The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel

Allegra de Laurentiis, Jeffrey Edwards

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441124548
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

This international collaborative project on G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy includes contributions by eighteen scholars of 18th to 20th century philosophy. It will be an essential reference tool for students and scholars of modern philosophic thought in general and of 19th century German thought in particular. The first part of the volume examines Hegel's early writings up to and including the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. The second part is devoted to Hegel's major mature works and lectures as well as to the primary themes of his system of philosophy. It opens with a comprehensive account of Hegel's Science of Logic followed by detailed treatments of the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit from the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences. Three further parts of this volume investigate key concepts and interpretive issues, paradigmatic forms of Hegelian argumentation, and main lines of Hegel's influence since the mid-19th century. The volume contains chronologies of Hegel's life and works, a bibliography of primary and secondary sources and an analytical index.

PART I:

HEGEL’S PATH TO THE SYSTEM

1

TÜBINGEN, BERN AND FRANKFURT: 1788–1800

Martin Bondeli

The phase of Hegel’s life and work stretching from his formative years in Tübingen (1788–93) to his private tutorship in Bern and Frankfurt (1793–1800) marks a peculiar contrast with the later

image of the great and sovereign philosopher. Hegel’s fragments, notes, excerpts and letters up to 1800 (GW 1, 2 and 3)¹ make it difficult to discern their connection with the thinker who will one day write the Science of Logic (WL) or the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Enc) and who will lead post-Kantian systematic philosophy to a momentous culmination. For long stretches, the young Hegel is indecisive; he struggles to secure a professional and intellectual orientation. His literary output, devoted largely to theological and political matters, advances slowly and remains limited to wide-ranging collections of materials and unfinished reflections. Compared to his friend Schelling, five years his junior and in the philosophical limelight from the outset, Hegel’s is a solitary intellectual path. His relationship to post-Kantian philosophy, centred in Jena for two decades, long remains ambivalent. As a sympathetic and willing observer, yet without genuine enthusiasm, Hegel witnesses the completion of Kant’s philosophy begun in 1789 by Reinhold’s Elementary Philosophy (Elementarphilosophie) and carried forward in Fichte’s Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Science (Wissenschaftslehre) and in Schelling’s sketches for a transcendental and natural philosophy. Not until his Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (Differenzschrift) of 1801 does Hegel garner some acclaim, thus becoming linked to Jena’s intellectual movement, the royal road of German Idealism. This is not to say that Hegel’s work and thought prior to 1800 should be regarded as insignificant. For they give us insight into substantive and conceptual continuities that stand to inform our understanding of his later thinking. Moreover, some peculiarities of his thought can only be grasped by appreciating that the young Hegel arrives at post-Kantian philosophy through a theological and political detour. It is especially noteworthy that his thinking is distinguished in all phases by pronounced political and pedagogical orientations. From the time of his tutorship in Bern, Hegel persists in taking a stand on the political events of the time.

THE INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT IN TÜBINGEN (1788–93)

For an adequate understanding of Hegel’s path it is helpful to consider some facts about the intellectual milieu at the Tübingen Stift, the university in the protestant duchy of Württemberg where Hegel studies as a fellow during his formative years (see Rosenkranz, 1844, pp. 25–41; Pinkard, 2000, pp. 19–44; for the philosophical and theological contexts of the Tübingen years, see Franz, 2005, 2007).

During this period he earns a Master of Philosophy and sits for his qualifying exam in theology. He belongs to a circle of friends that includes several later luminaries. Among these are Hölderlin and Schelling, influential companions during his philosophical development. A regular topic of conversation in this circle is the conservatism of official Tübingen theology. The more enlightened among Hegel’s friends impugn the dogmatism of their teachers Storr and Flatt² with its combination of classical rationalist content and belief in miracles and revelation. The students regard this mixture as typical of the dominant positive religion – the antithesis of the natural, rational and tolerant religion endorsed by prominent thinkers like Rousseau, Herder, H. S. Reimarus, Lessing and Kant. Another topic of fervent conversation is the French Revolution of 1789. News of its developments lead to high expectations and to mounting sentiments of liberty and fraternity among students of the Stift. Indeed, many see themselves on the threshold of a new epoch. Hegel is an outspoken advocate of the revolution. Even afterwards, he would remain convinced that this event, despite its excesses, marked a crucial juncture of progress in mankind’s history. The friends embrace and debate everything that prompts change and renewal. Each has his favourite writers – for Hegel, Rousseau above all (see Nicolin, 1970, p. 12). In the context of the circle, he reads with special fondness Jacobi’s novels (see Rosenkranz, 1844, p. 40). These are clearly congenial to the perceived need for a religion of the heart and sentiment as opposed to traditional religious ritualism. Of enduring impact is the shared reading of Jacobi’s On the Doctrine of Spinoza (Über die Lehre des Spinoza). This has a peculiar effect on Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling. It directs their attention not just towards Jacobi’s philosophy of being, enriched by elements of docta ignorantia and Humean scepticism, but also towards the pantheistic doctrines of Spinoza and Bruno, for which Jacobi has both sympathy and scorn. Spinoza’s and Bruno’s monism and their religion-critical aura make them attractive to the Tübingen friends. Undeterred by the fatalism attributed to Spinoza, they regard this as a reason for re-interpreting Spinozian substance as the unity of nature and free subjectivity.

