Hegel's Understanding Research Articles

Dialectics, Mathematics and the Cavaillès-Hyppolite Encounter

This essay utilises Suzanne Bachelard's essay ‘Forme et Contenu’ as an entry point to sketch out the possibility (or impossibility) of a dialectic of mathemata following the work of Jean Cavaillès and Jean Hyppolite. Firstly, I outline what Bachelard sees as a ‘dialectic’ of form and content in the history of abstract algebra, highlighting a parallel between Bachelard's reading of algebra and Hyppolite reading of the relation of the human subject to logos. Secondly, I move towards Jean Hyppolite's discussion of Lautman in ‘Mathematical Thought’ which allows for a revealing of convergences between the work of Hyppolite and Cavaillès. I conclude by noting that the similarities between Cavaillès and Hyppolite – despite possible protestations by Hyppolite – go against Hegel's understanding of mathematics, leading to the possibility of opening up a ‘Hegelian mathematics against Hegel’.

The Anthropological Content of Thinking: The Place of Thinking Among the Essential Forces of Man According to Hegel

Purpose. By appealing to Hegel’s philosophy, the article aims to understand the role of thinking through its relation to other essential human forces – feeling and will. Such a problem statement reveals the anthropological content of thinking, which is necessary for conducting a critical analysis of human nature. Theoretical basis. To realize the set purpose, the dialectical-logical method of categorical-reflexive analysis for texts and realities of human existence in the world is applied. Originality. The authors proceed from the fact that the usual way of interpreting thinking as existing alongside feelings and will is theoretically unsatisfactory since thinking is taken in a reduced way – only in its mental form. Thinking, as the mind itself, does not exist next to feelings and will, but permeates them through, at the same time being enriched by their definitions. In this case, thinking appears as an activity following the objective laws of reality itself, which implies a necessary and conscious change by the subject of the forms and schemes of its activity. The authors claim that the Hegelian paradigm of the interpretation of thinking as the substance of everything spiritual makes sense and provides an opportunity to adequately understand the nature of both feelings and will. Conclusions. Accusing Hegel of absolutizing thinking, attributing to him "panlogism" appears unfounded, since Hegel understands logic itself in a fundamentally different way. The interpretation of feelings and will as a kind of specifications of thinking by no means reduces them to thinking, but allows us to see their imbued with thinking as an orientation to reality itself in its essence, and not to partial features of the subject. Such an understanding of human nature is capable of adequately orienting pedagogical theory and practice toward the formation of a holistic culture of the individual as a culture of mind, feelings, and will.

Hegel, Colonialism and Postcolonial Hegelianism

AbstractThis article aims to shed light on Hegel's conception of colonialism and its implications for the postcolonial reception of Hegel. Drawing on the abundant literature on the topic, it begins by engaging with Hegel's understanding of colonialism through a close reading of relevant passages of his works, in particular the Heidelberg Vorlesungen über Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft (1817–18), the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821), the Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Rechts (1819/20, 1821/22, 1822/23, 1824/25) and the Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (1822/23, 1830). Having mapped and reconstructed Hegel's conception of colonialism through his writings and lectures, the article argues that his account of Europe's modern colonial expansion is based primarily on economic considerations, rather than on civilizational assumptions proclaiming the spiritual superiority of European peoples—to which Hegel nevertheless subscribes. The conclusion explores distinct and divergent postcolonial perspectives for engaging with the contemporary legacy of Hegelianism. It addresses, on the one hand, Tibebu's critical reading of Hegel's philosophical enterprise as ‘the coldest rationalisation of genocidal murder and carnage’ based on ‘paradigmatic apartheid’ and, on the other, Brennan's redemptive reading of Hegel, which values his theoretical contribution to the shaping of 20th century anticolonial thought. After contrasting these two interpretations, the article argues in favour of postcolonial strategies for critical reappropriation and sabotage of the legacy of Hegel's philosophy.

