I here reproduce, with permission, Canadian scholar Jim Devin's complete annotated translation of the portrait of Hegel by Heinrich Hotho (1802-73), his former student, friend and editor of Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics. Above is the cover of a recent biography of Hotho by Elisabeth Ziemer covering his life as an art historian, critic and philosopher.
Hotho’s Penned Portrait of Professor Hegel at Berlin.
from
Heinrich Gustav Hotho (1802-1873),Vorstudien für Leben und Kunst [Preliminary
Studies for Life and Art ], Stuttgart und Tübingen, 1835, 388-399. A contribution to the completion of Edward
Caird’s translation. 1.
[1]
It was at the beginning of my student-life that one morning I ventured to
present myself, shyly, yet full of trust, in Hegel’s room. He sat before a
broad writing-table, and was impatiently turning over the books and papers that
lay heaped in some disorder upon it. His figure was bent in premature age, and yet had a look of native
toughness and force; a yellow-grey dressing hung from his shoulders, covering
his person down to the ground. There was nothing very noticeable in his general
external appearance—no imposing height or charm of manner; rather an impression
of a certain honest downrightness, as of some citizen of the olden time, was
conveyed in his whole bearing. The first impression of his face, however, I
shall not easily forget. Pale and relaxed, his features hung down as if
lifeless; no destructive passion was mirrored in them, but only a long history
of patient thought. The agony of doubt, the ferment of unappeasable mental
disturbance, seemed never to have tortured, never at least to have overpowered
him, in all his forty years of brooding, seeking and finding; only the restless
impulse to develop the early germ of happily discovered truth with ever greater
depth and riches—with ever greater strictness of inevitable logic—had furrowed
the brow, the cheeks, the mouth. When his mind was slumbering, the features
appeared old and withered; when it awoke, they expressed all the earnestness
and strength of a thought, which, through the persistent effort of years, had
been developed to completeness. What dignity lay in the whole head, in the
finely formed nose, the high but somewhat retreating brow, the peaceful chin!
The nobleness of good faith and thorough rectitude in great and little, the
clear consciousness of having sought satisfaction in truth alone, was, in the
most individual way, imprinted on every feature. I had expected a testing and
inspiring discourse about philosophy, and was mightily surprised to hear
nothing of the kind. Just returned from a tour in the Netherlands,2. this exceptional man would talk of
nothing but the cleanliness of the cities, the charm and artificial fertility
of the country, the green far-stretching meadows, the ponds, canals, tower-like
mills, and well-made roads, the art treasures, and the formal but comfortable
manner of living of the citizens; so that after half an hour I felt myself as
much at home in Holland as with himself.
[2]
When, after a few days, I saw him again, in the professorial chair, I could not
at first accommodate myself either to the manner of his outward address or the
inward sequence of his thoughts. There he sat, with relaxed, half-sullen air,
and, as he spoke, kept turning backwards and forwards the leaves of his long
folio manuscript; a constant hacking and coughing disturbed the even flow of
speech; every proposition stood isolated by itself, and seemed to force its way
out all broken and twisted; every word, every syllable was, as it were,
reluctantly let go, receiving from the metallic ring of the broad Swabian
dialect a strange emphasis, as if it were the most important thing to be
said. Yet the whole appearance compelled such deep respect, such a feeling of
reverence, and attracted by such a naïve expression of overpowering earnestness,
that, with all my discomfort, and though I may have understood little enough of
what was said, I felt myself irresistibly bound to him. And no sooner, by zeal
and patience, had I accustomed myself to these outward defects of his address,
than they and its inward merits seemed to unite themselves into an organic
whole, which claimed to be judged by itself alone.