Finally, there is the influence of Kant’s philosophy. After 1789, his philosophy comes to be regarded at German universities as the spiritual and philosophical counterpart of the revolution. In his Letters on the Kantian Philosophy (Briefe über die Kantische Philosophie) Reinhold revered Kant as the new Messiah and provided a detailed account and generalized application of Kantian ‘results’, especially those of Kant’s moral theology. From this ‘gospel of pure reason’ Reinhold hoped to usher in the ‘reformation’ of all the sciences as well as one of the ‘most remarkable and beneficial revolutions’ of the human spirit (see Reinhold, 2007, vol. 2/1, pp. 70–3). Also swept up in this fervour are those who debate Kant in the Stift. Flatt teaches Kant’s first Critique as part of the Tübingen curriculum, although he himself is less than enthusiastic about the rise of moral-religious Kantianism.³ The idea of the ‘invisible church’, re-interpreted in Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Religion) as ‘ethical state’ (AA 6:94, 101), circulates among radical students of the Stift as a revolutionary formula.⁴ In a sermon, Hegel appeals to the ‘duties’ imposed by Jesus on the disciples and refers to a ‘kingdom of God’ to be established not through a ‘visible church’ but through a living religious spirit (cf. GW 1:70; see Nicolin, 1996, pp. 42–69).

On the whole, there is scarcely anything to indicate that in Tübingen Hegel has his own philosophical programme. His philosophical activity consists primarily in the enthusiastic dissemination of religious ideas of freedom and community. The background and sources of these ideas play secondary roles. Yet the soil on which his later philosophy would thrive is now staked out. Kant, Jacobi and Spinoza have become crucial landmarks on Hegel’s path towards post-Kantian systematic philosophy.

KANTIANISM IN BERN (1793–6)

Hegel’s programmatic reflections on theology and philosophy first emerge in Bern and Tschugg (see Bondeli, 1990, pp. 17–83; Schneider and Waszek, 1997; Pinkard, 2000, pp. 45–69).

At the end of the Tübingen period, he had developed original thoughts on the relation between ‘objective’, or ‘positive’, and ‘subjective religion.’ He resumes these reflections at the beginning of his stay in Bern. The earliest fragments (Studien 1792/3–1794, GW 1:73–114) display a distinctive critique of objective or positive religion, understood as a religion that appeals to the understanding or demands blind faith in truths of revelation. Its fixation on exterior practices and rituals, Hegel writes, serves as ideological instrument of a particular class. Against this, he demands a return to a subjective religion that satisfies the understanding as much as the heart and conscience – a religion not geared towards private interests but one that serves as popular religion. In Bern, Hegel sharpens and concretizes this theoretical approach. Employing the keyword ‘positivity’, he launches a polemical attack against religious and political currents that he thinks are formalistic, legalistic, particularistic and hostile to sensibility. His polemics are primarily directed against Christian religion and theology. Seeking to seize Christianity by its roots, he combines a sober account of the life and teachings of Jesus (Das Leben Jesu, 1795, GW 1:205–78) with in-depth inquiry into how Jesus’ moral lessons and religion of the heart could have mutated into a positive religion and contributed to the development of a theocratic state. He concludes that the spread of Christianity, shaped by the Judaic religion of laws and by Jesus’ sacrifice, is nothing less than calamitous. In this scathing indictment, the history of Christianity figures as a series of schisms, falsifications and failed attempts at reconciliation (Studien 1795/6, GW 1:329–31). While gathering source materials for his novel religion, Hegel expands his account of the opposition between subjective and objective religion to include religious and cultural history, thus linking this opposition to a ‘difference between the Greek religion of the imagination and the Christian positive religion’ (GW 1:365). Bolstered by Herder’s and Schiller’s work, he maintains that subjective religion should seek its historical model neither in current nor in original Christianity but in ancient communal religion.

Hegel’s aim in Bern is to ground both the critique of positive religion and his ideal of subjective religion. In Tübingen, he did not align himself with Shaftesbury, Rousseau, Spi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I:HEGEL’S PATH TO THE SYSTEM
• PART II:   THE SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY
• PART III:   SUBSTANTIVE AND INTERPRETATIVE QUESTIONS
• PART IV:   HEGEL’S FORMS OF ARGUMENT
• PART V:   HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCE
• PART VI:   CHRONOLOGIES
• Selected Bibliography
• Index of names
• Copyright