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Walter Kaufmann 1959 The Hegel Myth and Its Method Source: “From Shakespeare to Existentialism: Studies in Poetry, Religion, and Philosophy” by Walter Kaufmann, Beacon Press, Boston 1959, 119, Chapter 7: The Hegel Myth and Its Method;Transcribed: by Kai Froeb. 1. Hegel’s importance. Hegel was not a pagan like Shakespeare and Goethe but a philosopher who considered himself Christian and tried to do from a Protestant point of view what Aquinas had attempted six hundred years earlier: he sought to fashion a synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christianity, making full use of the labors of his predecessors. Among these he counted not only the great philosophers from Heraclitus and Plato down to Kant, Fichte, and Schelling but also such world-historic individuals as Paul and the men who had made the French Revolution. As he saw it, philosophy did not stand between religion and poetry but above both. Philosophy was, according to him, its age comprehended in thought, and — to exaggerate a little — the philosopher’s task was to comprehend what the religious person and the poet feel. Hegel’s enormous importance becomes clear as soon as we reflect on his historic role. There is, first, his direct influence, which appears not only in philosophic idealism, which, at the turn of the last century, dominated British and American philosophy — Bradley, Bosanquet, McTaggart, T. H. Green, and Royce, to give but five examples — but also in almost all subsequent histories of philosophy, beginning with the epoch-making works of Erdmann, Zeller, and Kuno Fischer. It was Hegel who established the history of philosophy as a central academic discipline and as part of the core of any philosophic education. It was also Hegel who established the view that the different philosophic systems that we find in history are to be comprehended in terms of development and that they are generally one-sided because they owe their origins to a reaction against what has gone before. Secondly, most of the