THE FORERUNNERS

In the Preface to his Philosophy of Right Hegel coined the phrase that was later to divide the Hegelian school: ‘What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.’

The different glosses supplied for this sentence are at the root of the schism in the Hegelian school during the 1830s. Those who underlined the second half of the Master's dictum saw in it a philosophical justification for existing reality and drew politically conservative conclusions from it. Those who emphasized the first half of the sentence maintained that the whole phrase suggests that whatever can be shown to be rationally valid will ultimately be realized. For them Hegel's statement meant a far-reaching philosophical vindication of the radical and revolutionary postulate requiring them to shape the world according to Reason.

The debate about the open-endedness of the Hegelian system towards the future as an historical dimension was opened for the first time as early as 1838 in a book called Prolegomena zur Historiosophie. The author, Count August von Cieszkowski, a Polish aristocrat from the Posen area educated at Berlin University, is one of the more original—and somewhat bizarre—thinkers on the margin of the Hegelian school. After having been neglected for almost a century, he is only recently being slowly rescued from obscurity and oblivion. Since research has not yet caught up with Cieszkowski, an adequate study about the links between the Prolegomena and the later mystic Catholicism of his Polish book Ojcze Nasz is entirely lacking.