## 1. Life, Work, and Influence


Born in 1770 in Stuttgart, Hegel spent the years 1788-1793 as
a student in nearby Tubingen, studying first philosophy, and then
theology, and forming friendships with fellow students, the future
great romantic poet Friedrich Holderlin (1770-1843) and
Friedrich von Schelling (1775-1854), who, like Hegel, would
become one of the major figures of the German philosophical scene in
the first half of the nineteenth century. These friendships clearly
had a major influence on Hegel's philosophical development, and
for a while the intellectual lives of the three were closely
intertwined.


After graduation Hegel worked as a tutor for families in Bern and
then Frankfurt, where he was reunited with Holderlin. Until
around 1800, Hegel devoted himself to developing his ideas on
religious and social themes, and seemed to have envisaged a future for
himself as a type of modernising and reforming educator, in the image
of figures of the German Enlightenment such as Lessing and
Schiller. Around the turn of the century, however, under the influence
of Holderlin and Schelling, his interests turned more to issues
arising from the critical philosophy initiated by
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and developed by J.G. Fichte
(1762-1814). In the 1790s the University of Jena had become a
center for the development of critical philosophy due to the presence
of K.L. Reinhold (1757-1823) and then Fichte, who taught there
from 1794 until his dismissal on the grounds of atheism at the end of
the decade. By that time, Schelling, who had first been attracted to
Jena by the presence of Fichte, had become an established figure at
the university. In 1801 Hegel moved to Jena to join Schelling, and in
same year published his first philosophical work, *The Difference
between Fichte's and Schelling's System of
Philosophy*, in which he argued that Schelling had succeeded where
Fichte had failed in the project of systematizing and thereby
completing Kant's transcendental idealism. In 1802 and 1803
Hegel and Schelling worked closely together, editing the *Critical
Journal of Philosophy*, and on the basis of this association Hegel
came to be dogged for many years by the reputation of being a
"mere" follower of Schelling (who was five years his
junior).


By late 1806 Hegel had completed his first major work,
the *Phenomenology of Spirit* (published 1807), which showed a
divergence from his earlier, seemingly more Schellingian, approach.
Schelling, who had left Jena in 1803, interpreted a barbed criticism
in the *Phenomenology*'s preface as aimed at him, and
their friendship abruptly ended. The occupation of Jena by
Napoleon's troops as Hegel was completing the manuscript restricted the activities of
the university and Hegel departed. Now without a university
appointment he worked for a short time, apparently very successfully,
as an editor of a newspaper in Bamberg, and then from 1808-1815
as the headmaster and philosophy teacher at a gymnasium (high school)
in Nuremberg. During his time at Nuremberg he married and started a
family, and wrote and published his *Science of Logic*. In 1816
he managed to return to his university career by being appointed to a
chair in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, but shortly
after, in 1818, he was offered and took up the chair of philosophy at
the University of Berlin, the most prestigious position in the German
philosophical world. In 1817, while in Heidelberg he published
the *Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences*, a systematic
work in which an abbreviated version of the earlier *Science of
Logic* (the *Encyclopaedia Logic* or *Lesser
Logic*) was followed by the application of its principles to the
philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit. In 1821 in Berlin
Hegel published his major work in political philosophy, *Elements
of the Philosophy of Right*, based on lectures given at Heidelberg
but ultimately grounded in the section of the *Encyclopaedia
Philosophy of Spirit* dealing with *objective
spirit*. During the following ten years up to his death in 1831
Hegel enjoyed celebrity at Berlin, and published subsequent versions
of the *Encyclopaedia*. After his death versions of his
lectures on philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics,
and the history of philosophy were published.


After Hegel's death, Schelling, whose reputation had long
since been eclipsed by that of Hegel, was invited to take up the chair
at Berlin, reputedly because the government of the day had wanted to
counter the influence that Hegelian philosophy had exerted on a
generation of students. Since the early period of his collaboration
with Hegel, Schelling had become more religious in his philosophising
and criticised the rationalism of Hegel's
philosophy. During this time of Schelling's tenure at Berlin,
important forms of later critical reaction to Hegelian philosophy
developed. Hegel himself had been a supporter of progressive but
non-revolutionary politics, but his followers divided into factions
broadly groupable as those of the left,
right and centre (Toews
1985); from
the *left*, Karl Marx was to develop his own purported
scientific approach to society and history which
appropriated many Hegelian ideas into a *materialistic*
outlook. (Later, especially in reaction to orthodox Soviet versions
of Marxism, many so-called Western Marxists re-incorporated
further Hegelian elements back into their forms of Marxist
philosophy.) Many of Schelling's own criticisms of Hegel's
rationalism found their way into subsequent
*existentialist* thought, especially *via* the
writings of Kierkegaard, who had attended Schelling's
lectures. Furthermore, the interpretation Schelling offered of Hegel
during these years itself helped to shape subsequent
generations' understanding of Hegel, contributing to the
orthodox or traditional understanding of Hegel as a metaphysical thinker in the pre-Kantian
dogmatic sense.


