Carl Friedrich Göschel: Of the proof for the immortality of the human soul (1835)

Last time we saw Göschel, he was busy explaining his own take of the intricacies of the whole Hegelian system. In the work we are now dealing with, Von den Beweisen für die Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele, he grapples with a special question of how to prove the immortality of human soul. His fundamental line of defence is again his reading of Hegelianism, which he mostly calls speculative philosophy, but he does point in this work to many other philosophers, using even thinkers like Spinoza and Kant to find arguments for his own understanding of what to expect after death.

Göschel is clearly very fond of analogies, and one of the two most important ones presented in this book is that between the three traditional proofs for God’s existence – a division going ultimately back to Kant, but viewed as being reimagined by Hegel – and what Göschel takes as three fundamental proofs for the immortality of human soul (fundamental in the sense that all other proofs should be mere variations or combinations of these three proofs). Göschel knows his Hegelese and adds at once that these three proofs are not enough, because they are part of pre-Kantian dogmatic philosophy that failed to ask the important question of how thinking could be applied to being.

To bridge this gap, Göschel introduces the second important analogy in the work. He lifts a threefold schema of the ideal development of individual human beings from Hegel’s philosophy of subjective spirit and rereads it as a development of spirit in a more traditional sense (of course, Hegelian habit of using words like soul and spirit with religious connotations made this repurposing easy). The difference is that while Hegelian philosophy of subjective spirit ends merely with the human being becoming part of a society of other human beings, Göschel’s new reading turns the development to more theological fields.

Göschel notes that even before humans wondered about proving the immortality of the soul, they were immediately convinced of the fact that the soul would go on continuing its life indefinitely. This immediate certainty, as it were, forms for him in a sense fourth proof of immortality, just like similarly the existence of God has been justified by humans at large agreeing about this being immediately certain. What awakens the need to prove that this inborn conviction is certain, Göschel states, is the fact of death that appears to contradict the immediate conviction.

The first real proof, corresponding to the cosmological proof of God’s existence, Göschel says, is what he calls theoretical or metaphysical proof. In effect, this is proof familiar at least from the Wolffian tradition: the soul is simple, thus, it cannot be destroyed through division like a composite, material thing. Göschel gives this proof a new twist by relating it to the immediate phase in Hegelian philosophy of spirit, named appropriately soul.

Hegel understood by soul a human being in a state where they had not yet grasped the idea of themselves as distinct from the world around them (or to which they had regressed through suggestion or mental illness). Göschel takes the word to describe more the result of the development of Hegelian soul, namely, a distinct individual. Furthermore, he gives it a new twist by understanding the soul as an individual necessarily related to what he calls an internal body. This internal body should be simple – kind of what Leibnizian monad was supposed to be – and separable from the external body, capable of surviving without it. Thus, Göschel states, just like the cosmological proof of God’s existence deduces from the current existence of world that requires something to sustain it the existence of an entity that will sustain it, similarly theoretical or metaphysical proof of the immortality of soul deduces from the current existence of the soul as a simple monad or atom its continuing into the future.

Survival of such a soul-atom is not enough, Göschel thinks, because just like even Wolffians noted, mere continued existence of such an atom does not guarantee that our memories and thoughts continue to exist in separation from the body. Even worse, there’s the possibility envisioned even by Leibniz that an omnipotent God could come and annihilate even the seemingly indestructible monad, just because they wanted to. Thus, Göschel states, staying in this standpoint of abstract individuality we would be locked to a most frightful dualism, where soul would be separated from everything else, including its external body, and would live in a constant fear of the absolute other or God and in pain for being separated from them.

This awareness of oneself as distinct from everything else and awareness of something else beyond oneself marks already, Göschel states, a transition to the next phase of the journey of soul, which he calls, following Hegel, consciousness. Here Göschel and Hegel have pretty much the same understanding of the term, except while for Hegel the other of which the consciousness is aware of means the external world in general and other humans in particular, for Göschel, the important other is always God.

