Hegel's Project Research Articles

Understanding Hegel's Logic: On Houlgate's Hegel on Being

Understanding Hegel's Logic: On Houlgate's <scp><i>Hegel on Being</i></scp>

Meta-Encyclopaedic Reflections on the Beginning of Philosophy

AbstractSince in Hegel's view the end of philosophy coincides with its beginning, it is reasonable to expect that the end of the Encyclopaedia sheds some light on the Science of Logic. The Encyclopaedia concludes with three syllogisms in which logic, nature and spirit are related to each other in three different ways. This article analyses these three final syllogisms with an eye to how they can contribute to our understanding of the logical movement that starts from pure being. Trendelenburg and Schelling, like many others after them, think that Hegel's project in the Science of Logic is doomed from the start, because there can be no such thing as a non-temporal, purely logical movement. I argue that the three final syllogisms contain Hegel's response to this challenge. I call them ‘meta-encyclopaedic reflections’ in the sense that they take the whole encyclopaedic presentation of the Hegelian system as an object of critical inquiry and identify its limitations. The core of my approach is to examine how each one of these syllogisms situate us, namely the philosophizing subjects, vis-à-vis the world as disclosed by them. They demand that we shift from a third-person to a first-person perspective towards the world. The logical categories initially appear to move of their own accord only due to the limitations of the third-person perspective of the encyclopaedic presentation, which is to be sublated in a higher, first-person perspective. Hence, Hegel would happily admit that a purely logical movement is a mere appearance, but he would also claim that his philosophy can immanently explain the necessity of this appearance in the beginning of philosophy, and explain it better than his critics.

John Dewey's philosophy of spirit, with the 1897 lecture on Hegel

The question of how far Dewey's thought is indebted to Hegel has long been a conundrum for philosophers. This book shows that, far from repudiating Hegel, Dewey's entire pragmatic philosophy is premised on a philosophy of spiritinspired by Hegel's project. Two essays by Shook and Good defending this radical viewpoint are joined by the definitive text of Dewey's 1897 Lecture at the University of Chicagoon Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit. Previously cited by scholars only from the archival manuscript, this edited Lecture is now available to fully expose the basic concern shared by Hegel and Dewey for the full and free development of the individual in the social context. Dewey's and Hegel's philosophies are at the center of modern philosophy's hopes for advancing human freedom.

5. The Project of Reconciliation and the Road to Redemption: Hegel's Social Philosophy and Nietzsche's Critique

AbstractArthur Schopenhauer once observed: “A Philosophy in between the pages of which one does not hear the tears, the weeping and gnashing of teeth and the terrible din of mutual universal murder is no [genuine] philosophy.”1 Certainly, the unforgettable events of the twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries, which bear the names Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Rwanda, and Darfur, pose a challenge for philosophical thinking to prove itself equal to what emerges from these horrific events. To that end, my paper looks back to the philosophies of G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche—in particular to their vision of a social reconciliation and cultural redemption—as a source of inspiration in our efforts to meet the challenges posed for a philosophy of the future by the global scale of violence, human suffering, and alienation. In what follows, I first offer a comparative analysis of Hegel's “project of reconciliation” with Nietzsche's “project of redemption.” I then consider whether or not either philosopher can provide us with a coherent and attractive ethical/sociopolitical alternative for our postmodern world—a world still characterized by global violence, injustice, genocide, ecological degradation, and the prospect of nuclear annihilation.

