ABSTRACT
The three friends had plenty to talk about other than their studies. Believing as so many great thinkers have done that they lived in an age of transition, they speculated on what form the new world should take. In particular, they derived from Rousseau and Lessing a concern to identify the spiritual contours of the society that would emerge from the revolutionary turmoil, and under the influence of Hölderlin in particular, they looked backwards to an idealized conception of ancient Greece as a world of beauty and harmony and forward to a society that could accommodate the revolutionary aspiration to freedom. Hostile to the orthodox Christianity drummed into them at the Seminary (and no doubt regurgitated in their successful examination performances) the three friends were entranced by Jacobi’s critical revelation of Lessing’s alleged Spinozistic pantheism. From these controversies Hegel was to develop an early preoccupation with the form of religion or spirituality that would serve as the lifeblood of the emergent new civilization. Though fascinated by the political developments of their age, their response was that of rarefied spiritual analysis as much as close political study and debate.