For Göschel, the move to consciousness is also a move from the mere existence of the soul to its essence. He appropriates a Hegelian pun that the essence (Wesen) of something refers to what has happened to this something in the past (gewesen). In the case of consciousness, this involves the soul recollecting or internalising (another Hegelian pun on the word Erinnerung) this essence, which in Göschel's opinion means the consciousness becoming aware of the determination or destiny set to it by God at the time of creation.

Göschel connects this idea of the past determination of human consciousness with an analogy with the teleological proof of God’s existence, which hinges on the notion of finding the world to be geared toward some purposes. He links this proof to what he calls the practical proof of the immortality of the human soul: in essence, this is the proof Kant used in Critique of practical reason. In other words, consciousness is determined for some infinite goal that it cannot realise in a finite time, thus, because this goal is determined by God, they must guarantee the continued existence of consciousness.

The immortality in the practical proof appears to be based on the capacity of the human consciousness to approach its destiny, which due to the finity of humans seems hopeless to achieve. Here Göschel states that God has the power to change this human condition and will do it some day for everyone, leading us to the final stage of our development or spirit. While for Hegel this stage meant simply a time when a human being does not anymore feel alienation from the world around them, for Göschel the term takes more obvious religious connotations.

In Göschel's eyes, the phase of spirit means a return to the original conviction that a human soul will continue its existence indefinitely, but now this conviction can be put in a form of proof. While the ultimate experiential realisation of this conviction must wait for the time of our death, Göschel insists, we can already state this proof that he calls logical or ontological. In effect the proof is simply a variation of the Cartesian cogito: I think of my continued existence, but while I am thinking it, I must continue to exist. Göschel’s ontological proof of immortality appears to have a clear flaw: what about the time when we are not thinking? This flaw makes it as suspect as its analogue, the more famous ontological proof of God's existence, where the inevitability of thinking the most perfect being or God as existent should make us admit their existence.

What Göschel offers as a foundation of both ontological arguments is his rather metaphysical reading of Hegelian idea of thinking forming a unity with being, thinking being in a dominant role in this relation. He describes this unity as personality, not referring to a character of a conscious being, but to the concept of personhood in trinity: God is a unity in seeming multiplicity. In effect, Göschel insists that divine thinking has the capacity to penetrate anything that seemingly differs from it, both within itself (the different persons) and without itself (the creation). This penetrating thinking is going on all the time – or more likely, it is eternal in the sense of timeless. When a human spirit truly experiences the truth of both ontological proofs, it takes part in this divine thinking.

Göschel’s reading of Hegel seems to come close to pantheism, where the human spirit is like a droplet of water assimilated in the wide ocean of divinity. Yet, Göschel rejects this outcome with the Hegelian phrase that the earlier moments of development are retained in the later stages. While with Hegel it is quite natural to read such statements as saying merely that the history of human society is always played out through individuals, Göschel endorses a stronger interpretation that every individual human soul is retained by the divine thinking – not just in the Spinozan sense that these individuals are eternally thought by God, but as full individual soul-atoms with their own consciousness.

By being in community with God, Göschel continues, the individual human souls gain the divine ability to penetrate anything. This means that even the external world is not anymore a mystery to humans, but something they can freely manipulate by their will. This final stage of the development of the human soul Göschel calls resurrection, where the soul is not anymore an atom distinct from its external body, but reconstitutes this body as being now alive in a spiritual union with the soul.

Carl Friedrich Göschel: Hegel and his time: with regard to Goethe (1832)

The last time we met Göschel, he was busy defending Hegelian philosophy against the reinterpretation of a single philosopher, but now we see him arguing for Hegel against all his contemporaries in the work Hegel und seine Zeit, mit Rücksicht auf Goethe. The look toward Goethe mentioned in the title refers to Göschel’s belief that Goethe and Hegel were essentially on the same side in this battle, Indeed, at various points of the work, Göschel quotes Goethe’s poems, to indicate correspondences with Hegelian and Goethean ideas. Even more, Göschel begins with a description of Goethe’s take on Leibnizian monadology – we are a collection of monads, soul being a central monad, ruling over a body made out of other monads, and after our death, the monads disperse, only to come together during resurrection, only with more heightened awareness – just to make the fancy remark that the two recently deceased philosophers must now be conversing in a heaven of monads, waiting for their return to the world of living.

