DANKO GRLlC

REVOLUTION AND TERROR

On 'Absolute Freedom and Terror' in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

Hegel can be grasped only when taken as a whole. What is more, he can speak
to us only given our full understanding of the historical coordinates of his
time, of the past upon which he constructed, and of the ideals which he
regarded as adequate to the reality of the actual world-historical process.
Each detail of his work illuminates therefore the fundamental position of his
entire system, yet not each detail in the empirical sense, because in such
details mistakes and errors are inevitable; but rather each detail in the sense of
a moment of a philosophical, thoughtful effort, which becomes conceivable
only like the stone from a mosaic after the completion of the overall design.
In any case, only at the journey's finish can the way itself and all the stops
along it be evaluated - history with its countless figures lending itself to
analysis and evaluation as a whole only at its completion. Everything which
has happened gains its meaning through history's ultimate meaning so that
only perfection determines the extent to which a process has been perfected.
In order to attain the possibility of insight into this whole, Hegel must con-
clude the process. However, as the greatest master of developmental dynamics
(which oppose everything static) he is also best aware that nothing can be
completed without continuous movement, constant process, a specified way.
The whole is inconceivable as something contemplative, abstract, and static,
for it is the sense of unfolding which determines and makes creation possible.
However, the state as the realization of the idea of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) as
the final fact and journey's goal, represents the negation of this need for con-
tinuous process. It contradicts the idea of Hegel's philosophy of development
and yet from Hegel's standpoint only the state makes possible an evaluation
of that development and gives it meaning. Absolute knowledge of that devel-
opment is the circle of circles: in order to be and have a complete knowledge
of development, this knowledge is not allowed to develop. This is why Hegel's
opus can be approached at any point, since from whichever point of departure
we proceed, the same route is traversed.

***
A small chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit titled 'Absolute Freedom and
139
Mihailo Markovic and Gajo Petrovic (eds.), Praxis, 139-150.
This translation © 1979 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
140 DANKO GRLlC

Terror' on first glance appears to analyze only a peripheral aspect of Hegel's

view of the course of history: the relationship between revolution and terror.
However, on the basis of this small chapter it is also possible to grasp the
overall movement, the revolutionary scope and the place of Hegel's philoso-
phy in world history. Nevertheless, we will confine ourselves here to several
of Hegel's theses, and to an analysis of certain ideas which appear essential
precisely to that chapter. General conclusions will be indicated merely in
passing, since the reader can draw his own, and the literature on Hegel is
already overburdened with generalized evaluations. As holds for all great,
consistent and systematic philosophers - the details contain the whole.
Although Hegel perceived his philosophy as a philosophy for all time and
in essence immutable, nevertheless certain historical experiences which mod-
ify some theses and introduce new elements into the general construction are
already present in the Phenomenology, at the outset of his journey as it were.
After the experience of the French Revolution, to which he devoted pos-
sibly the finest and most enthusiastic pages he ever wrote, Hegel introduces
into his views of that revolution a certain scepticism, enriching and perhaps
even philosophically overburdening them with documentation from experi-
ence. In this section where Hegel associates revolution with fear, he to be sure
upholds the principle of its necessity, and the principle of the higher histor-
ical justice exercised just because it was necessary to rise up against the 'old
institutions'. But together with his enthusiasm appears the knowledge that
certain of the problems posed by revolution are insoluble, that it must neces-
sarily collapse as pure negativity, that is, as tyranny. From 1795, in fact,
Hegel's revolutionary zeal (at one time expressive of his desire to participate
directly in the revolution) begins to diminish, and images of individual terror-
ism become accommodated to the concept of revolution. The Phenomenology
is most concerned with these questions in the chapter on 'Absolute Freedom
and Terror' where Hegel compares plain revolutionary negativity with 'sheer
destructive force', to the 'most meaningless death' which has no inherent
dimension or fulfillment, a death 'signifying no more than cutting off a head
of cabbage'.
Why is revolution in its negative definition, i.e. simply as a revolt which
aspires to liberation from that which was universal in the past, necessarily
tyranny? Is what is decisive here only that experience of the French Revolu-
tion wherein it failed to become exclusively the realization of freedom,
becoming also the establishment of a new despotism by individuals? Why
does Hegel think that the process of liberation of the individual has to end
in terror and destruction as long as it is carried on by individuals against the
 REVOLUTION AND TERROR 141

