I - Aims of a New Epoch

Summary

Hegel was born in 1770, at the moment that German culture was entering the decisive shift known as the Sturm und Drang, and when the generation which would revolutionize German thought and literature at the turn of the century was being born. Hegel belongs to this, the ‘Romantic’ generation, as it has been called, a bit loosely. In fact such party labels are misleading; there were certain pre-occupations which captured the thinkers and artists of this generation, whether they qualify as Romantics or not, pre-occupations which were shared even by sharp critics of the Romantics, as Hegel was. We cannot really understand what he was about until we see the basic problems and aspirations which gripped him, and these were those of the time.

It was a revolutionary time, of course. This has become to us a hackneyed phrase, because revolution in the world is become almost a constant of our experience. But in the 1790s Revolution had its full impact, as the Shockwaves from Paris spread across Europe; and its impact was all the stronger for being bi-valenced: enthusiasm followed by perplexed horror, among the young intelligentsia of Germany. Much in the writings of Hegel and his contemporaries can be explained by the need to come to terms with the painful, perturbing, conflict-ridden moral experience of the French Revolution. But we have also to understand something of the medium in which this epochal event reverberated, the climate of thought and feeling in which the rising generation of young educated Germans was formed and evolved.