The main text of the work is dedicated to describing the relations between Hegelian philosophy – or as Göschel prefers to call it most of the time, speculative philosophy – and the contemporary culture of the times. He begins with what he calls Umsicht – literally, a look from outside. In other words, he is interested in what the contemporaries who are not Hegelians think of Hegelian philosophy.

Göschel begins from the end of Hegel’s philosophical system or religion (one could point out that Hegel continues with philosophy after religion, but Göschel may be betraying his interests here somewhat). He notes that Hegelianism sits squarely in the middle between two major factions in the philosophy of religion: rationalism, which emphasises the role of reason in deciding what to believe, and supernaturalism, which endorses divine revelation as the foundation of religious certainty. Just like rationalism, Göschel says, Hegelian philosophy thinks that reason should be used as the “form” or method for studying religion by the subject, while the content or object of this method Hegel takes to agree in its essentials with Lutheranism, just like supernaturalists state.

Göschel thinks the position he describes as Hegelian is reasonable, if we just assume that the two sides – the investigating subject or individual human reason and the investigated object or divine revelation – are in a sense identical or connected to one another, even when they are seen as different. More particularly, Göschel adds, we should, firstly, assume that both these opposites have their worth, secondly, admit that this coexistence involves some contradiction or tension between the two poles, and finally, solve this tension by noting that opposites share something in common – human reason agrees with divine revelation, since the latter is also caused by reason, just that of divinity. Göschel at once points out that this mediating stance doesn’t still satisfy the extremes, which question the justifiability of the other extreme, but not of themselves: for rationalists, Hegelian philosophy of religion appears irrational in accepting orthodox dogmas, while for supernaturalists, it seems blasphemous in subjugating Bible to standards of human reason.

Göshcel considers similarly contemporary evaluations of other parts of Hegelian system (more particularly, he goes through it in reverse, continuing from philosophy of religion to philosophy of state, then to philosophy of religion, philosophy of nature, particularly medicine, and mathematics, ending finally with what philologists, historians and other philosophers have to say about Hegelianism), but his main point is clear from the first example. Hegelian philosophy often takes a mediating position between two extreme positions, of which one usually corresponds to subjective, human reason ready for revolution, while the other extreme then corresponds to objective, divine reason upholding traditions. Hegelianism solves the seeming contradiction of these two positions by noting their interconnectedness and essential unity, leading it to endorse moderation between radicalism and conservatism, which just makes the extreme positions reject this middle stance.

From different standpoints, Göschel concludes, Hegel’s system could be taken as too eclectic – in combining all systems – or too exclusive – as taking itself as the final truth; too poetic and mystic – as upholding contradictions as truth – or as too pedantic and scholastic – as using hierarchic classifications; as too realistic – as dealing only with the world around us – or as too idealistic – as seeing material world as a mere appearance of reason; as too pantheistic – as seeing God everywhere – or as too atheistic – as seeing God nowhere.

After this look from outside, Göschel moves to Einsicht or a look inside the Hegelian system. As we noted in the previous post about him, Göschel knows his Hegelian liturgy. He also shares some basic faults common to many so-called Hegelians. Thus, after quite correctly insisting that Hegel wants to develop the basic structures of his philosophy from a standpoint where we abstract from everything given – indeed, he wants to begin from nothing definite at all – but then when the truly interesting question how this development occurs at crucial points of the system is presented, Göschel merely answers with the general consideration that it happens “by immanent negation”, which in Hegelese really says nothing more than “by finding out how the matter at hand shows how to arrive at the next step”.

