The Philosophy of Hegel

Allen Speight

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317493693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Few philosophers can induce as much puzzlement among students as Hegel. His works are notoriously dense and make very few concessions for a readership unfamiliar with his systematic view of the world. Allen Speight's introduction to Hegel's philosophy takes a chronological perspective on the development of Hegel's system. In this way, some of the most important questions in Hegelian scholarship are illuminated by examining in their respective contexts works such as the "Phenomenology and the Logic". Speight begins with the young Hegel and his writings prior to the "Phenomenology" focusing on the notion of positivity and how Hegel's social, economic and religious concerns became linked to systematic and logical ones. He then examines the "Phenomenology" in detail, including its treatment of scepticism, the problem of immediacy, the transition from "consciousness" to "self-consciousness", and the emergence of the social and historical category of "Spirit". The following chapter explores the Logic, paying particular attention to a number of vexed issues associated with Hegel's claims to systematicity and the relation between the categories of Hegel's logic and nature or spirit (Geist). The final chapters discuss Hegel's ethical and political thought and the three elements of his notion of "absolute spirit": art, religion and philosophy, as well as the importance of history to his philosophical approach as a whole.

CHAPTER ONE
German Idealism and the young Hegel

The story of the "young Hegel" - Hegel in the earliest years of his development before the writing of the Phenomenology of Spirit - is one that has been told from a number of different and not necessarily incompatible perspectives: some have read it as the story of a young man focused on political issues and the task of being a philosophical educator of some sort, while others have read it as the story of a former seminarian whose concern for essentially theological issues gave way to a critical stance on existing forms of religion and moved him to systematic philosophy. However partial these readings may be, they share a correct view: an exploration of the philosophical development of the young Hegel is a crucial point of departure for anyone trying to make sense of who Hegel became and what we can take Hegelianism to be as a result.

In this chapter, I shall take up the question of Hegel's philosophical development with two particular concerns in mind: (a) the general intellectual background of the post-Kantian world that is the common framework for German Idealism and early German Romanticism, and (b) Hegel's interest in the issues posed within that intellectual world. (The small German town of Jena turns out to be unusually important for both.) What will emerge at the end of this period is a Hegel whose philosophical views have been shaped importantly by a concern with the range of questions of interest to idealists and Romantics both, but whose individual contributions have begun to look distinctive against that general intellectual environment.

One general approach that has been taken to the young Hegel is to see his intellectual trajectory as linked, at least at its deepest point of origin, to a distinctly Romantic set of concerns - and by Romantic here is meant "early German Romantic", in the tradition of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. On this view of Romanticism, the most motivating concern is with what is often called being "at home" in the world: the Romantics looked somehow to emerge from the modern experience of division, alienation and oppression of nature to find themselves instead in a world that is experienced more as an organic whole. The Hegel who, on this reading, is moved by the Romantic concern with finding a home in the world comes to be the systematist that he does, however, because there is in his intellectual baggage as well an essentially Enlightenment commitment that is interested in giving a rational articulation of that organicist impulse.

This story is fine as far as it reaches, yet it will not be - for all that Hegel will be shown to share with the Romantics - the story told here. The Romantic impulse, after all, is frequently non-foundationalist and sceptical, rather than systematic in its aspiration (witness Novalis's famous comment that "philosophy is actually homesickness - the urge to be everywhere at home").¹ The point of departure I will suggest instead is one framed not by Schlegel and Novalis but first of all by the rather more tragic philosophical explorations of Hegel's friend Hölderlin. For it was Hölderlin who appears to have introduced Hegel to a line of criticism of the Fichtean approach to the post-Kantian philosophical project and to have suggested an essential rubric under which the relation between subject and object should be seen as a sort of initial separation emerging from a more primitive unity somehow "behind" all of our experience. It is this background image that Hegel seems to have had in mind as he started (in this case, along with his friend Schelling) to work out how it is essentially bound up with arriving at the correct "idealist" standpoint (and thus how infinity and finitude, subjective and objective could be united). But it would seem that Hegel (unlike Schelling) takes this question most to heart not merely in terms of the "stance" to be arrived at but - most importantly - the correct and rigorous journey that anyone could follow in order to get there. Thus it is that for the young Hegel the problem of scepticism retains an important hold - and one that in fact returns us indeed to some version of the problem of "being at home in the world", but with a different perspective, since the animating question for Hegel by the end of this period will be precisely how anyone could be led to the level of idealist philosophy's position, and so with the wider concern that the methodological project itself is somehow directly social and political.