state, but not when exercised by the state itself? Is it truly the state alone
which can offer emancipation to the individual even though, in Hegel's view,
it cannot give the individual perfect freedom, or pure truth?
Paramount in the search for an answer to these questions is the problem of
the relationship between the continuous and the discontinuous course of
history. For Hegel only man-in-general is free man, not an individual in his
singularity, in his national or social setting, not a Greek as opposed to bar-
barian, nor a Catholic as opposed to non-Christian, not a master as opposed
to slave, nor a feudal landholder as opposed to serf. In all such forms, the
individual can have only apparent freedom. Freedom does not become a
principle until these contradictions are overcome, because freedom is not
freedom unless it stands as a universal principle. Hence it is only world revolu-
tion which represents the principle of history as the actual realization of the
idea of freedom.
Conversely, all possible forms of restoration are founded on the exclusion
of that which affirms man-as-man from contemporary history, exclusion of
his universal substance. Restoration is a denial of the present in the name of
the past which returns man to his national, caste, familial, tribal individuality
- to those historical roots which differentiate man from man not according
to his human qualities but according to other historically imposed characteris-
tics which have no lasting bearing on his humaneness.
While revolution is the negation of that which was, restoration is the denial
of that which now presents itself as a world-historical chance. But both revo-
lutionary negation of the past and restorational attempts to negate the present
are identical, according to Hegel, in their view of the historical discontinuity
between past and present.
All the political, legal, and spiritual problems of the epoch are brought to
a focus in civil society around the realization of the idea of ethical life, really
around the bourgeois state. But they are therein, in essence, also resolved and
thus eternally frozen, neutralized, entrenched, stabilized, indeed buried.
But the civil society which devolved from the bourgeois revolution was
also a radical negation of the past. While before the law an individual, in
morality a subject, and within the family a family member, in civil SOciety
man has worth because he is man and not Jew, Catholic, etc. Therefore, the
historical past which hitherto constituted history does not figure in bourgeois
society. Revolution introduces discontinuity and therewith the abstractness
of non-historical human being, which determines the political theory of world
revolution and its negative idea of freedom. Only within the sphere of ethical
life does the positive turn of this negative idea occur, in other words it comes
142 DANKO GRLIC

to be realized only when the revolution realizes its positive value, when the
process turns to a stabilized condition wherein man becomes a member of
the state. However, the realization of the revolution, in itself only negative,
even after the new state which surmounts all older forms has been established,
requires of necessity an emancipation of society from the historical assump-
tions of the past.
Revolution is a discontinuity in history because its enactment includes the
opposite of all previously existing orders, bringing about the end of the old
world and thus of history. This is why for Hegel the freedom of revolution is
a negative or abstract freedom, whose negativity is manifested by destructive
force which moreover drives toward self-destruction. Simultaneously, restora-
tion makes its appearance as revolution's antithesis, frustrating it allegedly in
order to rescue man's historical (national, familial, etc.) substance. Hence
revolution in its negativity as individual protest and revolt against the general-
ity of the past, the old order, turns into terror, not only over the past but, as
we shall see, possibly also terror over the present.
The problem of discontinuity in history remains nonetheless unsolved in
Hegel's Phenomenology, an unresolvedness reflected and consistently per-
petuated in a number of other questions. It strikes us that this problem
remains essentially unresolved because it is viewed through the focus of the
past and the focus of the actual present, from the point of view of that which
the revolution purportedly negates and only after its realization affirms, con-
verting it thereby (through affirmation) into a post-revolutionary condition.
At the same time, restoration on behalf of the past refutes the present, but
this refutation is empty because the restoration does not live in the present
any more since its actuality is a thing of the past. Hence not only a cruel
terrible reality today gives it cause for grief but the loss of an idyllic past even
more. However, it seems that Hegel does not take into account another tem-
poral dimension, for according to him neither restoration nor revolution
reside in the milieu of that which is not, because it has not yet come about.
For him, revolution is never the negation of what is in the name of the not
yet existing, an opposition to factuality of the present and well-known, which
is inspired by the non-present, as yet unknown. We should keep in mind that
the rationality of a time is located, according to Hegel, in that which is. Civil
society represents for that very reason the focal point of all the whole of
Hegel's philosophy - not only of the Philosophy of Right as is often thought,
but also of the Phenomenology, the Philosophy of History, and even the
History of Philosophy. 2
In this context an equally decisive question: whether revolution really
 REVOLUTION AND TERROR 143