Göschel even makes the comparison – even if not outright identification – of the supposed steps of Hegelian method with the trivison of thesis, antithesis and synthesis at the beginning of the first version of Fichtean Wissenschaftslehre. In this often criticised comparison that loses the distinctness of Hegelian philosophy, Göschel also errs in not noting that this Fichtean trivision is rather different in holding the thesis (positing of an existing I) as higher than the two others, because in its pure form it describes what an absolute or divine I would be like, while the antithesis (positing I against not-I) describes the standpoint of human I and the resulting synthesis (I and not-I being divisible and thus able to share the consciousness of I) just tries to explain how the human standpoint could be possible from the standpoint of divine consciousness.

Moving back to his take on Hegelianism, Göschel makes the very common error of immediately assuming that the supposed three steps in Hegel’s method (abstraction of pure starting point, “negation” or development of new structures out of the first and “second negation” or consideration of this string of structures as forming a unified system) agree literally with the various trivisions of Hegel’s system. This assumption makes then possible to just ignore the question how the individual transitions in Hegel’s system work, although Göschel does at one place admit that the trivisions might sometimes appear arbitrary (no wonder, as Hegel himself reworked them from time to time and suggested they were more to help the reader than anything else).

We need not thus go in any detail to Göschel’s reconstruction of Hegelian logic, which is really just a summary of its table of contents. We can therefore skip at once to his peculiar understanding of its end, where Göschel outright assumes that the absolute idea concluding the book simply is God, not in any metaphorical sense, but as the same personality as described by orthodox Lutheranism. The development of pure thinking in Hegelian philosophy should then end with faith in the certainty of a personal God, who unites e.g. subject and object or infinite and finite by showing that the former has the power to “overreach” into the latter – in other words, to be the controlling and even creating principle in their organic fusion.

Göschel then continues to summarise the Hegelian philosophy of the concrete, or as Göschel emphasises, created nature and created spirit (we could say, humanity), which we for the just mentioned reason can also skip and jump into his take on absolute spirit. The final point of Göschel’s interpretation is that nature and humanity are not independent, but exist merely in relation to absolute spirit, which is then again God, but as related to their creations. The structures of logic were supposedly just developments of divine thought, which then in the concrete world appear as distinct and seemingly independent entities. World is thus, in a sense, fuller than logic, but it also mirrors the latter’s structure, showing analogies between different levels of the natural and the human world.

Another major point in the latter part of Hegel’s philosophy, according to Göschel, is that it shows the divine to be present in the here and now of the world we are living: just like theology said, God is omnipresent. Furthermore, Göschel adds, it also shows that these individual heres and nows form a larger continuity, where individuals unite into an organic whole.

Finally, Göschel presents as mediating between the Umsicht and the Einsicht the Aussicht – literally, a look toward the outside. In other words, he wants to deal with various problems that hinder the contemporary reader from understanding Hegelian philosophy, as he understands it. The central obstacle, he thinks, is our natural thinking, which as natural is still moored in some immediate presuppositions, which the absolute thinking has learned to put aside. Göschel admits this change of standpoint is difficult, since it involves us resisting the stubborn independence of concrete individuals in order that we can recognise that the light of reason is able to penetrate the essence of all things.

A particularly interesting shape of this stubborn attitude is found in the objection that what is actual seems not always reasonable, especially when this actual is evil and sinful. Göschel can quite correctly point out that this objection involves just a misunderstanding of Hegelian terminology. Actual does not mean for Hegel just anything that exists, but only the lawlike structures upholding what exists. Evil and sin, on the other hand, are mere existences, which may or may not appear – they are contingent. Then again, Göschel adds with conviction, such non-actual or contingent existences are then bound to be destroyed by the divine necessity and thus evil and sin are fated to find their retribution.

Quite characteristic is also Göschel’s answer to the question whether the absolute idea and the absolute spirit are just symbolic names for what is human. Göschel affirms this, but with a twist: it is not just any individual human Hegel is talking about, but the universal humanity embodied in Christ. Thus, he continues, while Father of the Christian Trinity is the exemplary infinite, Christ is the exemplary finite, in whose image the individual humans are then created. With this move Göschel reveals his cards: the Hegelian system is just a cover for quite a literal understanding of Christianity.