In academic philosophy, Hegelian idealism had seemed to collapse
dramatically after 1848 and the failure of the revolutionary movements
of that year, but underwent a revival in both Great Britain and the
United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In
Britain, where philosophers such as T.H. Green and F.H. Bradley had
developed metaphysical ideas which they related back to Hegel's
thought, Hegel came to be one of the main targets of attack by the
founders of the emerging "analytic" movement, Bertrand
Russell and G.E. Moore. For Russell, the revolutionary innovations in
logic starting in the last decades of the nineteenth century with the
work of Frege and Peano had destroyed Hegel's metaphysics by
overturning the Aristotelian logic on which, so Russell claimed, it
was based, and in line with this dismissal, Hegel came to be seen
within the analytic movement as an historical figure of little genuine
philosophical interest. To some degree, analogous things could be said
of Hegel's reception from within the twentieth-century
phenomenological tradition that developed in continental Europe, but
although marginalized within such core areas of mainstream academic
philosophy, Hegel nevertheless continued to be a figure of interest
within other philosophical movements such as existentialism and
Marxism. In France, a version of Hegelianism came to influence a
generation of thinkers, including Jean Hyppolite, Jean-Paul Sartre and
the psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, largely through the lectures of
Alexandre Kojeve. However, a later generation of French
philosophers coming to prominence in the 1960s tended to react against
Hegel in ways analogous to those in which early analytic philosophers
had reacted against the Hegel who had influenced their
predecessors. In Germany, having lapsed in the second half of the
nineteenth century, interest in Hegel was revived at the turn of the
twentieth with the historical work of Wilhelm Dilthey, and important
Hegelian elements were incorporated within the approaches of thinkers
of the Frankfurt School, such as Theodor Adorno, and later,
Jurgen Habermas, as well as within the Heidegger-influenced
*hermeneutic* approach of H.-G. Gadamer. In Hungary,
similar Hegelian themes were developed by Georg Lukacs and
later thinkers of the Budapest School. In the 1960s the
German philosopher Klaus Hartmann developed what was termed a
*non-metaphysical* interpretation of Hegel which, together
with the work of Dieter Henrich and others, played an important role
in the revival of interest in Hegel in academic philosophy in the
second half of the century. Within English-speaking philosophy, the
final quarter of the twentieth century saw something of a revival of
serious interest in Hegel's philosophy with important works
appearing such as those by H.S. Harris, Charles Taylor, Robert Pippin
and Terry Pinkard in North America, and Stephen Houlgate and Robert
Stern in Great Britain. By the close of the twentieth century, even
within core logico-metaphysical areas of analytic philosophy, a number
of individuals such as Robert Brandom and John McDowell had started to
take Hegel seriously as a significant modern philosopher, although
generally within analytic circles a favorable reassessment of Hegel
has still a long way to go.


## 2. Hegel's Philosophy


Hegel's own pithy account of the nature of philosophy given
in the *Preface* to his *Elements of the Philosophy of
Right* captures a characteristic tension in his philosophical
approach and, in particular, in his approach to the nature and limits
of human cognition. "Philosophy", he says there, "is
its own time comprehended in thoughts" (PR: 21).


On the one hand we can clearly see in the phrase "its own
time" the suggestion of an historical or cultural
conditionedness and variability which applies even to the highest form
of human cognition, philosophy itself. The contents of philosophical
knowledge, we might suspect, will come from the historically changing
contents of its cultural context. On the other, there is the hint of
such contents being raised to some higher level,
presumably higher than other levels of cognitive functioning such as
those based in everyday perceptual experience, for example, or those
characteristic of other areas of culture such as art and
religion. This higher level takes the form of conceptually articulated
*thought*, a type of cognition commonly taken as capable of
having purportedly eternal contents (think of Plato and Frege, for
example, who both have the truths of mathematics in mind). In line
with such a conception, Hegel sometimes referred to the task of
philosophy as that of recognising *the concept* (*Der
Begriff*) in the mere representations (*Vorstellungen*) of
everyday life.