Climbing Harris' Ladder

In his two volume work, Hegel's Ladder, spanning over 1500 pages, Henry Harris describes Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807 as “an epic story about God” (I. 31). Harris' work is itself a work of epic proportions. It is the fullest commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology I have ever seen. We are brought, paragraph by paragraph, from the beginning to the end of Hegel's Phenomenology, without break. And although Harris describes it as an epic about God, there is nothing of the usual mystification that surfaces when “theological” interpretations are offered.There is, of course, no possibility of commenting on this work in any adequate way, short of perhaps writing a 3,000 page commentary on his commentary of some 1500 pages. After briefly, and inadequately, offering a summary of some of the important characteristics and positions of Harris' work, I want to pose some questions to Professor Harris concerning his interpretation.As already mentioned, the format Harris chooses is to comment in detail on each of the paragraphs of the Phenomenology. This commentary follows two previous volumes, Hegel's Development I: Toward the Sunlight, and Hegel's Development II: Night Thoughts, in which we are given an erudite and thorough account of Hegel's studies and of his writings prior to the Phenomenology of Spirit. These previous volumes are integral to the present two volumes, as indicated by Harris' challenge to his readers and his critics.My own view — after studying and laying out Hegel's intellectual development as completely and coherently as I could — is that no thesis about Hegel's project should be preferred to the one that I am about to advance unless it coheres with and provides answers to all of the exigencies that I have pointed to in the “genesis” of the book at least as well as mine does. (But many other theses may be valid complements to the one maintained here.) (I. 9)And, indeed, one of the characteristics of Hegel's Ladder is that we are constantly reminded of how and why the problematic at issue derives from the way that Hegel's thought had developed. Thus, Hegel's Ladder has significance not only as a commentary on the Phenomenology, but also as a link between the Phenomenology and Hegel's earlier development.

Antigone's Ghost: Undoing Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

This essay argues that Hegel's discussion of the family in “The Ethical Order” section of Phenomenology of Spirit undermines the entire project of that text. Hegel's project demands that every element of consciousness be conceptualizable, and yet, woman, an essential unconscious element of consciousness, is in principle unconceptualizable. The end of the essay attempts to relate Hegel's discussion of the family to contemporary discussions of family values.

On Hegel's project

On Hegel's project

The Categorial Satisfaction of Self-Reflexive Reason

Robert Pippin's book, Hegel's Idealism: the Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, is a deep, probing reconstruction of Hegel's project and the specific ways in which he tried to work out that project. It is rich in both analytical detail and in setting Hegel's thought in the historical complex of ideas that run from Kant to Fichte. It offers us a different view of Hegel than we have been accustomed to getting.I shall not concentrate too much on the details of Pippin's book, which excels in the depth and fine grained quality of its analyses. Instead, I shall deal with his overall interpretation and how good a case can be made for it. Pippin's goal of locating Hegel in terms of the Kantian project is well founded, and I think that he almost succeeds admirably. But only almost.The design of this commentary is threefold. First, I will give an overview of the general thrust of Pippin's interpretation. Second, I shall raise some questions about it and propose an alternative to it. Finally, I shall look at part of one particular section of Pippin's work, namely, his interpretation of Hegel's conception of “Essence” in the Science of Logic.Pippin's main thesis about Hegel's program seems relatively straightforward: Hegel's work should be understood as carrying on and transforming the Kantian idea of deriving all the conditions of knowledge from the transcendental unity of apperception, a special kind of self-conscious awareness of objects. Let us call this the Apperception Thesis.

Kierkegaard's Dialectic of Inwardness. A Structural Analysis of Stages, and: Kierkegaard: the Descent into God (review)

