Hegelian System Research Articles

Before and after Hegel: a historical introduction to Hegel's thought

In this engaging and accessible introduction to Hegel's theory of knowledge, Tom Rockmore presents the philosopher's ideas the way Hegel himself saw them: as coming to grips with, even competing with, prior philosophical positions. Carefully laying out the philosophical tradition of German idealism, he concisely explicates the theories of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, essential to an understanding of Hegel's thought. Rockmore shows how Hegel first formulates his own position in relation to the philosophical discussion of his own historical moment, before extending the discussion, in a second phase, to the entire historical tradition. The Hegelian system, according to Rockmore, remains an essentially modern conception of knowledge, surprisingly relevant to our contemporary intellectual situation. Rockmore's remarkably lucid book will interest general readers as well as students of philosophy, intellectual history, politics, culture, and society.

From hermeneutics in social science toward a hermeneutics of social science

standing of their age in terms of its being a product of world-historical progression, where each stage contained its own possibilities and limitations as well as being superceded in turn by another stage. Hegel constructed a grand philosophical edifice on this new ground of selfunderstanding. No one has ever transcended and no one will ever transcend, he contended, in action, thought, project, fantasy or utopia his own Time; we shall not be able to do so either. Yet, Hegel added, the past that we are able to recollect from the peak of our present is the Whole, that is, the whole History and the whole Truth.1 The Hegelian time capsule carries a dual paradox that only the Hegelian system was momentarily able to sublate. Reflected universalism had given birth to Faustian Man, who overthrows all taboos and transcends all limits, who is eager to know everything, to act out all his projects and desires. However, the same reflected universality publicly declared that we are captives of the prisonhouse of contemporaneity. Reflected universalism had transformed Truth into "historical Truth," robbing the world of the eternal, the timeless, without ever being able to quench the thirst for certitude both in the outer and inner worlds. Modern historical consciousness inherently encompasses this dual paradox, just as well as all the attempts to live with it and bear with it proudly.

Glasnostalgia

On the first page of Glas Derrida writes in the left column that “This” is a legend, not a fable. “This” could be that or this pronoun. It could be Hegel's signature, Sa signature referred to a few lines earlier, Hegel's corpus, also referred to earlier, what Derrida is in the course of writing, and much else. Not Hegel's whole corpus, however, but two passages: the religion of flowers and the phallic column of India. On each page there are two columns. The right column has to do especially with Jean Genet, especially with Genet's writing about flowers, especially the flower of the broom, genêt; but genêt is also a common noun for a kind of Spanish horse. In other words, the religion of flowers and its role as an introduction to the religion of animals are in play also in the right column. And just as the right column plays on the possibilities of taking a mark as a proper and a common name, so too does the left column, for example on the chances of hearing the name of the eagle in the name of the philosopher when these names are pronounced à la française. So pronunciation has an important part in this. But reading has an important part in pronunciation, legein in logos. The fable thought of as pure thought without mark, immaculate conception, is at stake in Glas. “Glas” means the voice that speaks, as “fable” is from fari, to speak. So is the reader about to discover in Glas something that sticks in the throat of the Hegelian system, resisting digestion there, a materialism of the idea that resists Aufhebung to absolute knowledge? Or is Derrida lifted thither in the eagle's talons? For does not the dialectic thrive on resistance? Would it not be a bad reading of Hegel's text that failed to comprehend this? ButWhat would it mean not to comprehend (Hegel) the text Sa ? If it is a matter of a finite failure, the failure is in advance included, comprehended in the text. If it is a matter of an infinite fault or lack, one would have to say that Sa does not think itself, does not say itself, does not write itself, does not read itself, does not know itself, which no longer means anything, by definition. Sa always ends by being full, heavy, pregnant with itself.

Absolute Knowledge: Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics (review)