This antithetical combination within human cognition of the
temporally-conditioned and the eternal, a combination which reflects a
broader conception of the human being as what Hegel describes
elsewhere as a "finite-infinite", (SL: 114) has led to
Hegel being regarded in different ways by different types of
philosophical readers. For example, an historically-minded pragmatist
like Richard Rorty, distrustful of all claims or aspirations to the
so-called God's-eye view, could praise Hegel as a
philosopher who had introduced this historically reflective dimension
into philosophy (and set it on the characteristically
romantic path which has predominated in modern
continental philosophy) but who had unfortunately still remained
bogged down in the remnants of the Platonistic idea of the search for
ahistorical truths (Rorty 1982). Those adopting such an approach to
Hegel tend to have in mind the (relatively) young author of
the *Phenomenology of Spirit* and have tended to dismiss as
"metaphysical" later and more systematic works like
the *Science of Logic*. In contrast, the British Hegelian
movement at the end of the nineteenth century tended to ignore
the *Phenomenology* and the more historicist dimensions of his
thought, and found in Hegel a systematic metaphysician
whose *Logic* provided the basis for a definitive philosophical
ontology. This latter traditional *metaphysical* view of
Hegel dominated Hegel reception for most of the twentieth century, but
from the 1980s came to be challenged by scholars who offered an
alternative non-metaphysical, post-Kantian
view. By "non-metaphysical" these thinkers had in
mind metaphysics in the sense that Kant had been critical of, a point
sometimes missed by critics. But in turn, this post-Kantian reading
has been challenged by a *revised metaphysical* view, critical
of the purported *over*-assimilation of Hegel to Kant by the
post-Kantians. In the revised metaphysical view, appeal is often made
to Aristotelian or Spinozist conceptual realist features of
Hegel's thought, as well as to features of recent analytic
metaphysics.


Before surveying these competing views, however, something needs to
be said about the confusing term "idealism", and about the
variety of idealism that is characteristic of Hegel and other German
idealists.


### 2.1 Background: Idealism as understood in the German tradition


"Idealism" is a term that had been used sporadically by
Leibniz and his followers to refer to a type of philosophy that was
opposed to *materialism*. Thus, for example, Leibniz had
contrasted *Plato* as an idealist with *Epicurus* as a
materialist. The opposition to materialism here, together with the
fact that in the English-speaking world the Irish philosopher and
clergyman George Berkeley (1685-1753) is often taken as a
prototypical idealist, has given rise to the assumption that idealism
is necessarily an immaterialist doctrine. This
assumption, however, is mistaken. With the possible exception of
Leibniz, the idealism of the Germans was not committed to the type of
doctrine found in Berkeley according to which immaterial minds, both
infinite (God's) and finite (those of humans), were the
ultimately real entities, with *apparently* material things to
be understood as reducible to *states* of such minds--that
is, to ideas in the sense meant by the British
empiricists.


As Leibniz's use of Plato to exemplify idealism suggests,
idealists in the German tradition tended to hold to the reality or
objectivity of ideas in the Platonic sense, and for Plato, it would
seem, such ideas were not conceived as *in* any mind at
all--not even the mind of Plato's *god*. The type of
picture found in Berkeley was only to be found in certain late antique
Platonists and, especially, early Christian Platonists like Saint
Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. But especially for the German idealists
like Hegel, Plato's philosophy was understood through the lenses
of more Aristotelian varieties of neo-Platonism, which pictured the
thoughts of a divine mind as immanent in
matter, and not as contained in some purely immaterial or spiritual
mind. It thus had features closer to the more pantheistic picture of
divine thought found in Spinoza, for example, for whom matter and mind
were attributes of the one substance.


Even for Leibniz, whose later monadological metaphysics was perhaps
closer to Berkeley's immaterialist philosophy, an opposition to
materialism didn't necessarily imply immaterialism. Leibniz had
resisted Descartes' postulation of distinct spiritual and
material substances, treating corporeal bodies as inseparable
combinations of form and matter after the manner of Aristotle. The
materialists to which he was opposed (mechanistic corpuscularists of
his time) conceived of unformed matter as a type of self-subsistent
substance, and it seems to have been *that* conception to which
he was opposed, at least in some periods of his work, not the reality
of matter *per se*. Leibniz's combination of Platonic and
Aristotelian notions played a role in the thought of the later
idealists, giving their opposition to materialism its distinctive
character. These anti-immaterialist features of the idealism of the
Germans became more prominent in the post-Kantian period as they moved
progressively away from the more subjectivistic features of
Leibniz's thought (Beiser 2002).