grows exclusively out of discontinuity, on the negation of the past? What is

the past in the sense of the historical past? Is it not also founded on crucial
historical movements which direct revolution toward the realization of its
own possibilities, toward historical time which, exactly due to its purposeful-
ness, has become historical time and not simply a sequence of mere occur-
rences? Were not the great movements of the past, and the great personalities
inspiring them, historical above all because they were in their essential di-
rectedness purposeful? Existing in so-called pre-revolutionary time, they
tended to reach beyond the boundaries of a single nation, country, class or
faith. Despite an often formally religious and national character, these move-
ments and figures attained their true historical dimension only through those
tendencies which superseded the formal manner of their appearance by con-
taining the nucleus of the world-historical process.
In this sense, revolution, even as an apparent plain individual negativity or
revolt, cannot be merely a negation of historical continuity, but also by that
same negation it is the realization of the truly human past of mankind. In the
very act of negating the historical, the inhuman, revolution becomes both
really historical and really human. Thus in principle (although indeed not
always in actual practice) when truly so imbued with the idea of historical
negation, revolution cannot be terror. Terror is of necessity a principle of
restoration because restoration is not only a negation of the present but a
revival and affirmation of that which was inhuman in the past, of that which
makes man feel his identity only when opposed to other men through belong-
ing to a clan, a privileged caste, a ruling nation, an organization, a sacred
stratum, etc.
But why does revolution as negation, according to Hegel, nevertheless turn
into terror whose consequences are fear and death, meaningless death? A re-
volutionary period which aspires to the creation of absolute freedom converts
to terror, to a dictatorship, precisely because everyone may want to be dicta-
tor, each person could say ['hat c'est moi and impose his individual will upon
all the rest. In that universal negation, in such absolute freedom, it could be
anyone at all. The principle of individuality, independent and apart from the
principle of universality itself, is the principle of terror. As each bears within
himself the possibility of being master, or king, and as each man gains the
right to express the absolute freedom of his nature regardless of others, this
principle of arbitrariness, and thus of terror, becomes fundamental and
determining. Thus this abstract idea of dictatorship, deriving ultimately from
the individual, if once realized, in fact terminates all individual will through
terror and death. Finally it is fear which disposes individual consciousness to
144 DANKO GRLlC

acknowledge a state in which it will be possible to create, albeit in a partial

and limited manner, a security for freedom. Only then will it become possible
for the personality to be free, truly and really, not merely abstractly or abso-
lutely. Thus in the Phenomenology, Hegel writes of individual consciousness,
"These individuals who have felt the fear of death, of their absolute master,
again submit to negation and distinctions, arrange themselves in the various
spheres, and return to an apportioned and limited task, but thereby to their
substantial reality."3
The "apportioned and limited task" which is nevertheless the "substantial
reality" of freedom is the state, which will negate the negativity of revolu-
tion as expressed in the fact that revolution in itself is still not the achieve-
ment of a lasting solution, is not an organization assuring freedom. At the end
of his life, Hegel said that revolution "does not realize anything organization-
ally firm." Constant alarm, continuing unrest, make political stability and the
establishment of an adequate lawful order as both the guarantor of freedom
and of a definite fulfillment of its idea, impossible.
Here the development of the idea of freedom can proceed only to the
point where the freedom of the individual and of society is harmonized but
beyond which any further development becomes impossible, or else remains
merely a senseless circling, harmful to one side or the other of this constant
controversy. Since freedom achieves its greatest realization in the state, and
since freedom is an essential principle of history as well as a principal deter-
minant of its course, so with the cessation of the possibility of further
advancement for the idea of freedom, history ceases as well. Thus only in the
state is the truth of self-consciousness no longer either'!, or 'We' but the 'I'
who is also 'We' and the 'We' who are also'!'. This does not mean to Hegel
the leveling of individual interests at the level of the universal interest but a
higher synthesis of the individual within the universal. Nevertheless, the basic
resolution has been found in the universal, in the constitutionally organized
sta te as the crown of historical development.
By virtue of its organization and well-devised defense, both of the idea of
universality and of the individual no longer left to an empty search for free-
dom but creating it, the state for Hegel really belongs in the post-revolution-
ary period. Only the state ca!l rescue the individual from the possibility of
revolutionary terror imposed by one individual over others. The state is, to
be sure, the realization, the fulfillment of the revolution, but at the same time
it also is the abolishment of the driving principle of revolution. Like those
Marxists who see in communism a perfect and completed social structure, not
a constant movement or process which can never be completed, Hegel was of
 REVOLUTION AND TERROR 145