[3]
An easy-flowing eloquence presupposes that one has made up one’s final accounts
with the matter in hand, and therefore an ability of a merely formal kind is
able to chatter away with cheap attractiveness, without rising above the region
of the commonplace. His work, on the other hand, was to call up the most
powerful thoughts out of the deepest ground of things, and to bring them as
living forces to bear upon his audience; and for this it was necessary
that,—often as they had been mediated and recast through past years,—at every
new expression they should be reproduced afresh in himself. A more vivid and
plastic representation of this hard conflict and birth-labour of thought than
his manner of address could not be conceived. As the oldest prophets, the more
vehemently they struggle with language, utter with the more concentrated force
that thought which they half conquer, and which half conquers them, so did he
struggle and overcome by the unwieldy verve of his expression. Entirely
lost in his subject, he seemed to develop it out of itself for its own sake,
and scarcely at all for the sake of the bearer; and an almost paternal anxiety
for clearness softened the rigid earnestness which otherwise might have
repelled one from the reception of such hard-won thoughts. Stammering already
at the beginning, he forced his way on, made a new beginning, again stopped
short, spoke and meditated: the exact word seemed ever to be in request, and
just then it came with infallible certainty;3.
it seemed ordinary and yet was inimitably appropriate, uncommon and yet only
right; the essential thing appeared always to be unsaid, and yet unnoticed it
had been expressed already as completely as possible. Now one felt one had
grasped a proposition, and expected a further advance to be made. In vain. The
thought, instead of advancing, kept turning with similar words again and again
round the same point. Yet if the wearied attention was allowed to stray for a
moment, one found, on returning, that one had lost the thread of the discourse.
For slowly and carefully, by apparently insignificant intermediate steps, a
thought had been made to limit itself so as to show its one-sidedness, had been
broken up into differences and entangled in contradictions, the solution of
which suddenly brought what seemed most opposed to a higher reunion. And thus,
ever carefully resuming again what had been gone over before, and deepening and
transforming it by new divisions and richer reconciliations, the wonderful
stream of thought flowed on, twisting and struggling with itself, now isolating
and now uniting, now delaying and now springing forward with a leap, but always
steadily moving to its goal. Even one who could follow with full insight and
intelligence, without looking to the right or to the left, saw himself thrown
into the most strange tension and agony of mind. To such depths was thought
carried down, to such infinite oppositions was it turn asunder, that all that
had been won seemed ever again to be lost, and after the highest effort the
intelligence seemed to be forced to stand in silence at the bounds of its
faculty. But it was just in these depths of the apparently undecipherable that
that powerful spirit lived and moved with the greatest certainty and calm. Then
first his voice rose, his eye glanced sharply over the audience, and lighted up
with the calmly glowing flame of conviction, while in words that now flowed
without hesitation, he measured the heights and depths of the soul. What he
uttered in such moments was so clear and exhaustive, of such simple
self-evidencing power, that every one who could grasp it felt as if he had
found and thought it for himself; and so completely did all previous ways of
thinking vanish, that scarce a remembrance remained of the days of dreaming, in
which such thoughts had not yet been awakened.
[4] Only in the most comprehensible parts did he become ponderous and
wearisome. He twisted and turned, showed ill humour in all dispositions with
which he dealt with these things, and yet, when he brought the tedious business
to an end, all was again so clear and complete before one’s eyes, that also in
this connection one had to admire the livelier strangeness. On the other hand
he moved with like mastery among non-sensible abstractions as among the lively
wealth of phenomena. To a hitherto unequalled degree he would project himself
into every individual standpoint and to present the same in its full entirety.
As if it was his own world he seemed to be so attached with it, and only after
the full picture had been filled in, he pointed out the defects, the
contradictions through which it collapsed or led to other stages and shapes. In
this way he succeeded in portraying epochs, nations, occurrences, and
individuals completely; for his profound penetrating eye allowed him always to
recognize the decisive, and the energy of his original conception even in age
lost none of its youthful power and freshness. In such descriptions his large
vocabulary became effervescent; he could never limit apt depictive adjectives,
and yet each was necessary, new, unexpected, and so substantial in itself that
the whole that combined all the motley features forced itself on the memory
never again to vanish. Such a picture could not be altered independently; into
such definite forms it had been cast for all. And one’s own peculiarities and depths of mind, that seemed futile to
seize in words, were not able to withdraw themselves from this gift of
representation. He was
avid in praised acknowledgement of commendable ability and greatness, yet also he showed equal authority in the pungency and
bitterness of stinging polemic. How kindly, comparatively sounded the gentle
and tender in graceful tones; strong points roared along forcibly, without
order came the confused, the baroque and ridiculous revolted and delighted, the
hateful frightened in the same degree as the virtuous and good uplifted and
refreshed; the beautiful shone in mild brilliance, profundity deepened his
speech, and as the exalted surpassed all limits, the holy commanded the eternal
awe of reverence. And yet left with all this completion it was hard to
determine, whether he mastered more the thing, or the thing more him. Then here
too the ring was not escaped, and the pliant and established did not deny all
the painful trouble despite the inspiration of genius.