Carl Friedrich Göschel: Monism of thought (1832)

(1784–1861)

Right after Hegel’s death in 1831, the interpreters dashed like vultures to feed on the carcass of Hegel’s system – for what was left of Hegel’s philosophy after his death was certainly not anymore a living, developing organism, but a mere dead corpse that could be used by other thinkers as nutriments for developing their own philosophies. After a while, two broad extremes of Hegel-interpretation rose: the so-called Young or Left Hegelians and the opposing Old or Right Hegelians, the dividing line being roughly determined by the political stances

An example of the Right Hegelianism is provided by Göschel’s Der Monismus des Gedankens, which is a perfect example of an interpreter reading more into a philosopher’s texts than could be gleaned from the text itself. The occasion for Göschel’s text is provided by Christian Hermann Weisse, whose Hegel-inspired book on aesthetics we have considered. Weisse did not even present himself as a pure Hegelian, but wanted to improve Hegel’s philosophy, while Göschel then suggests he wants to defend Hegel against this perceived attack.

Since we have dealt only with a part of Weisse’s suggested improvement, I will go through it in a summarised fashion. Firstly, he had said that he didn’t want to remove anything from Hegel’s logic, but thought it had to be supplemented in a fashion. Logic, Weisse had said, was a science of necessity, so all necessities should be handled in it. Thus, he continued, the final chapter of the logic had to still contain another trivision: logical method, as an undivided continuum of all the previous structures of logic, should be transformed into a differentiated space, which would then be transformed further, through connecting these differentiations into a new process or time.

Now, speaking as a Hegel-scholar, I see nothing to object in the process of developing space and time out of the logical method, as presented by Weisse, since this is in fact how Hegel himself does it. What is against Hegel’s intentions is only the grouping of space and time within logic, on the pretext that logic is somehow a science of necessities, compared with other parts of his philosophy, which should be sciences of freedom, according to Weisse. In other words, what Weisse is saying is that while logic describes what must be, the later parts of Hegel’s philosophy should describe only what exists, because of the free choice of God.

The problem is that Weisse’s notion of necessity is very different from the manner in which Hegel understands the word: of course, Weisse is really using the ordinary notion of necessity, so the confusion is understandable. For Hegel, necessity means in a sense the necessity of connections, in the sense that it is necessarily possible to move from what is described in an earlier part of his philosophy to what is described in a later part. Thus, for instance, once one has discovered the logical method, one can then divide the moments of the method and so form a sort of mental space of them. Of course, since such a necessarily existing possible connection need not still be used – we can freely choose whether to think space after the logical method – this necessity does not in any manner hinder our freedom. Then again, this duality of necessity and freedom occurs in all parts of Hegel’s philosophy and even in logic. What is novel in the further parts of Hegel’s philosophy, as opposed to his logic, is that one can then also find dedicated empirical counterparts for such logical models or concepts discovered through these connections – for example, the experienced, geometrical space.

What Weisse had considered as a necessary outcome of his emphasis on the difference of necessity and freedom is that the next part of Hegel’s philosophy – the philosophy of nature, should have begun with matter, which is something that does not necessarily exist, but is created by God. As something freely created, Weisse had added, matter is something of more worth than mere thinking, and in addition, something thinking can never completely penetrate. Of course, the truly Hegelian counterpoint would be to point out that all Hegel needs is to show that a model of space and time is necessarily connected to a model of matter – something moving within space and time – in the sense that we can, as it were, construct the latter model from the former. This connection of models is then in a sense reinforced by Hegel’s conviction that empirical space and time are nothing but ephemeral sets of relations that could not empirically exist without anything having those relations (that is, matter we can empirically observe). Furthermore, there would then be no question of not understanding what matter is, since the construction of its model just would be this required understanding.