the opinion that only in a: world of reason, organized on a world-historical

level of the most rational objectivity, could any further course of that process
(which had guided and led world history to its culmination) be brought to a
conclusion. The possibility of true freedom does not exist outside of that
rationally organized reality, outside those institutions which by their ration-
ality guarantee freedom, outside the lawfulness and the firmly constituted
stability which prevents the terror of negativity, the terror of the arbitrary
individual. Any other is a false, hypocritical freedom since the absolute free-
dom of the individual swiftly negates itself. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel
pointed out that hatred of the law is the shibboleth by which fanaticism,
feeble-mindedness, and the hypocrisy of good intentions, are revealed and can
be unmistakenly perceived. The state, as the immanent purpose of abstract
right, family and also society, is not based upon natural law , or on the law of
pleasure, of the strongest, or of feeling, nor on moral law (because moral will
is always particular will), but upon the law of reason; and that rational purpose
in-and-for-itself which bestows the dignity of the highest objectivity and
enduringness. All individual proclivities, all convictions with their non-general
nature, and their particular wishes for freedom, cannot be universally rational,
and hence they cannot be recognized by the state, which is not constituted
on good or bad individual intentions easily converted into terror but upon
the actuality of life organized on the highest principle - that of reason. As
achieved reason, therefore, only the state is positive freedom; no other con-
crete freedom beyond it or above it is conceivable. The state can and must be
perfected, its institutions improved, the functions of power and economy
reformed, but its principle cannot be fundamentally restructured, nor can it
in principle be any more demolished: after the revolutionary process has been
concluded by revolution no further course remains but evolution.
Only within the state does the citizen have an individual consciousness
elevated to its universality. Man is actually free only to the degree that he
wants the freedom of a man within an organized community, within the state.
Thus the state cannot be a contract either, as Rousseau thought, since a
contract could not provide for the rational objectivity of the state but at best
for as favorable as possible mediation between the individual will and the
universal: and thereby losing sight of the universal will which exists in its
rationality, independent of any subjective contract or agreement.
But which are the basic elements for understanding this preference for the
universal as the only framework for the true realization of the individual?
The basic impulses of Hegel's construction for the realization of reason in
the highest form of human community, the state, are rooted first of all in a
146 DANKO GRLIC

concept of man as one who is cast in the present, in hic Rhodus, hic salta, in
present-day reason as the true reason.
Aristotle defines a free man as one "who is for himself and not for another".
In the same sense Hegel writes, ... "if I am dependent then I relate to some-
thing other which I am not ... I am free if I am with myself" (Philosophy of
History). But when am I with myself? When I have constructed the possibility
of so being in reality, in the present. The organization of actual reality is
the sole guarantee of that 'being with oneself.' Man is not with himself in a
spontaneity which leads to disorganization, and thence to destruction of the
present on account of something else. The now is the crucial criterion, and it
is represented by civil society, as organized in a bourgeois state which can no
longer be questioned for otherwise everything would be called into question,
reason itself and thereby also man as individual.
Destruction in the sense of revolution is always destruction of the now on
account of that which is not yet now. Hegel was committed to the present
because he was a philosopher of bourgeois society and the state - and philo-
sophy is always its own time conceived in thought. Therefore all projections
which seek to go beyond their own time seemed like sheer chimeras to him.
Analogously, man is man by virtue of his realization, his fulfillment, his
achievement accomplished in the here and now as a member of an organized
state. It is in this concept of man as having brought his own personal history
to an end in the state (because he has achieved in principle his immanent goal:
the realization of freedom) that Hegel's thesis concerning the post-revolutio-
nary period and the negation of the possibility of further revolutionary change
is rooted. In this thesis - that the present as the highest reason becomes the
principle and criterion of what is rational for every individual as well, such
that his opposition to this achieved reason becomes a proof of madness - the
essential limitation of that Hegelian temporal structure becomes obvious: the
rational has its goal in what is achieved, discovering man's greatest possibilities
in the definitive fulfillment of his social function, in the knowledge of what
he is and what he wishes to continue being. Many Marxist thinkers base their
blueprint both for the building of communism and for all the forms of know-
ledge concerning man as a highly conscious member of that greatest and most
rational organized community, on this sort of Hegelian comprehension. Of a
certainty, man must know what he is in order to know what kind of organiza-
tion of human community is most adequate for him. But in contrast to these
thinkers who have very often vulgarized this thesis to the point of absurdity
under concretely petty-bureaucratic political conditions, one Marxist thinker
asserts that what is human in man does not consist in the knowledge of what
 REVOLUTION AND TERROR 147