[5.]
After only a few years, I was fortunate to be attached to the immediate
circle of his younger acquaintances and friends. What
makes him indispensible above all for me
even today was his thoroughly consistent character. His disposition
was altogether consistent with his philosophy; his innermost nature stayed with
his thought, his most intimate will inseparably entwined with what his
scientific conviction prescribed to him as moral and right; and if, he was the
first ever of all those who subjected themselves to the discipline of coherent
thought to be given to recognize in every sphere of the past the reason of a
divinely-mirrored and realized course, so a like peace bound him with the world
around him, for this world stood there before him as the vibrant counterpart of
his innermost thought, woven through all things. That he had a
right, even a duty, to admit to himself. Nonetheless, though I searched far and
wide, I could not find his equal for unpretentious modesty. No objection would
faze him; the customary censure of the weak he dismissed with a laugh; and only
the arrogance of incomprehension, the presumption of incomplete understanding,
would from time to time exercise him,
and because he was conscious of having with difficulty achieved victory for
himself after the most noble exertion, he would feel slighted and bruised by
the pompously intentional neglect of recognized authorities. For it was a
fundamental trait of his character to combine inextricably the most unshakeable
independence with the highest degree of reverence. In
religious matters he fought with powerful weapons for the enlightened freedom
of thoughtful conviction, while he was nevertheless foremost to almost all in
the clear conception of the most orthodox doctrines; in politics, his moderate
constitutional attitude inclined him toward the basic tenets of the English constitution;
a corporate foundation he held essential also for more general affairs; the
rights of primogeniture for peers and princes he defended in every
consideration; indeed, he showed an involuntary ceremonial respect even for the
accidental superiorities of social rank, class, and wealth; and because in the
main he had the view that ministers and civil servants would be of more
understanding, he allowed the freedom to criticize and to know better to
representatives and the press, without really being disposed to claim it as an
inalienable civil right. Above all, however, all demagogical agitating was
detested by him; and
when it challenged with unclear feelings and unfounded thoughts more sensible
competency, like that chaotic German political heart-mongering, it found in him
then its bitterest adversary. For the fortuitousness of one’s own feelings, of
subjective opinion, arbitrariness and passion should be broken by youth onwards
was his continual demand and to exchange them for the solid principle toward
everything in life that is firm, lawful and substantial; when he also instead of that combative
morality with always only partial successes professed so profoundly by nobody
except Goethe that genuine ethics which is able to unite feeling, senses,
drives, wishes and will with what is necessary and rational in a complete
accord of uninterrupted habit and custom. It was on the basis of a fully
realized unity of the true and intrinsically richly developed universal with
the subjective and particular that his thought and action proceeded in every connection. Since however this direction in him developed
at a time, that had cultivated contrariwise in a one-sided way the most
subjective freedom of conscience, the way of acting and conviction, he, more by
his sentiment than by his thought, pushed back more certainly the incontestable rights of modern personality. Thus he was the
affectionate, most faithful husband, the tender, most concerned, even though
strict father; yet he demanded that marriage should be entered upon for
marriage and not for the most intimate love of souls; fondness, respect and
loyalty would be found by themselves, and knot the most indissoluble bonds. With
this upright disposition the insight into the manifold fluctuations,
contradictions and eccentricities of today's mind was not lacking to it; and as
he understood how to describe these discords and abysses, and he knew, if only
some deeply shocking substantial needs moved throughout them, to preserve a
constant participation and consideration. For everything that worked only in the human-heart’s depths, and might
break it never remained foreign to his rich nature. As
always his love of art even in the last years of his life could continue to
increase. Here, too, he was entirely at home,
and with his universal perspective he was able to penetrate all its fields, epochs, and works. Poetry indeed proved
