Oldal 19 [19]
Jacobin dictatorship and then the rule of the little Corsican are just
over the horizon. The latter was seen by Hegel with his own eyes
the day after the Battle of Jena, “Weltseele zu Pferde” (“mounted
on the soul of the world”), as Hegel wrote to Niethammer‘. The
positions of Schelling and Hegelian are not far apart: the subject
does not recognize an object independent of itself, but the cognition
occurring is cognition of himself, since in all other cases cognition
would be lead down the false track of dogmatism, and dogmatism
is best suited by oppression and suffering. The critical attitude is
the field of freedom and opposition to it. Every autocratic system is
dogmatic. There is no freedom in it, especially not individual free¬
dom, but the dogmatic person likes this and does not understand
why they should have to be free. It is not the tyrant who creates
the slave — building on Unamuno’s ideas (Unamuno 1928. p.38.)
— but the slave who creates the tyrant. That is to say, as Schelling
writes, that all cognition can only be imagined occurring with a
foundation of freedom, because there is no thought (and, let us
add, no thinker) that would renounce freedom and still dare to
call themselves thinking people. Not-free thinking is not thinking.
Thus, the only way of thinking, like the only way of philosophy, is
critical thinking. In the modern sense, we can add that the advan¬
tages of anyone, no matter how skilled, educated, etc. they may
be, are not worth a button if they are in the service of an ideology,
and the same can be said of the person themselves.
In criticism, mediation and reflection can only be interpreted
after recognizing this. Let us simply call the latter a conscious
thought, an observation. However, before looking at the category of
mediation and trying to ascertain its nature, it is useful to look at
the basic elements of Fichte and Schelling’s philosophy of identity
(also known as Identiätsphilosophie).
6 Thelegend that Hegel finished The Phenomenology of Spirit on the night ofthe
Battle of Jena does not match reality. The battle, the day after which Hegel
saw Napoleon, was on October 16, 1806, while Hegel had already signed the
contract with the publisher that summer.