Hegel's Metaphysics of Rational Life: Overcoming the Pippin-Houlgate Dispute

Abstract In the past decade, the meaning of Hegel's idea of a ‘science of logic’ has become a matter of intense philosophical debate. This article examines the two most influential yet opposed contemporary readings of the Science of Logic—often referred to as the ‘metaphysical’ and ‘non-metaphysical’ interpretations. I argue that this debate should be reframed as a contest between logic as ontology (LAO) and logic as metaphysics (LAM). According to Stephen Houlgate's interpretation of logic as ontology, the science of logic is a progressively explicit unfolding of the categories of thought, which is at the same time the process by which being itself determines what it is to be. A second interpretation has been pursued by Sebastian Rödl and Robert Pippin, who read Hegel's logic as metaphysics. On this reading, the science of logic is a progressively coherent unfolding of the categories of thought, which articulate all that it could intelligibly mean to be. This article intervenes in this debate in three key ways. First, I argue that Houlgate's ontological approach undermines his attempt to establish the objective validity of the categories. Second, I show that the LAM emphasis on the crucial idea of apperception enables it to succeed where Houlgate fails by doing justice to the rational necessity with which the Logic unfolds. Third, I argue that, despite this success, the LAM program remains unrealized because of its neglect of Hegel's understanding of cognition as a form of life. While LAM has compellingly unfolded the ‘thought of being’, it has ignored the inverse question of the ‘being of thought’. I attempt to fulfil the LAM program by elaborating Hegel's account of what it means to be a thinker.

Sharing the universal resources: Remarks on Honneth’s understanding of work

Work is topic often neglected by contemporary philosophy. In academic political philosophy, this is due, among other things, to the dominance of analytic political liberalism and its bracketing of substantive questions regarding the “good” life. Surprisingly, however, even in critical theory there have been few exceptions to the general shunning of the question of work. That Axel Honneth, in his 2021 Benjamin Lectures, has now brought the subject out of the black box is an invaluable asset of his project. Nevertheless, I would like to ask two critical questions and make a suggestion. The first part of my inquiry concerns the side of the materiality of labor and expresses doubts whether the material basis Honneth seeks to recover is sufficiently material. The second part of my inquiry concerns the normative character of his understanding of work (i.e., the question of good work and the pathologies of labor) and suggests a Hegelian understanding of work, that is, work as participating in the universal resources of society. I argue that such an understanding would provide us with a much-needed sufficient basis for an encompassing but non-essentialist critique of the pathologies of labor.

Shelter from the Storm: Cynicism and the Refuge of Meaning

Abstract In her new book on the function of cynicism, Helen Small defines a positive role that cynicism can play in the liberal articulation of the very ideals and norms that cynicism affronts. She provides this “strategic cynicism” with a nineteenth-century lineage including Friedrich Nietzsche, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Thomas Carlyle. This review essay identifies some problems in the concept of strategic cynicism, drawing on Hegel's understanding of intentional action. Strategic cynicism is ultimately a role-playing (or impersonation) of cynicism by normativity on its own behalf. As Small conceives norms, they are vulnerable to cynicism because they are stranded and without immanent grounding. Turning to Henry James's novel The Awkward Age, this essay shows how cynicism can be answered not by pointing to better intentions, but only by what we discover retrospectively, from the consequences of how things turn out, our commitments to be. The essay ends with a consideration of the dysfunction of liberal responses to Donald Trump's cynicism.

‘Pedagogic oppression’: the need for emancipation through contradiction in teacher professional development

ABSTRACT Whilst teacher professional development exists in an arena of competing discourses it is commonly underpinned by a dualistic philosophical perspective. Some argue that professional development could be improved within the dualist perspective whilst others suggest a monistic alternative championing unity and connection. In this paper we argue that there are consequences to professional development experienced in a dualistic system which we term ‘pedagogic oppression’. We suggest that this pedagogic oppression takes place when Hegelian contradiction (the inability of anything to be identical with itself) is obscured in professional development. We claim that this pedagogic oppression reveals confusion around the purpose of professional development, reveals shortcomings in its scope, and reveals a deep dissatisfaction in teachers’ self-perceptions. This paper utilises reflexive thematic analysis generated from interviews with five experienced teachers of mathematics. We identify how a Hegelian understanding of opposition, experience and expertise can reveal pedagogic oppression and explore the consequences. Not only do we suggest that there is a need for a wider perspective of our understanding of professional development, but we also argue that professional development should be founded on principles which enable the revelation of contradiction – revelations that bring about pedagogic emancipation.