most amenable to him, but he also queried architecture about its secrets not in
vain, sculpture still less evaded his discovery; an eye for painting was inborn
in him, and in music the masterpieces of every type were appreciated always by
his ear and mind. He was the first to give
oriental art its fitting position, and the more he
immerseded himself in later
years in the Chinese, Indian, Arabic and Persian
mental-outlooks, all the more trenchantly was he able to assess
it. Greek sculpture, architecture, and poetry were for
him the acme of all art that he admired as
the achieved most beautiful realized ideal; with the Middle Ages on
the other hand, apart from the architecture, so long as one felt no necessity
to model after Antiquity he was unable to get used to it, at no time completely. The external
confusion and in the detached mind, which unconcerned leaves the outer form to
the barbarism of chance, the diabolical and ugly, the graphical adverse
hardships and torments, the entire not deepened by an undivided inner religious
contradiction, a worldly untrained heart and its visible appearance always
remained for him a bone of contention. He was similarly at ease in
circumstances of amusement and frivolity; still the full depth of a joke would
elude him sometimes; and the most recent strain of irony was so inimical to his
own tendencies that you might say he lacked the organ that would have allowed
him to recognize what was authentic, much less take pleasure, therein.4.
[6] Convinced of this he ran up the edifice of his scientific worldview in silence and seclusion over a period of many years; the rigidity of its form, one look at which was sufficient to deter, militated against the entry, not to mention the applause of the masses. This too he could not fail to notice. In fact he received hospitably anyone who approached him with trust. How many of these comers was he forced to observe leave empty-handed after a short stay! With all the more affection did he attach himself to those who spared no effort to follow faithfully the route of his project; and if they in fact arrived at the goal, they would remain forever beneficiaries of his unwavering devotion.
[7] From his earliest youth Hegel had given himself with unwearied rectitude of
purpose to every kind of scientific study; in later years he had lived for a
time, like Schiller, estranged from the world, almost as in a cloister, while
the impulse towards active life was fermenting within him. When he emerged from
retirement, life subjected him to a hard school, outward embarrassments hemmed
him in on all sides; and clearly as he saw the necessity of a complete
remoulding of science, yet at that time he was far from feeling in himself the
power to achieve such a reform by his own efforts. For he was one of those
strong natures which only after a long process of growth, in the full maturity
of manhood, reveal all their depth, but which then bring to the riper
completion what has been so long developed in silence. When I first knew him
his main works were published, his fame stood high, and also in all externals
his position was fortunate. This comfort and peace lent to his whole
bearing—except when his temper was fretted or blunted by bodily suffering—the
most thorough kindliness. How gladly I met him on his daily walks; though he
seemed to move forward with effort and without spring, he was really more
robust and forcible than we younger men. He was ready for every
pleasure-party,—nay, complete relaxation seemed, with advancing years, to have
become more and more necessary to him. Who would then have recognized in him
the deepest spirit of his time? Ever ready for talk, he rather sought to avoid,
than to encourage, scientific subjects: the day’s gossip, the on dits of
the city, were welcome to him; political views, the art of the moment, came in
for a share of his attention; and as his aim was amusement and recreation, he
often approved at such moments what at other times he would have blamed,
defended what he had before rejected, and found no end of chaffing me for my
judicial strictness and straitness. What life there was in him at such times!
Yet if one walked beside him, there was no getting on; for at every other
moment he stood still, spoke, gesticulated, or sent forth a hearty ringing
laugh; and whatever he might say, even when it was untenable and spoken to
provoke contradiction, one was tempted to agree with him, so clearly and
vigorously was it expressed. An equally agreeable companion he was at concerts
and theatres—lively, inclined to applaud, ever ready for talk and jest, and
content even, when it came to that, with the commonplaces of good society.