From matter, Weisse had jumped straight to spirit, noting that like nature, spirit must also be something that is not describable by mere logical categories, but also something freely created by God. We probably need not repeat the basic fault in Weisse’s reading, but just in case let’s do it: jump from nature to spirit does not say that spirit would be somehow necessary, but only that a) given a model of nature (a realm of disparate entities), we can move to a model of spirit (a self-regulating process using these entities consciously for its own purposes) and b) empirically natural processes can in some measure be controlled by such a conscious self-regulating process.

Within Hegel’s philosophy of spirit, Weisse had ignored the so-called subjective spirit, mostly because he wanted to concentrate on both objective and absolute spirit, instead. Weisse had envisioned the realm of objective spirit to be divided into parts on language – which Hegel studied in the division on subjective spirit – on state – which Weisse apparently thought to contain almost all of what Hegel had studied in his philosophy of right – and finally, on world history – which for Hegel was only a final part of a study on state. From this short summary it is difficult to judge what Weisse really meant with this division, and the analogy he gives is not that much more helpful: language being like mechanism (perhaps because speaking persons are still independent of one another?), state like chemism (perhaps because persons unite into communities?), and finally, world history like teleology (perhaps because it is supposed to be a process with an end?).

Weisse’s theory of absolute spirit we are already very familiar with. He had begun with truth or science as life of spirit, then proceeded to beauty and art as spirit’s cognition of the external world and finally ended with divinity or religion as the most absolute phase of spirit. I have discussed this part of Weisse’s system (or more particularly, the second division of beauty) in more detail earlier, so I’ll overlook it here.

As for Göschel's critique of Weisse, he clearly knows the Hegelian liturgy, since he can at the right places state some key phrases loved by many followers of Hegel. Thus, when Weisse criticises Hegel of formalism, Göschel can at once point out that Hegel's philosophy is just the opposite of formalism, avoiding mere application of all external schemas. He connects this point at once with the idea that the universal beginning of Hegel’s philosophy particularises itself, thus becoming more determined with its development. Weisse’s supposed improvement, Göschel says, is on the contrary dualist, because it assumes something beyond logical method – content – which the method has to grapple with. All this liturgy has a proper Hegelian meaning – thinking is, for Hegel, an activity that can create content even when nothing else is given and can thus be used to model anything in the empirical world - but it is unclear how Göschel understood these words.

This unclarity becomes clear when we see how Göschel wants to solve the dilemma of necessity and freedom that led Weisse to improve the Hegelian philosophy. Göschel says explicitly that the thinking we follow throughout the Hegelian philosophy is not human, but divine thought – or at least it would be that, if this system could repeat exactly all the intricacies of the world around us. Thus, he says, the world around us is the creation of divine thought and therefore necessary, but there is much that seems contingent for us as mere humans. This is, of course, completely against the spirit of Hegelian philosophy, where the idea of necessary contingency is explicitly endorsed and no divine viewpoint outside the human viewpoint is accepted.

Göschel, on the other hand, is clearly committed to the Christian notion of God. Hence, while he recognises that Hegelian philosophy just begins, from nothing, he at once adds that beginning differs from beginner, thus, that it is God doing this beginning. This does not mean, he explains, that we should begin from God, since then we could never move away from God, which would drive us to pantheism. Similarly, he adds, we should not start from unconscious nature, consciousness or both together, since these beginnings would lead us, respectively, to realism, idealism and dualism.

A further example of Göschel’s tendencies is his choice of example for the supposed cyclical nature of Hegel’s philosophy, where the beginning and end should coincide. This example is the incarnated God that, Göschel says, is both the basis of true human cognition – because according to him, we would know nothing without Christ – but also the end of all human cognition. Thus, moving toward Christ, Göschel says, a person moves, on the one hand, to their beginning, but also to their end.

Göschel moves on to consider the specifics of Weisse’s reimagination of the Hegelian system. Beginning from Weisse’s derivation of method, space and time, Göschel notes quickly – and quite correctly – that actually these three are implicitly present much earlier in the development of Hegelian philosophy than Weisse thinks. Indeed, method is, of course, used through Hegel’s logic, and furthermore, abstract spaces and “times” or processes have appeared almost from the beginning of the logic (i.e. when Hegel starts by pointing out that thinking nothing begins a process – or becoming, as he calls it – which results in a construction of a space of qualities), and the later philosophy of nature really adds just the discovery of empirical counterparts for both of them.

