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71 4 The Reality of Thought As we enter into the realm of speculative thinking, a new structure of life and a new order of relations are revealed.a The soul recognizes the possibility of ascending to “objektive” life, without, evidently, abandoning its own limits and, in any event, without surrendering to the will of all-fragmenting and all-dispersing sensuous intuition. Within the limits of the soul itself, a new sphere full of extraordinary content and significance is revealed, allowing the soul to throw off the fetters of personal limitedness and spurious subjectivity, and to give itself over to the authentic life of the objektive, of the object, of meaning. In this sphere the soul becomes filled with the feeling of Jesus, who said: “I do nothing on my own.”b The soul is already not itself, though it becomes assured later that it did not perish in the object but was enriched by it; having come to “hate” itself as such in self-renunciation, it opens for itself the possibility of living as Spirit. Speculative thought gives to the soul the happiness of self-renunciation,1 preserving for it the best of what it has renounced and leading it through what has been preserved to what is most perfect. In this is revealed not only that vitally creative knowledge of Hegelianism which is intrinsic to every true and noble form of philosophizing, but also the deepest root of Hegel’s doctrine of the ideality and reality of thought. Of course, the definition of “thought” as an “ideal” principle sounds completely different on his lips than on the lips of a contemporary logician, insisting that “meaning” has only to do with pure thought, insisting on its complete (both empirical and metaphysical) unreality, and on the necessity of establishing a particular, “purely logical” category of the “meaning situation.”c Hegel begins and ends with the categorical rejection of the entire tendency that has led in our time to these, from his point of view, “dead” and “abstractly rational” distinctions. He uses the terms “ideality” and “reality” in approximately the sense that he inherited from the progenitors of modern philosophy, and only then, within the 1. Comp: Enc. I 378, on the negation of “eigener Subjektivität” in the elevation of spirit to Divinity; Gösch. 131: “Process der Selbstentäusserung des natürlichen Seins und Wissens des Menschen ” is a “Process der geistigen Wiedergeburt”; Briefe I 261: “wahre Befreiung des Menschen von ihm selbst.” 72 T H E D O C T R I N E O F T H E E S S E N C E O F T H E D I V I N I T Y limits of dialectic, i.e., completely esoterically, does he give to the term “ideell” a specific meaning.d Speculative thought is “ideal” in the most general sense insofar as it belongs to the psychic, inner world, insofar as its element is not external, sensuously empirical being, but the psychic medium. From this point of view, gravitating toward the primacy of the “inner in general” over the “external in general,” all that is “subjectively psychic”1 as such relates to the “ideal”: representation,2 sensation, feeling, memory,3 and thought. And if everything psychic is “ideal,” then formal, abstractly rational thinking will also turn out to be “ideal.” However, already within such a naive understanding of “ideality” is hidden the possibility of recognizing the immediately given psychic medium as something primary, as taking precedence over external things, as something possessing a “greater” and “better” reality than they. The “ideal” (the inner) turns out to be more real than the “real” (the external); philosophizing thought effects one of the most remarkable shifts of the ontological center of gravity, and the term “ideal” (present only in the soul and therefore “not existing” in external reality), uttered by the naive realists with a hint of scorn, falls back on their heads as a censure. There arise two “idealities” and two “realities.” The inner world, the “ideal” one, is real; the external world, the “real” one, is ideal. This means that external things, perceived by naive realists as the genuine reality, are deprived of it; they are only “subjective phenomena”; they are “merely ideal”; whereas inner, immediately given states of the soul are not “merely ideal,” but are undoubtedly real. Long before Kant, in the philosophy of English empiricism, there commenced this gradual doubting of the genuine reality of “external” things and the striving...

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