External or Intrinsic Purpose—What comes first? On Hegel's Treatment of Teleology

AbstractHegel's philosophy of biology is one of the strongest chapters of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature. It can be argued that Hegel's understanding of organicity underscores the explanatory power of ‘dialectical thinking’, as Hegel himself claims. Hegel's interpretation of organicity is based upon the logical development of categories in his chapter on Objectivity of his Logic. If we compare Hegel's treatment of teleology in the Logic with his interpretation of organicity in his Philosophy of Nature, a mismatch can be found. In the Logic, Hegel introduces the notion of life (Leben) after the chapter on Objectivity, i.e. after elaborating on external teleology. In his Philosophy of Nature, the notion of the inner purposiveness of organicity belongs to the externality of nature. This article compares Hegel's treatment of teleology in his Logic and his Philosophy of Nature, reconstructs possible explanations for mismatches and offers a possible solution to the question whether the notion of life should be regarded as the last part of the chapter on teleology or the first part of the chapter on the Idea.

The “event-tragedy” of war in the figures of Badiwan’s reflections as a condition of philosophy

Claiming our share in discursive positions, ideas and assessments of Russian aggression in Ukraine, reflections on it, we investigate this tragic event through heuristic value and "social relevance", influences on internal determinants — "life of mind" and spirit of man and communities, the formation of which is determined by the course of the war. Hegel's work "Phenomenology of the Spirit" was used to operationalize his position on the gestalts of the spirit, the appeal to which was stimulated by Slavoj Žižek's analysis and evaluation of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, in which he appealed to the Hegelian understanding of freedom, "for which Ukrainians are fighting today" (Žižek). In the analysis of the eventtragedy as the external world of human existence, emphasis is placed on the scientific content of the concept of the Event in the philosophical explorations of A. Badiou, S. Žižek, the heuristic fruitfulness of which is that they act as meaninggenerating factors in the configuration of the external and internal world of human life in a war situation. Regarding the latter, reflection is carried out through the prism of the psychoanalytic method, represented by the psychoanalytic model of thinking of Wilfred Bion and through the existential analysis of being by Karl Jaspers and Paul Tillich. The substantiation of the cognitive function of the life of the mind, which generates gestalts of the spirit and needs emotional coloring, required additional work by Hannah Arendt. The Deleuzian version of the event was used as a source for the formation of the concept of immediate existence for decision-making in the situation of a tragic event. It is noted that such searches are a significant part of the life of the mind and spirit, anxiety and resistance. Fichte's Ukrainian lamentation, his "Speech to the German Nation" during the time of Napoleon's invasions, is accompanied by references to M. Espany's theory of cultural transfer. Using the work of V. Frankl. P. Tillich, K. Jaspers in relation to Real Death allows us to apply Real Death as a marker of war to the conditions of modern philosophy.

Radical Elegy: Adonais, Am/Trak

ABSTRACT This essay builds toward a comparative reading of Shelley’s Adonais and Amiri Baraka’s Am/trak, both examples of radical elegy at the crossroads of poetic experimentation and political dissidence. It was Esther Jackson who first suggested that Baraka’s own Romanticism is rooted in a Hegelian understanding of form as the concretion of consciousness. As a genre with an outstandingly intimate relationship to crisis, elegy is a special case of the concretion of consciousness through form. How does the mind apprehend the presence of a person who no longer exists? How does its collision with the disfigured referent of the dead shape the look of the poem on the page? Most pertinently for these two writers, how does elegiac form gather political steam? By considering both the Spenserian form of Adonais and what I take to be Shelley’s rewriting of his sonnet “England in 1819” in its thirty-ninth stanza, I propose a model of elegy grounded in the impulse to turn private consciousness into public, insurrectionary exhortation.