Just like space and time, Göschel says, so is matter to be found already in Hegel’s logic, even if Weisse thought it was something unique to philosophy of nature. Indeed, the move from space and time to something that is spatial and temporal is similar to many moves in Hegel’s logic, where he moves from the thinking of e.g. existence to the thinking of something existent. As Göschel points out, we do a similar movement in our ordinary thought, when we introduce the notion of matter – we perceive something and then decide something or matter must be the basis of these perceptions. In fact, he continues, matter just is a hypothesis of thought and not something thought couldn’t understand. Göschel also suggests that while Weisse saw matter and even whole nature as inimical to thought, nature in its innermost essence really is at least an analogy to spirit – in other words, it is not just a passive receptacle, but an active striving toward self-organisation and even self-knowing. Therefore, it is just natural that matter will next give rise to motion.

Although Göschel at first appears to understand the introduction of matter in a manner faithful to Hegel, he then adds the un-Hegelian point that we should also investigate the genesis of matter or of nature in general, or in the more poetic terms he uses, how the water of thought solidifies into the ice of matter. Hegel really isn’t interested in the question of how things have temporally begun, especially in the case of nature – philosophy, for him, deals with what is present. Göschel, on the other hand, explicitly answers this question by saying that it must have been absolute spirit – in essence, God – that has created matter.

From matter, Göschel jumps straight to the end of Hegel’s philosophy of nature, that is, to living organisms, which are the most spiritlike forms nature can produce. In other words, while the realm of nature, Göschel says, differentiates and solidifies the moments of the fluid process of thought, its forms become more and more unified, in the sense that in the more complex forms and especially in organisms their parts are less and less independent of one another. Yet, even organisms are still no spirits. Göschel, following Hegel, suggests that we could thus call the whole nature sick in the sense that it always dissatisfies the demand of becoming spirit.

Since Weisse ignored the first part of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit – the so-called subjective spirit – Göschel does not say much about it, but he does reprimand Weisse for not taking it seriously. Subjective spirit should be the first step away from nature and still partially linked with nature, and because this necessary first step is missing, Göschel insists, Weisse’s account of objective spirit appears to lack objectivity, which it then has to find beyond thought. It is for this reason, Göschel suggests, that Weisse considers human community or state to be mere means to an end – the world history. On the other hand, Göschel, following Hegel, thinks that world history is just the highest shape of the human community – the court of the whole world.

More sympathetically Göschel relates to Weisse’s idea that language is part of the objective spirit, while Hegel had restricted it to the subjective spirit. In fact, Göschel thinks that logic already as pure thought is some type of language, as the etymology suggests (logos meaning word). Subjective spirit, then, is the place where language is generated, Göschel continues, but objective spirit does have its own language, and the deepest shape of language can be found in absolute spirit, and more particularly, in art.

It is no wonder that Göschel finds Weisse’s account of absolute spirit very wanting, since it is based on the very idea that philosophy and thought is not enough and that there’s something more to be found beyond it. Göschel himself, on the other hand, suggests another way to amend the end of Hegel’s philosophy. In a rather formalistic manner – and in a manner followed by many Hegel-interpreters after him – Göschel takes a bit too seriously the trivisions of Hegelian philosophy and tries to correct Hegel by suggesting a better trivision, thinking he has thus made considerable progress. Thus, while logic is for Göschel the natural first point of the system, the second point should not be the philosophy of nature, but the whole philosophy of creation, dealing with nature (passive beginning), soul (separation of something active from nature) and human spirit (free activity). The third point, then, would be theology, as the study of God. Although he does not explicate this idea more closely, it clearly appears opposed to basic ideas of Hegel’s philosophy – God is not just something completely removed from creation and especially from human life, but merely one form of human existence.