### 2.2 The *traditional* metaphysical view of Hegel's philosophy


Given the understanding of Hegel that predominated at the time of
the birth of analytic philosophy, together with the fact that early
analytic philosophers were rebelling precisely against
Hegelianism so understood, the interpretation of Hegel
encountered in discussions within analytic philosophy is often that of
the late nineteenth-century interpretation. In this picture, Hegel is
seen as offering a metaphysico-religious view of God *qua*
Absolute Spirit, as the ultimate reality that we can
come to know through pure thought processes alone. In short,
Hegel's philosophy is treated as exemplifying the type of
pre-critical or *dogmatic* metaphysics against which Kant
had reacted in his *Critique of Pure Reason*, and as a return
to a more religiously driven conception of philosophy to which Kant
had been opposed.


There is much that can be found in Hegel's writings that
seems to support this view. In his lectures during his Berlin period
one comes across claims such as the one that philosophy "has no
other object but God and so is essentially rational theology"
(Aes I: 101). Indeed, Hegel often seems to invoke imagery consistent
with the types of neo-Platonic conceptions of the universe that had
been common within Christian mysticism, especially in the German
states, in the early modern period. The peculiarity of Hegel's
form of idealism, on this account, lies in his idea that the mind of
God becomes actual only via its particularization in the minds of
"his" finite material creatures. Thus, in our
consciousness of God, we somehow serve to realize his *own*
self-consciousness, and, thereby, his own perfection. In
English-language interpretations, such a picture is effectively found
in the work of Charles Taylor (1975) and Michael Rosen
(1984), for example. With
its dark mystical roots, and its overtly religious content, it is
hardly surprising that the philosophy of Hegel so understood has
rarely been regarded as a live option within the largely
secular and scientific conceptions of philosophy that
have been dominant in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.


An important consequence of Hegel's metaphysics, so
understood, concerns history and the idea of historical development or
progress, and it is as an advocate of an idea concerning the
logically-necessitated teleological course of history that Hegel is
most often derided. To critics, such as Karl Popper in his popular
post-war *The Open Society and its
Enemies* (1945), Hegel had not only advocated a disastrous political
conception of the state and the relation of its citizens to it, a
conception prefiguring twentieth-century totalitarianism, but he had
also tried to underpin such advocacy with dubious
theo-logico-metaphysical speculations. With his idea of the
development of *spirit* in history, Hegel is seen as
literalising a way of talking about different cultures in terms of
their spirits, of constructing a developmental sequence
of epochs typical of nineteenth-century ideas of linear historical
progress, and then enveloping this story of human progress in terms of
one about the developing self-conscious of the cosmos-God itself.


As the bottom line of such an account concerned the evolution of
states of a mind (God's), such an account is clearly an idealist
one, but not in the sense, say, of Berkeley. The pantheistic legacy
inherited by Hegel meant that he had no problem in considering an
objective *outer* world beyond any particular subjective mind.
But this objective world itself had to be understood as conceptually
informed: it was *objectified* spirit. Thus in contrast to
Berkeleian *subjective* idealism it became common to talk
of Hegel as incorporating the *objective* idealism of
views, especially common among German historians, in which social life
and thought were understood in terms of the conceptual or
spiritual structures that informed them. But in contrast
to both forms of idealism, Hegel, according to this reading,
postulated a form of *absolute* idealism by including both
subjective life and the objective cultural practices on which
subjective life depended within the dynamics of the development of the
self-consciousness and self-actualisation of God, the *Absolute*
Spirit.


Despite this seemingly dominant theological theme, Hegel was still
seen by many as an important precursor of other more
characteristically secular strands of modern thought such as
existentialism and Marxist materialism. Existentialists were thought
of as taking the idea of the finitude and historical and cultural
dependence of individual subjects from Hegel, and as leaving out all
pretensions to the Absolute, while Marxists were thought
of as taking the historical dynamics of the Hegelian picture but
reinterpreting this in materialist rather than idealist categories. As
for understanding Hegel himself, the traditional metaphysical view
remained the dominant interpretative approach of Hegel scholars
throughout much of the twentieth century. In the last quarter of the
century, however, it came to be vigorously questioned, with a variety
of interpreters putting forward very different accounts of the basic
nature of Hegel's philosophical project. While a number of
interpretations of Hegel have emerged during this period in an effort
to acquit him of implausible metaphysico-theological views, one
prominent tendency has been to stress the continuity of his ideas with
the "critical philosophy" of Immanuel Kant.