On Two Viewpoints on the Dramaturgical Conflict Structure: from Hegel’s Aesthetics to the Identity of the Formalists

In Russian humanitarian knowledge, the understanding of the nature of the dramaturgical conflict was influenced by aesthetic ideas about beauty, harmony, the sublime, and the ideal, formulated by Hegel in the Lectures on Aesthetics. In line with classical concepts, the conflict is understood as a necessary condition for maintaining the compositional unity of the work and the action development, leading to the final equilibrium state of all its elements after the separation of the participants in the collision to the maximum distance. In addition to the aesthetic understanding of the conflict as the basis for the harmonic organisation of the text, an idea of the conflict as the primary condition for the development of all systems was formed. This direction is also based on the Hegelian doctrine, which, however, is not connected with his aesthetic views on art but with The Phenomenology of Spirit, explaining historical patterns and the dialectical processes of the formation of the cognising subject, embarked on the path of struggle for recognition and turned out to be an instrument for bringing the spirit to oneself. In the context of the doctrine of the absolute spirit, the concept of conflict is the bases for personality development (Freud, Vygotsky), life cycles (E.Erickson), and textual organisms (M.Bakhtin), where the collision of two forces of the emerging subject of cognition leads a stable state of the system to irreversible changes, a transition to a new quality, to a higher stage of development in the case of a productive resolution of contradictions and the emergence of a new formation that is different from the two participants in the confrontation. Throughout the 20th century, Russian humanitarian thought developed mainly under the influence of the aesthetic paradigm, as evidenced by the definitions of the dramatic conflict offered by literary theorists. Such a history has its reasons, which lie in the plane of understanding the official ideology, art and culture, reflecting the historical meaning of the revolutionary achievements of a classless and, therefore, conflict-free society, which achieved the dialectical removal of all contradictions in the main historical event. However, the Hegelian understanding of the modification of textual organisation due to a catastrophic event, a shift, underlies a theory that has not been fully mastered by the Russian tradition but which has outlined a new way of perceiving and understanding the nature of a dramatic conflict as a change in identity due to irreversible actions and a further change in the structure of the subject-text. This is Shklovsky's theory of estrangement, which expressed the essence of formal poetics but was forced out to the periphery and, for compelling historical reasons, did not receive further development in the theory of art.

Being, Presence, and Implication in Heidegger's Critique of Hegel

AbstractFor Heidegger, Hegel understands being, ‘the highest actuality’, as the categories which pervade and thereby form all objects and events. Since, Heidegger argues, the categories are, in Hegel, present-at-hand, Hegel conceives of being as presence-at-hand. This is a problem, for Heidegger, because it entails the full transparency and knowability of being, whereas, in his view, being is partially hidden and unknowable. I consider the objection to this Heideggerian critique of Hegel that Hegelian logic understands being not only as the list of categories but also as their derivation and movement from pure being to the absolute idea, which (derivation and movement) establish being not only as presence but also as implication. Since being-as-implication is (a) not presence-at-hand and (b) necessary to being, it cannot be said that Hegel's account of being turns it into full transparency and knowability. Heidegger's critique should, therefore, be rejected. I argue that this objection is unsuccessful because there is strong evidence in the Logic that Hegel ‘subordinates’ being-as-implication to presence-at-hand. Implication's way of being is, in Hegel, only a collapse into presence-at-hand and hence ‘merely a modification of presence’. Consequently, Heidegger's critique of Hegel should not be rejected based on the objection. I conclude the article with a remark on the relation between language and being-as-implication. I argue that Hegel's account of being-as-implication in language disrespects the autonomy of being-as-implication therein and that Haas's argument for such an autonomy based on the phenomenon of the syntactic ellipsis of ‘is’ fails to undermine Hegel's account.

Forma e Conteúdo no Sistema das Artes de Hegel

The dialectical structure that permeates Hegel's understanding of the artistic phenomenon in the Lectures on Aesthetics allows him an original apprehension of the individual arts and their relationships with each other, because, unlike what many thinkers had proposed so far, Hegel places content as the fundament of their articulation, albeit in a strict and intrinsic relationship with form. This is due to a logical aspect that permeates the Aesthetics and goes back to the first volume of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, resulting in a historical understanding of the content and its adequate external manifestation as form. As a consequence of the articulation of form and content based on the history of spirit, Hegel not only provides an understanding of the individual arts and their realization as artworks, but also offers several reflections that can be used to think about art in his posteriority, concerning for example modernism and the avant-garde movements, where the questioning of form becomes its own content, or the novel, a literary genre which can be constituted under infinite forms, in order to express the subjectivity and reflexive nature of the modern spirit.

