1. On Hegel
The explorations that we are attempting in the form of a discussion should not interrupt the course of your work of interpreting Hegel’s Logic. The questions that we are striving toward are also not intended to “intrude on” Hegel’s philosophy from the outside with the “impatience of incidental reflection,”1 which is thoroughly contrary to a system of thinking, particularly of the Hegelian type, and must therefore also be fruitless.
It is also true that Hegel does not simply serve us as an arbitrary opportunity and foothold for a philosophical confrontation. His philosophy stands definitively in the history of thinking—or should we say: of beyng—as the singular and not yet comprehended demand for a confrontation with it. This demand holds for any thinking that comes after it or for any thinking that simply wants to—and perhaps must—prepare again for philosophy.
Nietzsche, who freed himself very slowly and rather late from the pathetic slander and disregard for Hegel that he inherited from Schopenhauer, once said that “we Germans are Hegelians, even if there had never been a Hegel.”2
The singularity of Hegel’s philosophy consists primarily in the fact that there is no longer a higher standpoint of self-consciousness of spirit beyond it. Thus any future, still higher standpoint over against it, which would be superordinate to Hegel’s system—in the manner
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. Georg Lasson (Leipzig, 1923). Preface to the second edition, 21. [Science of Logic, 21.]
2. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft. Book V, 357. Großoktavausgabe, vol. 5, 230. [English: The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 218; translation modified.]