Hegel Enc Preface 2

Philosophy itself, meanwhile, experiences its worst fate at the hands of those same individuals when they make it their business to meddle in philosophy, construing it and judging it [on their own terms]. The fact [Faktum] of physical or spiritual, in particular also religious vitality, is distorted by a reflection incapable of grasping it. Yet, as far as it is concerned, this way of construing the fact has the sense of initially elevating it to the level of something known [Gewußte] and the difficulty lies in this transition from the basic matter to knowledge, a transition that is the work of deliberating on the matter. In the science itself, this difficulty is no longer on hand. For the fact of philosophy is knowledge that has already been prepared and, with this, the process of construing the matter would be a thinking over [Nachdenken] only in the sense of thinking that follows after the fact [nachfolgendes Denken]. It is only [the act of] evaluating that would demand a thinking over in the usual meaning of the term. But that uncritical understanding demonstrates itself to be equally unfaithful in the naked construal of the idea that has been articulated in a determinate manner; it has so little suspicion or doubt of the fixed presuppositions contained within it that it is even incapable of repeating the bare fact of the philosophical idea. Miraculously, this understanding combines the following double-barrelled approach [das Gedoppelte] within itself. It is evident to this understanding that in the idea there is a complete departure from and even explicit contradiction of its use of categories – and at the same time no suspicion dawns on it that another way of thinking than its own is present and employed and that its thinking would have to behave differently here than usual. In this manner it happens that the idea of speculative philosophy is fixed upon immediately in terms of its abstract definition, on the supposition that a definition would of itself necessarily appear clear and settled and that it would have its regulating mechanism and criterion in presupposed representations alone, at least without knowing [in der Unwissenheit] that the sense of the definition like its necessary proof lies solely in its development and in the way the definition proceeds from the latter as a result. More precisely, since the idea in general is the concrete, spiritual unity but the understanding consists in construing conceptual determinations only in abstraction and thus in their one-sidedness and finitude, that unity is made into an abstract identity, devoid of spirit, an identity in which difference is not on hand but instead everything is one; even good and evil, among other things, are one and the same. Hence, the name ‘system of identity’, ‘philosophy of identity’ has already come to be a received name for speculative philosophy. If someone were to make his profession of faith as follows: ‘I believe in God the Father, the Creator of heaven and earth’, it would be surprising if someone else were to conclude from this first part that the person professing his faith believed in God, the creator of heaven, and therefore considered the earth to be uncreated and matter to be eternal. The fact is correct that in his profession of faith that person has declared that he believes in God, the creator of heaven, and yet the fact, as others have construed it, is completely false; so much so that this example must be regarded as incredible and trivial. And yet this violent bifurcation takes place in the way the philosophical idea is construed, such that, in order to make it impossible to misunderstand how the identity (which is, we are assured, the principle of speculative philosophy) is constituted, the explicit instruction and respective refutation ensue to the effect that, for instance, the subject is different [verschieden] from the object [Objekt], likewise the finite from the infinite, and so forth, as if the concrete, spiritual unity were in itself devoid of any determinateness and did not in itself contain the difference, as if someone did not know [nicht wu ̈ßte] that subject and object [Objekt] or the infinite and the finite were different from one another, or as