13o JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 24:1 JANUARY 1986 has set for himself; in the chapter entitled 'Youthful Scholasticism' a number of the quotations actually come from much later writings. Perhaps after all the diachronic approach is not well-suited to introducing a philosopher whose range of themes and interests is as broad as Leibniz's. Apart from its stress on Leibniz's development, a further distinctive feature of the book is the space it devotes to metaphilosophical issues. Like other recent writers (Loeb, for example), Brown deplores the textbook division of seventeenth-century philosophers into the warring schools of Rationalism and Empiricism. Brown is on strong ground here; this habit of thought is so deeply entrenched that there is no harm in attacking it once again. But Brown is less convincing when he attempts to drive a metaphilosophical wedge between Leibniz and the other 'Rationalists' socalled . He claims that Leibniz's method "even in metaphysics, is much closer to what is nowadays called the hypothetico-deductive method than to that characteristic of Descartes and Spinoza in metaphysics" (63). But even if Brown is right about Leibniz 's method, it is not clear that this sets him apart in the way suggested: Jonathan Bennett has recently argued that Spinoza's method in the Ethics is also hypothedcodeductive . What does seem to be clearly true is that Leibniz does not regard all metaphysical truths as logically necessary. For example, according to Leibniz materialism is contingently false, even though its falsity is knowable a pr/0r/. Brown's eagerness to combat the textbook view of seventeenth-century philosophy sometimes results in strange exegetical claims. In particular, his desire to challenge the traditional opposition of Leibniz and Locke leads him into a flagrant distortion of the debate over natural kinds. Brown tells us that according to Leibniz, "the world does not contain 'natural kinds' but only particulars" (i 1l); again in a footnote we are told that there is a contrast between "Leibniz's nominalism" and "Locke's essentialism" (134 n. 2). Although the issue between the two philosophers in Book III of the New Essays is not always easy to pin down, few readers could fail to notice that Brown has the positions almost exactly reversed. It is Leibniz's spokesman who insists that species are "present in nature whether or not we know it or like it" (New Essays, III. vi). Brown's Leibniz is written in a lucid and pleasing style, but on the whole, it fails in what it sets out to do. Readers who are approaching Leibniz for the first time will hardly be helped by the bibliography; it includes much mediocre material and omits much that is distinguished. NICHOLAS JOLLZY Universityof California, San Diego Alan White. Absolute Knowledge: Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics. Series in Continental Thought, Vol. 4. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 198a. Pp. xii + 188. Cloth, $2~.95; Paper, $al.95. The author has entered upon one of the vast fields of philosophy--the comparison of two idealist systems, and upon one of the great topics of modern philosophy: the BOOK REVIEWS 13I relationship of the Hegelian concept to concrete reality. A comparison, a mutual critique of Hegel and Schelling, is all the more surprising since, in English, we have little literature on Schelling's dense thought. At the very least, from this volume the reader learns much about German philosophy in the early nineteenth century, about its origin in Kant and its climax in both Schelling and Hegel. In his introductory pages, White argues that basic critiques of Hegel are found in Schelling and that Schelling's struggle for a philosophy both transcendental and existential does not simply replace or dismiss Hegel. Schelling's critique of Hegel develops in two stages: the first questions whether the totality or the representative work of the Hegelian system is worth retaining; the second argues that the entire undertaking is misguided. White's book is divided into two parts examining these two critiques. In Part One, he argues that Hegel's Logicsurvives Schelling's criticism that it lacks a foundation in reality for its system and thinking; in Part Two, he argues that Schelling...

