The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII | Page 4

the new situation, unaware of trouble. Then, his wrong reaction engendered a hostile element. He was at war with himself; he was not what he meant to be. And finally, he returned to himself richer and wiser, including within himself the negative experience as a valuable asset in the advance of his development.
This process of falling away from oneself, of facing oneself as an enemy whom one reconciles to and includes in one's larger self, is certainly a familiar process. It is a process just like this that develops one's personality. However the self may be defined metaphysically, it is for every self-conscious individual a never-ceasing battle with conflicting motives and antagonistic desires--a never-ending cycle of endeavor, failure, and success through the very agency of failure.
A more typical instance of this rhythmic process is Hegel's view of the evolution of religion. Religion, in general, is based on a dualism which it seeks to overcome. Though God is in heaven and man on earth, religion longs to bridge the gulf which separates man and God. The religions of the Orient emphasize God's infinity. God is everything, man is nothing. Like an Oriental prince, God is conceived to have despotic sway over man, his creature. Only in contemplating God's omnipotence and his own nothingness can man find solace and peace. Opposed to this religion of the infinite is the finite religion of Greece.
Man in Greece stands in the centre of a beautiful cosmos which is not alien to his spirit. The gods on high, conceived after the likeness of man, are the expression of a free people conscious of their freedom. And the divinities worshiped, under the form of Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite--what are they but idealized and glorified Greeks? Can a more complete antithesis be imagined? But Christianity becomes possible after this struggle only, for in Christianity is contained both the principle of Oriental infinity and the element of Hellenic finitude, for in a being who is both God and man--a God-man--the gulf between the infinite and finite is bridged. The Christian, like the Greek, worships man--Jesus; but this man is one with the eternal being of the Orient. Because it is the outcome of the Oriental and Greek opposition, the Christian religion is, in Hegel's sense, a higher one. Viewing the Oriental and the Hellenic religions historically in terms of the biological "struggle for existence," the extinction of neither has resulted. The Christian religion is the unity of these two struggling opposites; in it they are conciliated and preserved. And this for Hegel is genuine evolution.
That evolution demands a union of opposites seems at first paradoxical enough. To say that Christianity is a religion of both infinity and finitude means nothing less than that it contains a contradiction. Hegel's view, strange as it may sound, is just this: everything includes a contradiction in it, everything is both positive and negative, everything expresses at once its Everlasting Yea and its Everlasting No. The negative character of the world is the very vehicle of its progress. Life and activity mean the triumph of the positive over the negative, a triumph which results from absorbing and assimilating it. The myth of the Phoenix typifies the life of reason "eternally preparing for itself," as Hegel says, "a funeral pile, and consuming itself upon it; but so that from its ashes it produces the new, renovated, fresh life." That the power of negativity enters constitutively into the rationality of the world, nay, that the rationality of the world demands negativity in it, is Hegel's most original contribution to thought. His complete philosophy is the attempt to show in detail that the whole universe and everything it contains manifests the process of uniformly struggling with a negative power, and is an outcome of conflicting, but reconciled forces. An impressionistic picture of the world's eternal becoming through this process is furnished by the first of Hegel's great works, the Phenomenology of Spirit. The book is, in a sense, a cross-section of the entire spiritual world. It depicts the necessary unfolding of typical phases of the spiritual life of mankind. Logical categories, scientific laws, historical epochs, literary tendencies, religious processes, social, moral, and artistic institutions, all exemplify the same onward movement through a union of opposites. There is eternal and total instability everywhere. But this unrest and instability is of a necessary and uniform nature, according to the one eternally fixed principle which renders the universe as a whole organic and orderly.
Organic Wholeness! This phrase contains the rationale of the restless flow and the evanescent being of the Hegelian world. It is but from the point of view of the whole that its countless conflicts, discrepancies, and contradictions can be understood. As the members of the body find only in the body as a whole their _raison d'��tre_, so