~62 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:1 JANUARY ~988 case, as so little firm ground has been found to link the socialistic "Jtinger Spinozas" with the "Junghegelianer" a wider look at the others could easily have been purchased by the author by simply limiting his discussion of Hess. Such figures as K. L. Michelet or Stirner (who played, as Gascoigne's own work and others indicate, a central role among the Young Hegelians) or Bruno Bauer's politically-minded brother, Edgar, deserve some consideration in any study of Young Hegelianism. In sum, the reaction of some of the Young Hegelians to Hegel's project has been touched upon in this work, but somewhat unevenly and less than exhaustively. The criticisms here advanced are not intended to suggest that the work is without value. It is well-written and researched, and has some very interesting and informative sections, but above all, it does set the Hegelianism of the Vormi~rzinto a matrix which further clarifies our understanding of how Hegel's effort to synthesize the contrary forces of the Enlightenment and Christianity found itself "interpreted both as Promethean atheism and as a reduction of human nature to a mere epiphenomenon of the divine life-process" (265). LAWRENCE S. STEPELEV1CH Villanova University Stephen N. Dunning. Kierkegaard'sDialecticofInwardness. A Structural Analysisof Stages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Pp. xvii + 323 . $32.oo. Jeremy Walker. Kierkegaard: the Descent into God. Kingston and Montreal: McGillQueen 's University Press, a985. Pp. xi + 223. $27.5o. There is an irony in contemporary philosophy that Kierkegaard would certainly appreciate . After a very long period of domination by linguistic analytical philosophy, the philosophical community, if such it may be called, has opened up to larger philosophical vistas and is prone to think in a grand style. Analytical philosophers now prefer to be called "post-analytical" thinkers. Meanwhile, back in phenomenology and existential thought, analytical techniques and styles of argument are becoming more prominant in the writings of individuals who have learned from their opponents. The two studies of Kierkegaard we have before us are cases in point. Dunning admittedly follows the suggestions of Andr6 Clair's work of 1976, Pseudonymie et paradoxe: La Pens~edialectiquede Kierkegaard, and seeks to carry out a deconstruction of his texts in terms of an analysis of the internal dialectic of most of Kierkegaard's major writings. Although Dunning is not primarily concerned with the intention of SK to instigate a sea-change in the attitudes, beliefs, and behavior of his readers, his analyses do clarify the structure of SK's thought and, in the last chapters, he touches on the practical aims of SK's authorship. Dunning is meticulous in tracing the internal dialectic of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages of life as articulated by SK. He finds that SK has absorbed more of Hegel's dialectical method of exposition and disclosure than has previously been suspected. He speculates that this is an "unconscious " replication of "Hegelian systematic structures." Although this is possible, we should remember that, in the case of SK, we are dealing with the most self-conscious BOOK REVIEWS 163 philosophical writer in the history of Western thought. We cannot be too sure that he has not deliberately used a Hegelian method in order to demolish Hegelianism. Dunning isolates two basic forms of dialectical structures. One is a dialectic of contradiction in which conceptual polarities are presented in a negative relation; the other involves a display of a reciprocal relation between opposite poles that blocks further development. Fear and Trembling and Philosophical Fragments are said to exemplify a "paradoxical dialectic." Hegel's triadic formula, the in-itself, the for-itself, and the in-and-for-itself, is applied to many of SK's works and to the three modes of inwardness: aesthetic, ethical, and religious. The basic pattern that runs through SK's works is the polarity of inner and outer, self and others. With great care, Dunning displays and elucidates these dialectical patterns. And even though he realizes that his approach to SK is formalistic and presented in the manner of a literary deconstruction of various texts, the outcome of his study is that we get...

Hölse, System and Subject

Hegel, the philosopher most responsible for linking philosophy to history, appropriately argued that in his own day there simply could not be Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, or Epicureans, that one could not bring back an earlier stage of thought. In this massive two volume study Vittorio Hösle argues that, in the spirit of Hegel himself, there also cannot be contemporary Hegelians. But there can be “philosophers who attempt to mediate the tradition of objective idealism from Plato to Hegel with post-Hegelian philosophy and with contemporary science”, (p 57n) In the past many of the philosophers who have attempted such a “mediation” have concentrated on one or another aspect of Hegel's project, usually his philosophical anthropology, his social theory or political theory, his critique of modernity, theory of alienation, etc. Hösle ambitiously takes up what looks to be the most unlikely candidate for any “contemporary mediation,” Hegel's entire systematic attempt to link together “Logic”, “Philosophy of Nature” and “Philosophy of Spirit”.Often Hösle's study is simply a survey of Hegel's systematic enterprise, providing paraphrase and plausibility where possible, summarising claims, excusing or pointing out excesses, pausing to debate other commentators, or complain about prominent mis-readings. He introduces his account with a long historical and theoretical discussion of Hegel's Encyclopedia system, and then offers a running commentary on its three major parts, devoting the largest blocks of attention to the Logic and the philosophy of objective spirit in the Rechtsphilosophie. But there is throughout one great thematic problem at issue that sets the tone of the book at the beginning and is returned to again and again.