. 324-5.

16 Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 258.

17 Hegel, op. cit., pp. 315, 331, 343, 355, 368, 415, 140.

18 Ibid., pp. 529, 413, 472.

19 Epistle to the Philippians, II, 6, 7.

20 Hegel, Encyclopädie (Jubiläumsausgabe), III, 456.

21 Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, pp. 564, 21, 558.

22 Cf. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 343; Schriften zur Politik, pp. 380 and 384; Die Vernunft in der Geschichte (ed. Meiner, 1955), p. 80; Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 564.

23 Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, pp. 92, 79; Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, p. 345; Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 440.

24 Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, pp. 102-4, 85-99, 109.

25 Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus, SW, III, 593 and 594.

26 Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, pp. 48 and 200: Philosophie der Geschichte (ed. Reclam), pp. 509 and 563; Phänomenologie des Geistes, pp. 462-472; Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Preface.

27 Marx, Le 18 Brumaire etc., Werke, ed. Dietz 1960, VIII, 118.

28 Engels, Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats, Werke, XXI, 95, 96, 97, 171-2.

29 Cf. Engels, op. cit., XXI, 287, 97, 171, 286-8.

30 Cf. Marx, Werke, IV, p. 122; IX, p. 220; IV, p. 474; IX, p. 133; VIII, p. 544.

31 Marx-Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Werke, IV, 462.

32 Marx-Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie, ed. Dietz, 1953, p. 456.

33 Marx, Misère de la Philosophie, Werke, IV, 140.

34 Cf. Die deutsche Ideologie, pp. 19 and 50; Das Kapital, ed. Dietz, 1951, pp. 1, 141.

35 Stalin, Les Questions du léninisme, Paris, 1947, II, 257.

36 Engels, Anti-Dühring, Moscow, 1946, pp. 221, 223.

37 Plekhanov, Les Questions fondamentales du marxisme (The Fundamental Questions of Marxism), Paris, 1947, p. 55.

38 Cf. Trotsky, Communisme et Terrorisme (Communism and Terrorism), Paris, 1963, pp. 213, 215, 217. In his criticism of Trotsky, Kautsky (Von der Demokratie zur Staats-Sklaverei, 1921, p. 96) explains the progressiveness of slavist or feudal constraint by the fact that it "allowed an entire class of individuals to dedicate themselves to science…" These "progressivist" justifications of slavery and serfdom bring to mind the Nietzschian parable: "How many people, wishing to drive away their own demon, plunged into the sows them selves…"

39 Spengler, The Decline of the West, Introduction, Par. 14.