In the present chapter, I shall chart this intellectual journey of Hegel's first by looking at his development within the context of the emergence of German Idealism itself during the years he spent at Berne and Frankfurt (1793-1800) following his graduation from the Tubingen seminary, and then by comparing four decisive early works from the Jena period (1801-6), which, taken together, offer an unusually rich and specific introduction to the set of questions that come to animate Hegel's ultimate philosophical stance.

Tendencies of a revolutionary age

Hegel's birth in 1770 (in the town of Stuttgart, capital of the German-speaking duchy of Wiirttemberg) makes him a member of that generation which came of age just as the French Revolution was beginning - he was eighteen at the time of the storming of the Bastille. The romantic and revolutionary ferment of that era is often associated with the famous remark of Wordsworth, born the same year as Hegel: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven ..." Yet the "age of revolution" is a notion that carried a somewhat different meaning in Germany than it did either in France or in Wordsworth's England.

To begin with, it is only a convenient contemporary fiction to say that Hegel was born in "Germany", since that was an entity that did not come to exist until decades after his death. Hegel's national identification was instead as a Swabian from Württemberg, one of the numerous duchies and principalities of the German-speaking world.² For the German-speaking generation that was born in or around Wordsworth's birth-year of 1770 and that came of age in the 1790s - a generation that included not only Hegel and his college classmates Holderlin and Schelling, but also the Romantic figures Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, as well as the composer Beethoven-the differencesin how the "age of revolution" was viewed had a great deal to do with the intellectual and social character of German life at the time.

Perhaps the best place to begin an account of what made the German context of this era different is with the well-known fragment of Friedrich Schlegel (Athenaeum Fragments [no. 216]):

The French Revolution, Fichte's philosophy, and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister are the greatest tendencies of the age. Whoever is offended by this juxtaposition, whoever cannot take any revolution seriously that isn't noisy and materialistic, hasn't yet achieved a lofty, broad perspective on the history of mankind.

There are a number of things worth noticing in Schlegel's juxtaposition. The first is something that becomes almost a commonplace in writing in and about the period - as Heine and Marx, among others, were later to stress: while the French revolutionary moment is one of political deeds, the corresponding German revolutionary contribution is philosophical and literary. No one perhaps has summed up better the move from the first tendency to the second - and the importance of their connection for the birth and developmental energy of German Idealism - than Schelling, who put it quite simply in one of his first publications: "the beginning and end of all philosophy is - freedom!"³

The events, distant and French though they were, mattered, of course, too. Hegel was a college student during the French Revolution; it is a probably apocryphal story that he and his two college friends, Schelling and Holderlin, took time from their theological studies in Tubingen to plant a liberty tree, but there is no question about their initial fervour in relation to the ideals of the revolution. The story of how the three Tubingen students came to make contributions to this age of freedom is in the end much more dominated by Fichtean philosophy and the rise of the Romantic novel as a literary form, however: each of the three would in the end come to take an importantly different philosophical stance towards Fichte, and each would share in the aesthetic enthusiasm that surrounded the development of a distinctly modern form of narrative.

Fichte, Jena and the development of German Idealism

All of these currents in the German philosophical and literary world of the 1790s may be said to have had a remarkable geographical centre: the small university town of Jena (with 4,300 people and 800 students), on any account one of the most liberal and progressive university communities of its day in Germany or elsewhere. Drawn to its light in the mid- and late-1790s was a "who's who" of German intellectual culture: Friedrich and August Schlegel, along with their wives Caroline Schlegel Schelling and Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit, Novalis and Schleiermacher, with Goethe and Schiller close by in neighbouring Weimar. A leading edge of philosophical research stemming from Kant, it housed the important journal Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (ALZ), which had become an important organ of Kantian philosophical writing, and had attracted in succession Karl Reinhold in 1787 and Fichte in 1794.

The Jena of these years was thus, in Friedrich Schlegel's words, a "symphony of professors", but there was no one more central to the intellectual activity surrounding it than Fichte, whom Holderlin called the "soul of Jena". Starting with his inaugural lecture on 23 May 1794, Fichte drew students widely, not only among aspiring philosophers but also among those whose interest and fame would prove to be more literary - Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel and Holderlin, for example, were all drawn to make serious studies of Fichte's philosophy at one point or another in their own intellectual development.

Fichte's emerging philosophical stance in his Jena lectures presented to the public an important turn in the development of post-Kantian idealism. Reinhold had attempted to give what he thought was a necessary grounding to the Kantian project as a whole by beginning from a single first principle - what he called the "principle of consciousness", that "in consciousness the subject distinguishes the representation from the subject and object and relates it to both". But that attempt at grounding had quickly been called into question by G. E. Schulze in an essay named, after the ancient sceptic, Aenesidemus: Schulze argued, among other things, that if the "fact of consciousness" were the first principle of philosophy, it would be based on an infinite regress - since the subject needs to have a representation of itself, and there would need to be a representation of that, and so on.

