The Successor to Metaphysics

Abstract

Hegel remains widely known but largely unread in Anglo-American philosophy. Although the earlier hostility to his thought in these circles has begun to fade, Hegel still remains for many philosophers a more or less peripheral figure, somebody to be taught once other subjects in the philosophy department have been covered. This is partly because of his obscure style and mostly because of the standard picture of Hegel that re mains in the psychic geography of many academic philosophers. Hegel is conceived as the last great thinker who tried to fashion a unified systematic picture of God, man and the world through something called dialectic. On this standard view, Hegel is seen as arguing for a kind of grand Spirit (God) who is gradually coming to self-consciousness by struggling through the contradictions He has created, using people as instruments for His (or its) coming to self-consciousness, until finally (around 1820 or thereabouts) He succeeds somewhere in Berlin. Spirit-God comes to full self-consciousness and as parts of this grand Spirit-God, we too come to a full awareness of what we really are. This kind of grand metaphysical cosmology and theodicy does not fit the more skeptical temperaments of many twentieth century academic thinkers. This view, however popular at large, has been widely challenged by Hegel scholars, and it is hard to find in the best recent literature on Hegel any example of such a reading. Hegel's thought has come in once more for serious and careful study. One fairly widely known and controversial view among Hegel scholars has been dubbed the non-metaphysical reading of Hegel.1 This sees Hegel as far more concerned with Kantian style questions about the nature of our categories and about questions of explanation than with these grand cosmological questions, and it sees Hegelian dialectic not as some esoteric procedure involved with a notion of the Absolute Spirit God working its way through contradictions to full Self-consciousness but with the construction, explanation and justification of basic categories of thought and reality. However, there has always been an overriding objection to this reading: regardless of how nicely it may fit some aspects of Hegel's thought, it does an injustice to his overall system and to why people have continually returned to Hegel for new insights. Whereas it might serve to locate some core of Hegelian dialectic that can be preserved, it slices so much out of his