A Hegelian Key to Hegel's Method ABIGAIL L. ROSENTHAL THE INTERPRETATIONOF HEGEL'SPHILOSOPHYis, by general admission, a problem. It is curious, but typical of the dichotomizing tendency which many thinkers bring to any problem, that Hegel's philosophy--which claims to overcome the split between method and content in philosophy--has suffered persistent interpretative attempts to split its own method from its content. It is the contention of this article, that philosophic thought today cannot take decisive advantage of its strikingly post-Hegelian character until it acknowledges that Hegel has overcome for its sake precisely this dichotomy. Hegelian method and content are so far interrelated that, in the Preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel denies that a philosophically "absolute" statement can be summarized as a content, or positive finding, prior to the stage by stage experience by which it is demonstrably arrived at. The method which makes this demonstration possible is not different from the content--or meaningful terminus of the demonstration. If method and content were different, either the one or the other could be stated in advance. If the method does work (that is, if it turns out to deliver the unsurpassable or "absolute" illuminations that Hegel claims that it will) it will have worked in the total system of its applications, and this total system of its applications is not really abridgeable beforehand for a preface to the Hegelian corpus. Therefore, we seem to have the insoluble problem of Hegelian interpretation: the content is the systematic application of a method, and the method can only be seen to be exhaustive ("absolute") in the complete Hegelian corpus. If one has understandingly completed a reading of Hegel, one is then a finished Hegelian, and no longer needs interpretive abridgements. "Interpretation" would appear to be superfluous after such a completion, and impossible before it. A key to Hegel's method which is "Hegelian" must in some sense follow the Hegelian order of discovery. To do that here, something can be said about his total system of applications in general, that is, about the kind of sub/ect matter which the Hegelian method handles. On an equally general level, something can be said here about the method-as-content which emerges out of such a system of applications. The problem is not insoluble. One can talk about Hegel in a Hegelian manner, provided one is prepared to say very general things. (For various reasons, which cannot, for want of space, be gone into here, the [2051 206 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY textual infighting that follows any characterization of Hegel is inevitably inconclusive . 1 I think, therefore, that the test of any interpretation of Hegel must lie in its ability to cast light in the simplest and most coherent way on more of the corpus than have other interpretations, and--in so doing--to help clarify the work of philosophy itself. But the informed and critical reader remains free to take every kind of objection to such a project.) The fact is, that if one does not try to say something Hegelian about Hegel, something pre-Hegelian will be said about him with almost fatal regularity. Perhaps Hegel himself is to blame. Partly in the agony of a philosophic struggle toward expression which does not yet have perspective on itself, and partly in concern to let the reader read the whole without presuppositions as to where it will terminate --Hegel does little more in the Preface than claim that he will eventually say the last word on philosophy's absolute. The danger is that the "presuppositionless" reader is then turned loose on the text, possibly to bring to his reading the reader's uncorrected sense of what a philosophical absolute would have to look like. So Hegel's self-consistent but unpedagogical unwillingness to tell the reader in advance what he is going to find in Hegel may, in part, account for the curious coincidence between what many commentators do find in him, and what some pre-Hegelian philosophies took to be absolute and definitive for the philosophical enterprise. We find commentators finding in Hegel incorrigible, positive doctrines such as statist absolutism, pre-Critical pantheism and neo-Christian eschatology zdoctrines which, I maintain...