Especially was he easy to please with his favourite singers, actresses, and
poets. In business, on the other hand, his sharp understanding made him so
painfully exact in weighing every pro and con, so scrupulous and
obstinate, that men of quick decisive ways were often driven to despair by him;
yet, if he had once resolved, his firmness was immovable. For in practical
matters he had no want of insight; only the execution was difficult for him,
and the smaller the matter the more helpless he was. Repellent personalities,
who were opposed to the whole direction of his efforts, he could not abide,
especially when their want of a fixed way of thinking had pained him in regard
to that which he revered most: only in his most happy moods could one induce
him to have any relations with such people. But when friends gathered around
him, what an attractive loving camaraderie distinguished him from all
others! The minute nuance of manners was not in his way; but a certain
somewhat ceremonious bourgeois frankness united itself so happily, with
jest where jest was in place, with earnest where the occasion required
earnestness, and always with an equable good-humour, that all those surrounding
him were instinctively drawn into the same tone. He was fond of the society of
ladies; and where he knew them well, the fairest were always sure of a
supportive devotion, which, in the pleasant security of approaching age, had
maintained the freshness of youth. The greater the retirement in which his
earlier laborious years had passed away, the greater was his pleasure in later days
to live in society; and as if his own depth needed to find a compensation in
the triviality or commonplace of others, at times he took pleasure in people of
the commonest stamp, and even seemed to cherish for them a kind of
good-humoured preference. With what natural dignity, on the other hand, and
with what unaffected earnestness, did he appear when some public occasion made
it necessary for him to come forward! And how many long hours of advice, of
testing, of confirmation, was he ready to devote to those who sought his aid
and guidance! If Plato5.
celebrates how Socrates at the banquet preserved complete sobriety and measure
even in the full tide of enjoyment, and when all the others were sleeping
about, continued with Aristophanes and Agathon to drink and philosophise, till
he left them overcome at cock-crow, and went out to the Lyceum to spend the day
as usual, and only at the second evening cared to lay himself down to rest—I
may surely say that Hegel alone, of all men whom I have seen, brought before my
eyes this image of joyous, untiring energy, with a vivid force of realisation
that can never be forgot.
1. This is believed to be the
first complete English rendering of Hotho’s German text. The text consists of
seven paragraphs of varying length. The number before each translated paragraph
is not in the original German text; they are included here to help identify the
source of the translation. The English version here is framed by the
translation of Edward Caird from his still very helpful book Hegel
(1883), pp. 97-102 who provided a translation of the complete first,
second and final [or seventh] paragraph and all but part of one sentence
of the third paragraph. No attempt has been made to copy Caird’s style in
the portions not rendered by him. Without the kind assistance of my friend Donald
Smith (Toronto) this complete rendering would not have been possible. My
friend George di Giovanni (Montreal) also contributed to its
realization. Special appreciation must be paid to the other partial English
translations of the text known to me:
Frederic Ludlow Luqueer
(1896) in his Hegel as Educator, pp. 94 - 100 – Paragraphs one and two
and parts of paragraphs three, four, five and seven.
Carl J. Friedrich (1954) in
the introduction to his The Philosophy of Hegel, lvi – Part of paragraph
three.
Walter Kaufmann (1965) in
his Hegel: Reinterpretation, Texts, and Commentary, pp. 350-
354. – Paragraph two and parts of
paragraphs one, three, five and seven.
Joachim Neugroschel (1968)
in his translation of Franz Wiedmann’s Hegel: An Illustrated Biography,
New York, pp. 97-100 – Paragraphs one and parts of paragraphs three and
four.
E. B. Garside (1975) in his
translation of Robert Heiss’s Hegel Kierkegaard Marx, New York, pp.
126-127 – Parts of paragraphs two and three.
Ulla Johnson ( 1983) in Bulletin
of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, No. 8, pp. 50 –53 –
Paragraphs one to four.
2. Hegel made a journey in 1822 both to Brussels and the Netherlands
from mid-September to mid- October.
3. Caird did not provide a translation from this point to the end of
the sentence. But Caird’s translation resumes after this sentence to the end of
paragraph three.
4. Hotho is probably alluding here to Hegel’s discussion in places
such as the Philosophy of Right
(1821) § 149 (f) where Hegel distinguishes the use of irony by
Plato’s Socrates who was ironical towards people and the use by the German
Romantics that is directed at ideas and values.
5. Hotho is alluding to the closing of Plato’s Symposium
223b-d.
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