### 2.3 The post-Kantian (sometimes called the non-metaphysical) view of Hegel


Least controversially, it is often claimed that either
particular *works*, such as the *Phenomenology of
Spirit*, or particular *areas* of Hegel's philosophy,
especially his ethical and political philosophy, can be understood as
standing independently of the type of unacceptable metaphysical system
sketched above. Thus it is commonly asserted that implicit within the
metaphysical Hegel is an anti-metaphysical philosopher struggling to
get out--one potentially capable of beating the critical Kant at
his own game.


More controversially, one now finds it argued that the traditional
picture is simply wrong at a more general level, and that Hegel, even
in his systematic thought, was not committed to the bizarre,
teleological *spirit monism* that has been traditionally
attributed to him because he was free of the type of traditional
metaphysical commitments that had been criticized by Kant. Prominent
among such interpretations has been the so-called
post-Kantian interpretation advanced by North American
Hegel scholars Robert Pippin (1989, 2008, 2019) and Terry Pinkard
(1994, 2000, 2012). From an explicitly analytic perspective, broadly
similar views have been put forward by Robert Brandom (2002, 2014,
2019) and John McDowell (2006, 2018). Thus while the traditional view sees
Hegel as exemplifying the very type of metaphysical speculation that
Kant successfully criticised, the post-Kantian view regards him as
both accepting and *extending* Kant's critique,
ultimately turning it against the residual dogmatically
metaphysical aspects of Kant's own philosophy.


In Hegel, the non-traditionalists argue, one can see the ambition
to bring together the universalist dimensions of Kant's
transcendental program with the culturally contextualist conceptions
of his more historically and relativistically-minded contemporaries,
resulting in his controversial conception of spirit, as
developed in his *Phenomenology of Spirit*. With this notion,
it is claimed, Hegel was essentially attempting to answer the Kantian
question of the conditions of rational human mindedness,
rather than being concerned with giving an account of the developing
self-consciousness of God. But while Kant had limited such conditions
to formal abstractly conceived structures of the mind,
Hegel extended them to include aspects of historically and socially
determined forms of embodied human existence.


### 2.4 The *revised* metaphysical view of Hegel


Not surprisingly, the strong post-Kantian interpretation of Hegel
has been resisted by defenders of the more traditional approach, who
have argued against the plausibility of attempting to rehabilitate
Hegel's philosophy by divesting it of any purportedly
unacceptable metaphysical claims (see, for example, Beiser 2005 and
Horstmann 2006). Proponents of the post-Kantian view, it is commonly
said, are guilty of projecting onto Hegel views they
would *like* to find there rather than what is actually to be
found. However, the strong post-Kantian interpretation
has *also* been challenged by a somewhat different version of
the metaphysical reading by interpreters who, while recognizing the
influence of Kant's critical philosophy of Hegel, emphasize
Hegel's critique of Kant and affirm the irreducible role played
by a form of metaphysics in Hegel's philosophy. Nevertheless,
they share the post-Kantians' attempts to separate Hegel's
views from the extravagant views traditionally ascribed
to him and generally argue for the broad acceptability of
Hegel's views from the perspective of the present. Here one
tends to find interpreters attributing to Hegel some type of
conceptual realism, sometimes appealing to
contemporary *analytic* metaphysics for the legitimacy of
metaphysics conceived as inquiry into the fundamental
features or structures of the world
itself. Among the interpreters advancing something like this
*revised* metaphysical view might be counted Stephen
Houlgate (2005b), Robert
Stern (2002, 2009), Kenneth Westphal
(2003), James Kreines
(2006, 2008) and Christopher Yeomans (2012).


On a number of points, the proponents of the revised conceptual
realist metaphysical interpretation will agree with advocates of the
post-Kantian non-metaphysical approach. First, they tend
to agree in dismissing much of the extravagant
metaphysics traditionally ascribed to Hegel. Generally they
don't find in Hegel the type of classical teleological spirit
monism central to, say, Taylor's interpretation. Next, they
stress the importance for Hegel of Kant's critique of
metaphysics. Both think that Hegel took Kant's critique
seriously, and in turn subjected that critique itself to a
telling *meta-critique*, showing that Kant himself was not free
from the sorts of ungrounded metaphysical assumptions he criticized in
others. However, while the post-Kantians interpret Hegel's
criticisms of Kant as suggesting that Hegel thereby realized or
completed Kant's critical intention, creating a
form of philosophizing purged of metaphysics, proponents of the
revised metaphysical interpretation typically see his criticism of
Kant as involving a rejection of Kant's anti-metaphysical
attitude, and as reestablishing, on a new basis, a metaphysical
program originally derived from Aristotle (e.g., Stern) or Spinoza
(e.g., Houlgate).