Hegel's Phenomenology as a Philosophy of Culture

Hegel's Phenomenology as a Philosophy of Culture ALBERT WILLIAM LEVI 1 There are many ways to read Hegel's Phenomenology: strictly for itself as a great classic in the history of philosophy (this is the strategy of the notable commentaries of Hyppolite, Loewenberg, and Lauer); as an introduction to the Hegelian system or a significant segment of the same (the way of Walter Kaufmann, Charles Taylor, and J. N. Findlay), or as a notable illumination of a particular domain of subject matter (as in Judith Shklar's Freedom and Independence: a Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind).' I wish to follow in the footprints neither of Loewenberg and Hyppolite nor of Findlay and Taylor, but of Shklar. However, my reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit places it not in the tradition of political ideas which begins with Plato, but in the tradition of the philosophy of culture which begins with Voltaire and Kant. Kant died in 18o4. The Phenomenology was published in 18o7. But this three year interval signifies something infinitely more important than the end of one philosopher's life and the first significant publication of another. In fact it represents a decisive break between the rationalism of the eighteenth century Enlightenment and the emerging spirit of romanticism coming to life in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Kant died late but his mind was made by Christian Wolff, Leibniz and Newton, and David Hume, and his mode of perception was not unlike that of Lichtenberg, Jean Hyppolite, Genkse et Structure de la Ph~nom~nologie de L'Esprit de Hegel (Paris: Aubier, Editions Montaigne, 1946) ~ vols.; J. Loewenberg, Hegel's Phenomenology: Dialogues on the Li]e ~ Mind (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1965); Quentin Lauer, S. J., A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Fordham University Press, 1976); Walter Kauf'mann, Hegel: A Reinterpretation (New York: Anchor Books, 1966); Charles Taylor, Hegel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975); J. N. Findlay, Hegel."A Re-examination (New York: Collier Books, 196~); Judith Shklar, Freedom and Independence: The Political Ideas of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976). [445] 446 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 2~: 4 OCT 1984 Lessing, and Laplace. Hegel's mind was formed on other models and his mental slant had much in common with Hoelderlin's lyrics, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and the more romantic historical dramas of Schiller. It is a question of historical moment and world-feeling. The formation of Kant's mentality predates the great historical divide of the French Revolution. It is not so much that his politics is ancien r~gime (it is, of course, liberal and forward looking) as that his mode of perception is classic. For him, to domesticate experience requires the imposition of order and organization, of rationality and rules. But Hegel's universe is instinct with the flux of post-revolutionary uncertainty, and thus for him all human culture is primarily a matter of movement, growth, and dialectical development. Romanticism implies a triumph of temporality and historicity over logic, of growing and developing concepts over categorial fixity. Kant praised Christian Wolff--"the greatest of all the dogmatic philosophers"--for his rationalist method, for having by his example awakened the spirit of thoroughness in Germany, and Kant himself in his methodological rigor continued this tradition even further. But if the Critique of Pure Reason courts comparison with the exactitude of a scientific treatise, Walter Kaufmann is surely right in denying such scientific rigor to Hegel 's great work. "The Phenomenology," he said, ~ "is certainly unwissenschaftlich : undisciplined, arbitrary, full of digressions, not a monument to the austerity of the intellectual conscience and to carefulness and precision but a wild, bold, unprecented book that invites comparison with some great literary masterpieces." The characterization is just. I have already mentioned the analogy with Goethe's Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister. Others have likened the Phenomenology of Spirit to Dante's Divine Comedy,Goethe's Faust, and Homer's Odyssey. What is apt and central in all of these analogies is the notion of a spiritual journey through time and history. Here the Phenomenologyemerges less as an epistemology...

The Hegelian system, "Science" or tomb of freedom?

The Hegelian system, "Science" or tomb of freedom?

A response to Professor Colletti: An analysis and critique ofMarxism and Hegel

Lucio Colletti in his recent text Marxism and Hegel (NLB, London, 1973) has made a significant attempt to clarify what 'relationship' if any, actually exists between the thought and works of Hegel and Marx. It is against the 'Marxists' of the Frankfurt School as well as against Engels, Lenin and the Soviets, that Colletti directs his critical attack.1 The author's task, as he sees it, is to explicate the fact that Marx himself did not comprehend his work, both the early Critique of HegeVs Philosophy of Right, as well as the mature Capital, as an intellectual derivative of Hegel's philosophy. Marxian analysis, for Marx and for Colletti, is not merely a revision and reconstitution of the Hegelian system. It is a radical departure which leaves all of Hegel's proposi tions about philosophy intact to the extent that in Marx philosophy itself is abandoned. This is certainly consistent with Hegel's assertion that all true philosophy is idealism. All that Hegel has said about philosophy is true. It is precisely in this context that philosophy cannot grasp human existence as it really is. If Colletti's methodology is oft-times obscure in its purpose, and if it reintroduces dangerous distinctions (insofar as they are unclear in their implications) into Marxian categories, this does not detract from the basic important thrust of the work, viz., the Hegelian and Marxian dialectics are distinguishable methodologically and that it is this distinction which forms the foundation for the different socio-political results in the respective systems. The critical aspects of the Hegelian dialectic cannot but be subsumed in a final acritical moment of absolute unity which destroys all pr?tentions to being a truly critical philosophy. To be a Marxist, Colletti demands the rejec tion of Hegel, a rejection with which neither Marcuse, Engels nor Lenin were able to come to grips. None of them fully grasped the existential dimension of the Marxian critique, which precludes a coalescence of any sort between Hegelian and Marxian materialism. Dialectical materialism as espoused by the Soviets becomes for Colletti the direct heir of Hegel's materialism, not the pinacle of a true Marxian materialism. The task, then, of this paper is to present and evaluate the author's major theses. This will be accomplished

Subjectivity and Being. The Hegelian System as an Historic Stage of Viewing Being

Subjectivity and Being. The Hegelian System as an Historic Stage of Viewing Being

The Secret of Hegel: Being the Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form and Matter.

The Secret of Hegel: Being the Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form and Matter.