he is, but in what he has not yet become. "Who is man?" asks Ernst Bloch.
"He who still does not know what he is but who nevertheless knows what, as
self-alienated, he surely is not and he does not want to remain, or at least
ought not remain."4
What then is it which makes of man a man? The very consciousness of
defectiveness, of the non-existence of that quality by virtue of which he would
be a man (or should be), that not-yet-human, is just what is most human in
him. There is no moral imperative in 'ought not be' , because a moral impera-
tive presupposes a certain positive, existing, even petrified norm. The moral
imperative must be an absolute, i.e. a categorical imperative, or at the very
least a fixed regulative principle or idea which cannot remain simply a negati-
vity, hence a continuous eliminating of the not-human, but must represent a
fixation on what is positively established as human.
To the extent that we, as did Hegel, have found knowledge concerning
the greatest possible measure of realization of human freedom in the actual
present, locating it in the context of the state, and to the extent that we have
both specified by definition the purpose of man's existence and indicated the
secure prospect of realizing that purpose, any further philosophizing about
man is rendered senseless. All further investigation becomes routine; it is fin-
ished before it even started, since anyone to whom the scheme is known
knows the outcome beforehand. The unexplored recesses exist no longer. It is
only a matter of time, before everything becomes definitively defined.
In contrast Bloch says, "Marxism should least fear the abyss". 5 Not to fear
the abyss means to try also those personal possibilities of man which do not
reduce the revolutionary content of rebellion to a preference for that general
stability which, allegedly alone abolishes the tendency toward terror. Today
when we discuss not only Hegel but mainly our own time it is necessary to
stress, in contrast to Hegel, that terror realizes itself as a general principle in
the contemporary world precisely in that organized universality which has
often designated itself to be the realization of revolution. Terror is not a threat
primarily as a consequence of the rebellious consciousness of the individual,
as his negation of the universal and oflaw, as his individual arbitrariness, as it
seemed to Hegel: on the contrary terror arises in the first place as a conse-
quence of the law-maker, from state might, and moreover precisely at that
point in the world-historical process when the state has assumed for itself the
role of a most progressive governmental structure, dispensing greater historical
justice, as the guardian of revolutionary achievements and of historical reason.
The leveling of the universal as terror against the individual in an organized
degradation of personality stifles the essential element of revolution at its
148 DANKO GRLlC

very inception, that unceasing process of ever renewed razing of the obsolete
through action of the authentically free personality.
Today a state-functionary mentality exists and spreads, according to which
any individual who does not fit into the state interest, in the general well-
being, and is not sufficiently respectful of status quo normality or of the
resultant stable society, is regarded as a worthless, useless person, an anarchist,
a sick individual, an iconoclast, a suspicious and eccentric character, a desper-
ado, a lump en proletarian, a decadent, a hooligan, or a hippie. Consequently
all those who experience the slightest doubt about what exists become
objects of suspicion in a state beyond suspicion, a state which is the fulfilled
reason of the epoch itself. But what can be the value of the state in itself?
What does that mystification of state authority and of the good state, of
its nobility and magnanimity, serve when all is dispersed by the obvious fact
that the state cannot give anyone anything which it has not previously taken
away. Does not a permanent danger then threaten, that· the so-called objective
reason of the state will never be more than the subjective reasoning of the
ruling elite, class or estate? And how is one at all to institute and ascertain the
objectivity of that objective reason without taking into account those state
functionary creatures who only perpetuate the state as state? How is it possi-
ble to have a state without functionaries, subjects and administrators, without
a state faith and its believers, sycophants and important mediocrities, state
ideologists and philosophers, police-officers and police souls?
The ideal of the state as state is perfect organization. But perfect organiza-
tion - so perfect that it burns everything inconvenient as incidental or non-
essential for its self-propagation - is the concentration camp. From Hitler
and Stalin to present-day murderers, increasingly perfected organization has
always gone hand in hand with ever more perfected violence, terror and crime.
And although in his illusion of the rule of reason, Hegel was not able to fore-
see all the monstrous consequences of such a preference for the most sane
and rational state (which in its absolute rationality is always on the verge of
possible conversion into absolute, rigidly organized insanity); although he
was a resolute adversary of the total subsumption of the individual to an ab-
stract universality (so that it would be groundless and ridiculous to charge
Hegel with what has been done in the name of reason and the state), never-
theless, certain elements of an outlook, that prefers universal reason to the
individual personality, can be found in the quoted section of the Phenomeno-
logy, and in other of his works.
However, even taking the gloomiest, most misanthropic view of man and
his capacity for evil, the question remains whether so-called individual terror
 REVOLUTION AND TERROR 149