While it is for the most part clear what sets both post-Kantians
and conceptual realists against the traditional view, it is still not
clear which issues dividing them are substantive and which are
ultimately verbal. Brandom, for example, while often classed with the
post-Kantians, also construes Hegel as a conceptual realist (Brandom
2019), while Redding, appealing to the earlier work of J. N. Findlay,
attempts to combine the post-Kantian approach with what he calls
an *actualist* rather than a realist interpretation of Hegel
(Redding 2017). In recent work, both Pippin (2019) and Pinkard (2014),
the major representatives of the post-Kantian position, have insisted
that their own interpretations are compatible with many of the
Aristotelian features of Hegel to which conceptual realists allude.



In relation to such debates it must be remembered that Kant himself
was not critical of metaphysics *per se*. His claim was that
existing (so-called dogmatic) metaphysics was in a state analogous to
that in which, say, physics had been in before the scientific
revolution of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rather than wanting
to eliminate metaphysics, after the style, say, of Hume or the modern
logical positivists, Kant had wanted to put metaphysics itself on a
secure scientific basis analogous to what Galileo and Newton had
achieved for physics. Thus the very idea of an
*Hegelian metaphysics* is in no way straightforwardly
incompatible with the project of a post-Kantian
completion of Kant's critical program. 



## 3. Hegel's Published Works


We may think of there being five different types of work that make
up Hegel's published corpus. First, there are Hegel's two
major stand-alone books written for publication already
mentioned--*Phenomenology of Spirit* (1807)
and *Science of Logic* (1812-18). In the next category
are works that were published at the time as *handbooks* for
use in student teaching such as the *Encyclopaedia of Philosophical
Sciences* first published in 1817 while he was teaching at
Heidelberg and subsequently revised and republished in 1827 and again
in 1830, and *Elements of the Philosophy of Right*, effectively
an expansion of a section of the *Encyclopaedia* and published
in 1820 after his move to Berlin. (Transcripts of his earlier lectures
on this topic delivered in Heidelberg have also since been published.)
Along with the *Encyclopaedia* and the *Philosophy of
Right* might be added similar teaching-related writings from the
Jena period, prepared as lectures but only published as such much
later. The third major category is formed by posthumously published
lecture courses from his time at the University of Berlin, which,
after Hegel's death, were assembled by editors from his lecture
notes and from student transcripts of the lectures as
delivered--these include his lectures on the *Philosophy*
of *Nature*, *Philosophy of Spirit, Philosophy of
History*, *Aesthetics*, *Philosophy of Religion*,
and *History of Philosophy*. Next might be considered various
miscellaneous essays and short works published during his career, and
finally we can count Hegel's early works, written in the period
between his student years at Tubingen and his move to Jena, and
predominantly on religious and political themes
(ETW). Here we will restrict the discussion to the first three
categories.


### 3.1 Books


#### 3.1.1 *Phenomenology of Spirit*


The term "phenomenology" had been coined by the Swiss
mathematician (and Kant correspondent) J.H. Lambert (1728-1777)
in his *The New Organon* of 1764, and in a letter to Lambert,
sent to accompany a copy of his Inaugural Dissertation
(1770), Kant had proposed his own project of a "general
phenomenology" as a necessary propaedeutic
presupposed by the science of metaphysics. Such a phenomenology was
meant to determine the "validity and limitations" of what
he called the "principles of sensibility", principles he
had (he thought) shown in the accompanying work to be importantly
different to those of conceptual thought. The term clearly suited Kant
as he had distinguished the phenomena known through the
faculty of sensibility from the noumena known purely
conceptually. This envisioned phenomenology seems to coincide roughly
with what he was to eventually describe as a *critique of pure
reason*, although Kant's thought had gone through
important changes by the time that he came to publish the work of that
name (1781, second edition 1787). Perhaps because of this he never
again used the term "phenomenology" for quite this
purpose.


There is clearly some continuity between Kant's notion and
Hegel's project. In a sense Hegel's phenomenology is a
study of *phenomena* (although this is not a realm he
would contrast with that of noumena) and
Hegel's *Phenomenology of Spirit* is likewise to be
regarded as a type of propaedeutic to philosophy rather
than an exercise *in* or work *of* philosophy. It is
meant to function as an induction or education of the reader to
the *standpoint* of purely conceptual thought from which
philosophy can be done. As such, its structure has been compared to
that of a *Bildungsroman* (educational novel), having an
abstractly conceived protagonist--the bearer of an evolving
series of so-called shapes of consciousness or the inhabitant of a
series of successive phenomenal worlds--whose progress and
set-backs the reader follows and learns from. Or at least this is how
the work sets out: in the later sections the earlier series of
shapes of consciousness becomes replaced with what seem
more like configurations of human *social life*, and the work
comes to look more like an account of interlinked forms of social
existence and thought within which participants in such forms of
social life conceive of themselves and the world. Hegel constructs a
series of such shapes that maps onto the history of western European
civilization from the Greeks to his own time.


