In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

243 12 The Shapes of the World The philosophical receptiona of the world can consist neither in rebelliously convicting the world of “lying in wickedness” (Plato) nor in an enthusiastic depiction of its supposed perfection (Leibniz). A doctrine of the world must first of all be objective. In response to the summons of speculative thought, the world itself must accomplish its own exposure, conviction, and ascension. The world will fulfill this without concealment and distortion, in strict simplicity and adequacy, for its innermost essence—the speculative Concept—cannot respond otherwise to its own summons. There can be no place for pessimism here. The Concept, languishing in the thoughtlessnessb of its own worldly states, will rush joyously and as a wholec toward cognizing reason, which comes to liberate it. Everything that has accepted the law of the Idea in the world will be “justified ” at this court through a simple disclosure of its nature and will leave room neither for exaggerations nor for dejection. But neither can there be room here for optimism: that which has not incorporated into its “existence” a “real” order will itself not enter into the course of God’s path and will continue its hidden struggle for purification among the appearances . “Pessimism” and “optimism” are no more than contingent “points of view,” flashes of subjective opinions, tendentious conceptions of the interested human soul. Speculative philosophy reveals only that which is, because this philosophy lets the object itself reveal what is true about it. That is how Hegel understands his doctrine of actuality. None other than the voice of the objective situation, which has led him to acceptance of the irrational element, also guides him in the very mode of treating the “shapes” of the world. Hegel strives to purify and liberate his “method” from everything that does not appear to him as a real mode of life that is realized by the object itself. He strives to “convey” about the object only what he genuinely sees in it. He strives to “expound” the object precisely as the object itself lives. In heeding the object, he changed so much in his initial views that he truly acquired the right to that wise irony with which he often speaks of “opinions,” “subjective sympathies,” “idle exhortations ,” “ideals,” and so forth. The object forced Hegel to acknowledge that not one but two elements are hiding in it. The actual world is composed of sensuous, temporal , irrational existence and suprasensuous, supratemporal, rational 244 T H E D O C T R I N E O F T H E D I V I N E P A T H reality. Neither element can be removed, or liquidated, by the other within the limits of actuality, though the lower element is definitively “sublated” and absorbed by the higher in the sphere of reality (philosophical thinking). The relation of these elements in the world is a relation of struggle, connecting the two sides in a speculative symbiosis, or a relation of symbiosis that takes the form of a struggle. The struggle between them is waged for supremacy and self-realization. It is not for exclusivity of being, but for the subjugation of the opponent to one’s own law. This struggle is waged in order to fully realize a higher mode of life. The confrontation of these symbiotic elements naturally leads to a permanent compromise. However, it leads not to a compromise of arbitrary self-limitation, but to a transient equilibrium of the forces in conflict. Compelled to be reconciled with the permanent presence of the irrational element, the Concept also remains in the world as an active, creative , conquering principle and wages a “hard, endless struggle”1 against other-being, continuously unfolding into the distinctive calm of attainment. But all the appearances of the world are not final; they all realize only a “truce” of the elements. The Concept needs these “compromises” or “truces” in order to manifest itself; but its inner nature experiences here only a transient calming and resolves it again and again into a restless self-negation. Even the appearances of higher calm that occur on the earth—the sleeping sea, a blooming flower, a Greek sculpture, a Romanesque cathedral, free ethical life2 —are grasped only as states of unreconciled reconciledness. The level of this compromise depends upon the extent to which the Concept has succeeded in “working through” the element of other-being and subordinating this element to itself. Depending upon this, every world fragment is either an...

Share