The early Hegel: interesting quotes

Significant or just interesting quotes from the early Hegel (1788-1807) perhaps to be elaborated on a later occasion:

The State is a mechanical thing... We must go even beyond the State!--for every State must treat free men as cogs in a machine; and this it ought not to do; so it must stop
-"The Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism"

The higest act of Reason... is an aesthetic act... the philosopher must possess just as much aesthetic power as the poet... The philosophy of the spirit is an aesthetic philosophy.
-"The Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism"

Interestingly, Hegel just after this last passage links the aesthetic with spirit by using the term "geistreich," literally, "rich in spirit" or "rich in soul." The term is usually one designating the "witty" or "quick-minded" or "intuitive," as we might say now. Hegel says: "...even about history one cannot argue in a manner that is geistreich without aesthetic sense." The geistreich is somehow innate to refined or cultured or aesthetic discourse, or the discourse that has experienced or undergone the aesthetic: this might hint at the role Hegel gives to logic or the logos in his later philosophy, and the sense in which he conceives that role. Logic, as what constitutes the form of the concept or Begriff and as such is what joins with immediacy to lead immediacy out of itself into the mediated, is in its heart only thinkable at this stage in Hegel's thought as something resembling cultivated discourse. If I wanted to argue this, I'd point to his later essay, written sometime in 1807-8, entitled "Who Thinks Abstractly?" There, Hegel says something revealing about how he conceives abstraction and thus also about how he conceives concrete or concretizing thought: those who think abstractly are not the cultured and learned, but the unlearned, the common. Thus, cultivated discourse is the power to remove from abstraction, or, put another way and indeed in the way we just put it above with regard to art, cultivated discourse is the power to move away from the immediate and to mediate.

Nothing is unconditioned; nothing carries the root of its own being in itself.
-"Love"

Hegel will later in his Science of Logic affirm this sentence, which constitutes his most concrete opposition to Kant (who affirmed the existence of the a priori thing-in-itself), literally. That is, literally, Nothing will be what is unconditioned. Nothing will be the only thing that carries the root of its own being in itself. This is the thesis that Nothing and Pure Being are identical. Nothing for Hegel is really the Kantian thing-in-itself, and so too is abstract, Pure Being, being that has no conditions or is empty of all essence.

True union, or love proper, exists only between living beings who are alike in power and thus in one another's eyes living beings from every point of view; in no respect is either dead for the other.
-"Love"

Since love is a sensing of something living, lovers can be distinct only in so far as they are mortal and do not look upon this possibility of separation as if there really were a separation or as if reality were a sort of conjunction between possibility and existence.
-"Love"

In other words, what Hegel is getting at here is that the lovers do not look at their lover as if he or she were an existing lover that would be annhilated by death possibly in the future: they are just their lover. They do not project into the future with the distinction that it will be a future without their lover, because they have united with that lover in a way that exceeds death: they have united as living entities. It would be interesting to compare this reflection on the reality of death with Heidegger's: Heidegger it seems would call this idea of death that the lovers share, since they refuse to see its immanence and its determining capability, a they-understanding of death, a fallen understanding of death, a refusal of being-towards-death authentically and thus an inauthentic mode of being-towards-death. But Hegel is on to something here. We can only see death as something determinative of the individuality of the two lovers insofar as we abstract from their love, which occurs in such a way that it lives with them between them and in each of them, i.e. that it annuls their individuality. As Hegel goes on to say,

To say that the lovers have an independence and a living principle particular to each of themselves means only that they may die and may be separated by death. To say that salt and other minerals are part of the makeup of a plant and that these carry in themselves their own laws goerning their operation is the judgement of external reflection and means no more than that the plant may rot.

In other words, we designate something more than mineral when we call the totality of the minerals a plant. A plant is not a totality of particular minerals. So too is true union, or love proper, not the totality of the individuals involved, however much this seems counterintuitive to our atomistic thinking about selves. Love is these individuals (and a plant is these minerals) joined to the concept, linked to it as that about it which is infinite and annhilates its finitude, i.e. its constituent elements or individuals (or minerals). In other words, love is not what happens between two individuals, but is precisely what is beyond any individual in a union. Thus "this genuine love excludes all oppositions," as Hegel says earlier: it is the realm of the beyond and the beyond only (but again, not as a thing-in-itself). Or, as he puts it, "In love the separate does still remain, but as something united and no longer as something seperate." In love two individuals remain, but only as "lovers," just like in a plant the minerals still remain, but only as what we can designate as "minerals that are parts of a plant."

This raging of love against individuality is shame. Shame is not a reaction of the mortal body, not an expression of the freedom to maintain one's life, to subsist.
-"Love"