The fact that this progression ends in the attainment of what Hegel
refers to as Absolute Knowing, the standpoint from which
real philosophy gets done, seems to support the traditionalist reading
in which a triumphalist narrative of the growth of western
civilization is combined with the theological interpretation of
God's self-manifestation and self-comprehension. When Kant had
broached the idea of a phenomenological propaedeutic to Lambert, he
himself had still believed in the project of a purely conceptual
metaphysics achievable by the use of the regressive or
*analytic* method, but this project conceived as an
exercise in theoretical reason was just what Kant in his later
critical philosophy had come to disavow. Traditional readers of Hegel
thus see the *Phenomenology*'s *telos* as
attesting to Hegel's pre-Kantian (that is, pre-critical)
outlook, and his embrace of the metaphysical project that Kant
famously came to dismiss as illusory. Supporters of
the *post-Kantian* interpretation of Hegel obviously interpret
this work and its *telos* differently. For example, it has been
argued (e.g., Pinkard 1994) that what this history tracks is the
development of a type of social existence which enables a unique form
of rationality, in that in such a society all dogmatic bases of
thought have been gradually replaced by a system in which all claims
become open to rational self-correction, by becoming exposed to
demands for conceptually-articulated justifications. As Pinkard had
pointed out in that work, this was a conception of the normatively
structured practices of human reason found in the American pragmatist
Wilfrid Sellars, the inspiration behind the Hegelian dimensions of
analytic philosophers such as Willem deVries (1988), Robert Brandom
and John McDowell.


Something of Hegel's phenomenological method may be conveyed
by the first few chapters, which are perhaps among its more
conventionally philosophical parts (Westphal 2009). Chapters 1 to 3
effectively follow a developmental series of distinct shapes of
consciousness--jointly epistemological and ontological
attitudes articulated by criteria which are, regarded from one
direction, criteria for certain *knowledge*, and from the
other, criteria for the nature of the *objects* of such
knowledge. In chapter 1, the attitude of *Sense-certainty*
takes immediately given perceptual simples--the sort of role
played by the so-called sense-data of early
twentieth-century analytic epistemology, for example, with which a
subject is purportedly acquainted as *bare thises*--as the
fundamental objects known. By following this form of
consciousness's attempts to make these implicit
criteria *explicit*, we are meant to appreciate that any such
contents, even the apparently most immediate ones, are
in fact grasped *conceptually*, and so, in Hegel's
terminology, their reception is actually mediated by the
concepts with which they are grasped. Hegel is clear that these
contents are not merely qualitative simples that are
immediately *apprehended*, but *comprehended* instances
of the conceptual determination of singularity
[*Einzelheit*] (Phen: SS91). Such a simple
*this*, then, can also be understood as an instance of
what the Medievals discussed as *thisness*--a
general *property* of an individual thing's being
identical to itself. One might compare Hegel's point here to
that expressed by Kant in his well known claim from *Critique of
Pure Reason* (A51/B75), that *without* general
concepts, *intuitions* (singular [*einzeln*] purportedly
immediate mental representations), are *blind*. However,
Hegel seems to want to make this point *without* relying on
Kant's formal distinction *between* concepts and
intuitions as different species of representation. The idea seems to
be that for Hegel, *the same content* can play the roles played
by both concepts and intuitions in Kant. (The lessons of this chapter
have sometimes been likened to those of Wilfrid Sellars's famous
criticism of the empiricist *myth of the given*.)


By the end of this chapter our protagonist consciousness (and by
implication, we the audience to this drama) has learnt that the nature
of consciousness cannot be as originally thought: rather than being
immediate and singular, its contents must have some implicit universal
(conceptual) aspect to them. The general *truth* that was
learned about the apparent qualitative simples in Sense-certainty
(that they were instances of generals) is now explicitly taken as
the *truth of the object* of *Perception*
(*Wahrnehmung*--in German this term having the
connotations of taking (*nehmen*) to be true
(*wahr*)). In contrast to the purported single object of
Sense-certainty the object of Perception is taken *as*
instantiating general properties: it is "a thing with many
properties" (Phen: SS112). But this can be conceived in a
variety of ways: first, as a simple *bundle* of indifferent
qualities (a picture associated with Plato), or as an underlying
substrate *in which* these qualities somehow inhere (a picture
associated with Aristotle). Predictably, problems will be revealed in
these various different ways of thinking of the nature of those
everyday objects of our experience.