On subjects, objects, and ground: Life as the form of judgment

AbstractIn this paper, I reply to the critics of my book, Hegel's Concept of Life, by taking up the question of how a science of pure thought thinking itself arrives at the conclusion that it must determine itself as life. In particular, I consider how the logical concept of life informs Hegel's understanding of subjects, objects, and ground, and I also take up the relationship between logic and Realphilosophie in Hegel's system. Throughout, I aim to clarify and elaborate on one of the central arguments from my book, namely, that for Hegel, life is the primitive or original form of judgment.

Discontinuous History and Magical Realism: A Foucauldian Reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

Michel Foucault’s archaeological approach to history contests Hegelian understanding of evolutionary and progressive history which presupposes an ultimate arrival at a perfect form of society. For Foucault, history does not follow a linear, dialectical line within a cause-and-effect relationship. Each historical period has its own conditions of truth and between these periods, there are breaks, twists, ruptures and discontinuities determined by power relations in that society. These historical transformations occur following a change in épistèmé which connotes to the available set of knowledge produced by discursive practices in a particular period. Within this context, this study aims to analyse historical discontinuities in Kazuo Ishiguro’s magical realist novel, The Buried Giant (2015). In the novel, by benefiting from generic potentials of magical realism, and effectively exploiting the medieval romance, Ishiguro creates a quasimythological historical account of the Anglo-Saxon period. In his version, King Arthur makes Merlin perform a spell on a dragon. Due to the spell, the Britons and the Saxons suffer memory loss which causes historical discontinuities. Moreover, while the spell confines the people into a perpetual here and now, it grants Arthur absolute political power. The study will focus on these discontinuities and present a Foucauldian reading of the text. The study will also theoretically connect Foucault’s discontinuous history with magical realism, which may broaden our understanding of Ishiguro’s text.

А.С. Хомяков и «мысль народная» в романе-эпопее Л.Н. Толстого «Война и мир»

The article reveals the deep connections of the “people’s thought” and Tolstoy’s philosophy of history in “War and Peace” with the theological and literary-critical works of A.S. Khomyakova. The author of the work analyzes the dispute between Tolstoy and the cult of an outstanding personality, with the Hegelian understanding of his role in the historical process. Tolstoy is alien to the Hegelian rise of “great personalities” over the masses, the Hegelian liberation of the “genius” from moral control and evaluation. Tolstoy believes that it is not an exceptional personality, but the life of the people that turns out to be the most sensitive organism, catching the will of Providence, intuitively sensing the hidden meaning of the historical movement. Anticipating Tolstoy, Khomyakov sharply criticizes the cult of personality in the church hierarchy, the Catholic dogma of papal infallibility, of the unconditional authority of an individual in matters of conscience and faith. Khomyakov reveals deep religious roots that feed the centuries-old Western enmity towards Russia. The article proves that Tolstoy is close to Khomyakov’s idea that Divine Providence overshadows with its grace only the believing people, united into a single organism by Christian love, that the epic basis of “War and Peace” is anticipated in Khomyakov’s literary-critical works “Glinka’s Opera ‘Life for Tsar’”, “On the Possibility of the Russian Art School”, “Ivanov’s Painting. Letter to the editor of ‘Russian Beseda’”. The article proves that “War and Peace” overcomes the conflict between the individual and society, the hero and the people, and reveals the epic horizons lost in the Western European novel.

Liefde en refleksiewe denke: Die vroeë Hegel oor die lotgevalle van die moderne mens

