第47章

The first principle of that Philosophy which has taken its place in Christendom is thus found in the existence of two totalities. This is a reduplication of substance which now, however, is characterized by the fact that the two totalities are no longer external to one another, but are clearly both required through their relation to one another. If formerly Stoicism and Epicureanism, whose negativity was Scepticism, came forth as independent, and if finally the implicitly existent universality of both was established, these moments are now known as separate totalities, and yet in their opposition they have to be thought of as one. We have here the true speculative Idea, the Notion in its determinations, each of which is brought into a totality and clearly relates to the other.

We thus have really two Ideas, the subjective Idea as knowledge, and then the substantial and concrete Idea; and the development and perfection of this principle and its coming to the consciousness of Thought, is the subject treated by modern Philosophy. Thus the determinations are in it more concrete than with the ancients. This opposition in which the two sides culminate, grasped in its widest significance, is the opposition between Thought and Being, individuality and substance, so that in the subject himself his freedom stands once more within the bounds of necessity; it is the opposition between subject and object, and between Nature and Mind, in so far as this last as finite stands in opposition to Nature.

The Greek Philosophy is free from restraint because it does not yet have regard to the opposition between Being and Thought, but proceeds from the unconscious presupposition that Thought is also Being. Certainly certain stages in the Greek Philosophy are laid hold of which seem to stand on the same platform as the Christian philosophies. Thus when we see, for instance, in the Philosophy of the Sophists, the new Academics, and the Sceptics, that they maintain the doctrine that the truth is not capable of being known, they might appear to accord with the later subjective philosophies in asserting that all thought-determinations were only subjective in character, and that hence from these no conclusions could be arrived at as regards what is objective. But there is really a difference. In the case of ancient philosophies, which said that we know only the phenomenal, everything is confined to that; it is as regards practical life that the new Academy and the Sceptics also admitted the possibility of conducting oneself rightly, morally and rationally, when one adopts the phenomenal as one's rule and guide in life. But though it is the phenomenal that lies at the foundation of things, it is not asserted that there is likewise a knowledge of the true and existent, as in the case of the merely subjective idealists of a more modern day. Those last still keep in the background a potentiality, a beyond which cannot be known through thought or through conception. This other knowledge is an immediate knowledge-a faith in, a view of, and a yearning after, the beyond such as was evinced by Jacobi. The ancients have no such yearning: on the contrary, they have perfect satisfaction and rest in the certitude that only that which appears is for Knowledge.

Thus it is necessary in this respect to keep strictly to the point of view from which we start, else through the similarity of the results, we come to see in that old Philosophy all the determinate character of modern subjectivity. Since in the simplicity of ancient philosophy the phenomenal was itself the only sphere, doubts as to objective thought were not present to it.