is not less damaging than the general, organized terror so evident in the con-
temporary world. Furthermore, when a man refuses to yield his dignity and
passion to the state, to the organization, when he makes his own judgements
and thinks for himself, assuming responsibility for his own actions, is not the
likelihood of terror, and of inhumanity in general, reduced thereby to a min-
imum? For in that case, the individual does not undermine nor revenge him-
self against the state, nor does he deceive the organized coercive power in
order to assert his independence?
But if, as Bloch says, man does not yet know who he is, if man longs for,
aspires and advances toward a human infinity, and toward those possibilities
of his own being which unfold when pressures sapping human energies cease,
if man knows only what he is not and if he rids himself of that not-human,
bestial, alien, despotic aspect - then no longer even as an individual is he the
man through whose personal act another individual is terrorized. One should
not indeed obscure by sentimental optimism the possibility of inhuman
manifestations exhibited by individual man in his individuality; but it should
not be forgotten that such manifestations are very often not only made
possible, but are called forth by the way the general society and state are
organized. What made a Stalin out of Stalin were not his personal character-
istics, proclivities, and convictions, but the very structure of a society so
organized that he could and did emerge as its exponent. Today it is the law
which makes possible and often stimulates the terrorist, rather than an evil
characteristic of human nature. Especially does this hold in instances where
the law strictly upholds the status quo (most usually the case) while the in-
dividual is left unaided in the effort to humanize his being. Hence the indivi-
dual norms of personality development do not always represent mere law-
lessness, empty negation, or destructiveness.
One could say that terror as organized terror is the state deformed, that it
is not objective rationality but the abuse of law, and hence objective madness.
Now what Hegel called the state so little corresponds to any known historical
state, that it is impossible to refute him by empirical argument, using the
concrete political reality as evidence, those horrors which we have experienced
and continue to experience. Such an attempt would be not only a distortion
and diminishment of Hegel's grandiose idealized construction, its reduction to
that poor creation of wretched reason which is the modern state, but also an
obvioLis falsification. Nevertheless, is not that hypocrisy, however well in-
tentioned, that destrLlctive force and meaningless death which Hegel saw in
the rebellion of the individual, already made possible by the character of
organization for its own sake, by the state-character of the state, by the
150 DANKO GRLIC

inviolability of whatever is enshrined by law? Does not the perfect organiza-

tion of that state, so ordered precisely for the sake of perfection and for the
best possible functioning, theoretically open up the possibility for that disre-
gard of differences which allows for terror? Is not here rooted the theoretical
possibility for equating a human head with a head of cabbage so that it can
be cut off without qualms (although, of course, it need not be cut off, if the
state's rulers are magnanimous)? Are men not impelled in our times through
fear of generalized terror, rather than of the individual, impelled to protest
against organizedness, to revolt spontaneously for the rehabilitation of human
beings and human capacities? And not for all sorts of general programs and
state structures but for the human being who, as the negation of the existing,
knows for sure what he is not although knowing not what he is ? And is not
this openness of not-knowing the only true knowledge of our time?

* * *
Hegel can be grasped only when viewed as a whole. In one area of his thought
we have attempted nevertheless to indicate a possible way out of the circle. It
is not a broad road marked for easy passage with all the cautionary signs, but
a barely discernible steep mountainous path. This attempt assumes nonetheless
that in following the thought of another, one does not step within his alien
traces, but sets out on the way into the unknown treading independently.

NOTES

1 'Die Sittlichkeit': the untranslatable term of Hegel has been translated into English as
'social morality', 'ethical life' etc. In this paper we opted for 'ethical life'.
2 Since philosophy should comprehend its own time in thoughts, it locates in civil society
or the bourgeois state that reality in which the idea now actually exists.
3 G. W. Hegel, Phiinomenologie des Geistes (Samtliche Werke, Bd. 2, Stuttgart 1927, p.
456). See A. V. MiJler tr. Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford University Press, Oxford,
1977), p. 361.
4 E. Bloch, Philosophische Aufsiitze (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1969), p. 18.
S Ibid, p. 52.