In hierdie artikel val die fokus op hoe Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel se vroeë denke en vroeë teologiese geskrifte die tema van die historiese lotgevalle van die moderne mens in die moderne wêreld hanteer. Meer spesifiek fokus die artikel op Hegel se begrip van die liefde soos hy dit in sy essay "Die Gees van die Christendom en sy lotgevalle"2 (1797-99) weergee, en op die epistemologiese, eties-politiese, ontologiese en krities-historiese implikasies daarvan. Hierteenoor word begrippe soos refleksiewe denke, eiendom en abstrakte reg in 'n sekere vroeëre dialektiese verhouding by Hegel in spel gebring. Die bydrae bestaan basies uit vier dele. Eerstens word, ter wille van die leser, 'n bondige biografiese skets van Hegel gegee. Tweedens word Hegel se vroeë teologiese geskrifte oor die verhouding van die moderne mens en sy diepste bronne, wat gedurende sy jare in Tübingen en Bern geskryf is, bondig gerekonstrueer. Dit bied derdens die agtergrond waarteen hierdie denkmotiewe by wyse van 'n fokus op sy belangrike essay "Die Gees van die Christendom en sy lotgevalle", uit sy Frankfurtse periode (1798-1799), verdiep word. Hierdie bespreking, waarin Hegel se argument in 'n aantal stappe gerekonstrueer word, vorm die kern van die bydrae. Laastens word aangetoon hoe die denkmotiewe in hierdie belangrike vroeë essay in Hegel se latere werke weerklank vind.

Peer Gynt and Oedipus: Ibsen on Hegel's Precursors of Modernity

AbstractG. W. F. Hegel sees Oedipus as an epitome of the philosophical quest for self-knowledge. In Hegel's readings of Oedipus, the latter becomes a distant reflection of the modern and mature Hegelian self, who consciously takes on this quest. Yet unlike Oedipus, whose search for the truth about his past is characterized by both metaphorical and literal blindness, the modern self knows itself, precisely because it understands its past and can thus appropriate and situate itself in relation to the present. For Hegel, self-understanding entails grasping the proper relationship between past and present, which in turn necessitates acknowledging his own relationship to Oedipus. This essay examines Henrik Ibsen's turn to the Hegelian engagement with the past (Oedipus being one crucial moment in the Hegelian story of the history of self-consciousness), by focusing on one of the most enigmatic scenes in his 1866 drama, Peer Gynt, where the Norwegian protagonist is cast as Oedipus. The scene examines the drama's own past—through an engagement with a dramatic ancestor—and focuses on the influence of the past on fashioning modern European identity. Moreover, it offers a critique of how the past is utilized in the creation and consolidation of that identity. With this, Ibsen offers an implicit critique of Hegel's understanding of Oedipus, and his encounter with the Sphinx in particular. Revisiting Oedipus through its modern reception, Ibsen questions the act by which the past is revealed as such and is put to work in the service of a particular present.

Kant ve Hegel’in Felsefesinde Özgürlük

The main objective of this article is to understand Hegelian understanding of freedom through a comparison of its Kantian counterpart. I set up this investigation with a consideration of the debate between liberals and communitarians. In the history of political thought, many political thinkers have been occupied by the questions about the priority of right over good and of universal over particular. In order to answer these questions, one needs to have a clear conception of freedom since the claims of freedom and equality are universally accepted political values which should reflect our political institutions contextually. To accomplish this task, first, I will introduce a brief account of Kant’s idea of freedom. It is crucial to know Kantian idea of freedom and how this idea reflects to his political philosophy to understand Hegel’s emphasis on ethical order and particularly state institutions. Second, I will give a brief account of Hegel’s idea of freedom by giving references to his book titled Philosophy of Right. Third, I will introduce two major criticisms that Hegel poses to the Kantian idea of freedom. Finally, I will introduce how Hegel tries to overcome the problems of Kantian idea of freedom through the dialectical construction of the concepts of spirit, freedom and ethnical order.

Freedom and domination through time: Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of the plurality of temporalities

The plural, impure or discordant nature of time has become an important theme in recent critical social and political theory. Against Althusser’s dismissal of Sartre’s presumedly Hegelian understanding of time and history, this article establishes Jean-Paul Sartre as a key figure in this debate on the plurality of temporalities. Especially in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre understands history and the social in terms of a multiplicity of uneven and non-synchronous temporalisations, rejecting an notion of time as a universal container within which events take place. The originality of Sartre’s approach is that it establishes a link between the notion of the plurality of temporalities and the problem of freedom and domination. His mature social and political theory allows us to understand temporalisation as a strategy for domination, and objective social temporality (e.g. the time of the economy or of machine systems) as key to a form of anonymous or structural domination. A reconstruction of this highly complex and sophisticated approach to thinking domination through time can also shed an original light on the temporal dimension of democracy and totalitarianism.