The effect of Schulze's sceptical query to Reinhold was devastating for Reinhold's career, but Fichte (who reviewed the Aenesidemus essay for ALZ) not only picked up the difficulty but suggested a new way of proceeding: self-consciousness needed a different sort of account that was not representationalist, as Reinhold's attempt had been. What was needed was a point of departure not based in a fact (Tatsache) like the supposed "fact of consciousness" but rather was an action (Tathandlung). As Fichte came to state it in the course of his developing Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre, of which he wrote some sixteen versions), the proposition "I = I", which proclaims the necessary unity of self-consciousness, requires that there be some "not-I", but since that not-I can only be something posited by the I itself, the I must strive to overcome that not-I by showing that any possible other is what it is only by construction from the necessary conditions of the I itself. Our experience of objects of knowledge is thus something that we have by means of the self-grounding activity of the I.

Fichte's philosophical standpoint was still one that was rooted in the "I" as a single first principle. Among the listeners who began to raise questions about both the attempt at grounding philosophy on first principles (what Reinhold and Fichte shared) and the attempt to make that first principle the "I" was Hegel's old Tübingen friend Holderlin, who had made it to Jena in November of 1794 (albeit with the task of looking after a rather difficult young student in his charge) and was now soaking up Fichte's lectures, both in public and in private.

Hegel and the 1790s: towards “Intervention in the Life of Men”

Hegel's own development during these heady years of Jena's golden era had been at some remove from the centre of philosophical and cultural activity, both geographically and philosophically. His post-graduation plans following Tübingen - serving as a house tutor to a wealthy family in the Swiss city of Berne - were, at least for the time being, decidedly less alluring than what either of his friends was up to. Holderlin wrote to him from Jena in early 1795 with an account of how the Fichtean philosophy was developing, giving rapturous details also of his meeting with the illustrious Goethe ("Goethe and I have spoken. Brother! It is the most beautiful enjoyment of our life to find so much humanity among the great. . ."). Schelling, meanwhile, had already become something of a Wunderkind, with the publication of several important philosophical works (including On the Possibility of a Form for All Philosophy, Of the "I" as Principle of Philosophy, and Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism) from 1794 on. (Still in Tübingen, Schelling wrote to Hegel only a few days after Holderlin's letter about developments in Reinhold's philosophy and offered his old friend a remarkable confession stimulated by the new intellectual currents: "I have become a Spinozist. . .").

Hegel's intellectual progress in this time period, by contrast, seems to have been much more narrowly focused. Hegel had seemed to evince an interest from quite early in being a sort of philosophical "educator of the people" (a model he inherited in part from Lessing); his writing during this formative period is often said to be focused either on political issues (The Young Hegel in the title of Lukács's work) or on theological matters (Early Theological Writings, the title the Lutheran pastor Hermann Nohl gave to the collection of these juvenilia when they were first edited and published in the first decade of the twentieth century). The truth seems to be that both of these interests are present, although not yet connected to a systematic philosophical set of concerns.

At Tübingen Hegel had already written a "Life of Jesus" according to a Kantian moral template; while at Berne his religious and political interests focus particularly on what he calls (following Kant) the problem of "positivity" - of merely posited law or forms of obedience - and what would be the grounds instead for a "religion of freedom", for examples of which he looked particularly to the Greeks.

Perhaps the most decisive influence on the young Hegel, both practically and intellectually, was the move of his friend Hölderlin from Jena to Frankfurt - and his managing to arrange for Hegel to get a new house tutor's position in the same city. Around Hölderlin during this period there emerged a circle of friends, which included a number of notable figures, all interested in the connections between post-Kantian philosophy and the construal of the broader social world. Although much of what Hegel and Holderlin shared in their conversations is a matter of some historical speculation, we do have some important windows in a couple of remarkable texts from this period.

The first of these texts is a short fragment that Hölderlin himself presumably wrote during his final months in Jena but never published. It is, however, no doubt reflective of a significant line of criticism of the Fichtean approach to philosophy which Hegel and Holderlin must have discussed, for it retained a lifelong hold on Hegel, offering the promise of a new philosophical point of departure. In the fragment, which was given the title "Judgment and Being",⁴ Hölderlin constructs an important play on words around the notion of "judgment", which in German is the word Urteil (in older German, Urtheil). Holderlin takes the hidden meaning of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 German Idealism and the young Hegel
• 2 The Phenomenology of Spirit
• 3 The Logic and Hegel's system
• 4 Ethics and politics
• 5 Hegel and the narrative task of history
• 6 Art, aesthetics and literary theory
• 7 Religion and philosophy
• Notes
• Guide to further reading
• Bibliography
• Index