If such a requirement is grasped in its more general context ...
... it has gone beyond this immediacy of faith
... now demands from philosophy not knowledge of what spirit is; rather, it demands that it again attain the substantiality and the solidity of what is, and that it is through philosophy that it attain this.
unlock substance’s secret and elevate this to self-consciousness
... to take what thought has torn asunder and then to stir it all together into a smooth mélange, to suppress the concept that makes those distinctions, and then to fabricate the feeling of the essence.
What it wants from philosophy is not so much insight as edification. The beautiful, the holy, the eternal, religion, and love itself are all the bait required to awaken the craving to bite. What is supposed to sustain and extend the wealth of that substance is not the concept, but ecstasy, not the cold forward march of the necessity of the subject matter, but instead a kind of inflamed inspiration.
Reading all this I am constantly reminded of Plato who is perhaps a primary target here. — Fooloso4
I'm wallowing through it slowly. — Wallows
It's also important to note that 'Notion' (or concept) is used here (beginning in section 6 iirc) in contrast to 'intuition'. — emancipate
#6:
Hegel is opposing his claim that:
... truth has the element of its existence solely in concepts
with the claim that it is not the concept but the feeling and intuition or immediate knowing of the absolute which are supposed to govern what is said of it. — Fooloso4
But Hegel's polemical regard for "edification" could use some edifying explication. — tim wood
Corresponding to this requirement is a laborious and almost petulant zeal to save mankind from its absorption in the sensuous, the vulgar, and the singular. It wishes to direct people’s eyes to the stars ...
Corresponding to this requirement ...
... to save mankind from its absorption in the sensuous, the vulgar, and the singular.
... were like worms, each and all on the verge of finding satisfaction in mere dirt and water.
There was a time when people had a heaven adorned with a comprehensive wealth of thoughts and images. The meaning of all existence lay in the thread of light by which it was bound to heaven and instead of lingering in this present, people’s view followed that thread upwards towards the divine essence; their view directed itself, if one may put it this way, to an other-worldly present.
It was only under duress that spirit’s eyes had to be turned back to what is earthly and to be kept fixed there ...
... a long time was needed to introduce clarity into the dullness and confusion lying in the meaning of things in this world, a kind of clarity which only heavenly things used to have ...
... to draw attention to the present as such, an attention that was called experience, and to make it interesting and to make it matter.
Now it seems that there is the need for the opposite, that our sense of things is so deeply rooted in the earthly that an equal power is required to elevate it above all that.
Spirit has shown itself to be so impoverished that it seems to yearn for its refreshment only in the meager feeling of divinity ... That it now takes so little to satisfy spirit’s needs is the full measure
of the magnitude of its loss.
Whoever seeks mere edification, — tim wood
The Preface explains just what this transformation of philosophy into science fundamentally involves. In the first place, it involves the repudiation of the romantic notion, associated with Hegel's friends from the Tübingen Stift, Hölderlin and Schelling, that absolute truth can be grasped only in intuition or immediate feeling. In his younger days, Hegel shared with Hölderlin and Schelling the aspiration to overcome the dichotomies of Kant's critical philosophy, in particular its denial that we can have knowledge of the absolute or thing in itself. In the Phenomenology, Hegel does not abandon this aspiration, but he rejects Hölderlin's and Schelling's conception of absolute knowledge in terms of immediate intuition or feeling. Such a conception, he argues, dissolves the rich differentiation and determination of empirical content into a "night in which all cows are black" (94).
... intentionally stands aloof from both the concept and from necessity, which it holds to be a type of reflection at home in mere finitude.
The force of spirit is only as great as its expression, and its depth goes only as deep as it trusts itself to disperse itself and to lose itself in its explication of itself.
... While abandoning themselves to the unbounded fermentation of the substance ... suppose that, by throwing a blanket over self-consciousness and by surrendering all understanding, they are God’s very own, that they are those to whom God imparts wisdom in their sleep.
... is interrupted by the break of day
... spirit is never to be conceived as being at rest but rather as ever advancing.
... the gradualness of only quantitative growth [and then] it makes a qualitative leap and is born.
... in bringing itself to cultural maturity, spirit ripens slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the structure of its previous world, whose tottering condition is only intimated by its individual symptoms.
The kind of frivolity and boredom which chips away at the established order and the indeterminate presentiment of what is yet unknown are all harbingers of imminent change. This gradual process of dissolution, which has not altered the physiognomy of the whole ...
... is interrupted by the break of day, which in a flash and at a single stroke brings to view the structure of the new world.
Well, yeah, he gets where they're coming from. But isn't he accusing them of choosing the easy path, which they claim leads to deep understanding but is really just a superficial dream?Hegel is not entirely unsympathetic to the impulse of those he is criticizing — Fooloso4
But basically, Hegel is still criticizing and deconstructing the main ideas of German Romanticism in §10, right? — WerMaat
Well, yeah, he gets where they're coming from. But isn't he accusing them of choosing the easy path, which they claim leads to deep understanding but is really just a superficial dream? — WerMaat
Do you think that he's picking up the bud and flower metaphor from earlier? — WerMaat
And while we're looking at metaphors: note that §10 ends in a sentence about sleeping and dreaming, i.e. Romanticism, while §11 ends with the "break of day" of Enlightenment. — WerMaat
But I'm not sure yet what this "qualitative leap" is supposed to be exactly? — WerMaat
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