As in the case of Sense-certainty, here in the case of Perception,
by following the protagonist consciousness's efforts to make
this implicit criterion explicit, we see how the criterion generates
contradictions that eventually undermine it *as* a criterion
for certainty. In fact, such collapse into a type of self-generated
skepticism is typical of all the shapes we follow in the
work, and there seems something inherently skeptical about such
reflexive cognitive processes. But this is not the type of skepticism
that is typical of early modern philosophy, such as that used by
Descartes in his attempt to find some foundation
of *indubitability* on which genuine knowledge can be built
(Forster 1989). As is clear from his treatment of ancient philosophy
in the *Lectures on the History of Philosophy*, Hegel was
attracted to the type of *dialectic* employed by Socrates in
his efforts to get his interlocutors thinking about something beyond
that given immediately in sensation (LHP II: 51), and implicit in the
ancient form of skepticism that had been employed after Socrates (LHP
II: 344). For Hegel, the ancient skeptics captured the skeptical
moment of thought that is the means by which thought
progresses *beyond* the particular categories that have given
rise to contradictions. Just as in the way a new shape of
thought, Perception, had been generated from the internal
contradictions that emerged within Sense-certainty, the
collapse of any given attitude will be accompanied by the emergence of
some new implicit criterion that will be the basis of a new emergent
attitude. In the case of Perception, the emergent new shape of
consciousness, the Understanding, explored in Chapter 3,
is a shape identified with the type of scientific cognition that,
rather than remaining on the level of the perceived object, posits
underlying *forces* involved in the production of the
perceptual episode.


The transition from Chapter 3 to Chapter 4, The Truth of
Self-Certainty, also marks a more general transition from
Consciousness to *Self*-consciousness. It is in the course of
Chapter 4 that we find what is perhaps the most well-known part of
the *Phenomenology*, the account of the *struggle of
recognition* in which Hegel examines the inter-subjective
conditions which he sees as necessary for any form of consciousness.
This is a topic that had first been taken up by Alexandre
Kojeve (1969), and which has been appealed to in
non-Kojevean ways recently by a number of non-traditional
interpreters in order to give a quite different accounts of
Hegel's notion of *Spirit* (Honneth 1995; Ikaheimo
and Laitinen 2011; Pippin 2008; Williams
1992, 1997).


Like Kant, Hegel thinks that one's capacity to
be *conscious* of some external object as something distinct
from oneself requires the reflexivity of *self*-consciousness,
that is, it requires one's awareness *of oneself* as a
subject *for whom* something distinct, the object, is
presented *as known* (a result emerging in Chapter 3). Hegel
goes beyond Kant, however, and expanding on an idea found in Fichte,
makes this requirement dependent on one's recognition (or
acknowledgment--*Anerkennung*) *of other*
self-conscious subjects *as* self-conscious subjects *for
whom* any object of consciousness will be thought
as *also* existing. One's self-consciousness, in fact,
will be dependent on one's recognition of those others as
similarly recognizing *oneself* as a self-conscious
subject. Such complex patterns of mutual recognition constituting
*objective spirit* thereby provide the social matrix
within which individual self-consciousnesses can exist as such. It is
in this way that the *Phenomenology* can change course, the
earlier tracking of shapes of individual consciousness and
self-consciousness effectively coming to be replaced by the tracking
of distinct patterns of mutual recognition between
subjects--shapes of spirit--that forms the
ground for the existence of those individual
consciousnesses/self-consciousnesses.


It is thus that Hegel has effected the transition from a
phenomenology of the individual's subjective mind to one
of *objective* spirit, thought of as culturally distinct
objective patterns of social interaction to be analysed in terms of
the patterns of reciprocal recognition they
embody. ("Geist" can be translated as either
"mind" or "spirit", but the latter, allowing a
more cultural sense, as in the phrase "spirit of the age"
("Zeitgeist"), seems a more suitable rendering for the
title.) But this is only worked out in the text
gradually. We--the reading or so-called phenomenological
we--can see how particular shapes of self-consciousness, such as
that of the other-worldly religious self-consciousness (Unhappy
Consciousness) with which Chapter 4 ends, depend on certain
institutionalised forms of mutual recognition, in this case one
involving a priest who mediates between the self-conscious subject and
that subject's God. But we are seeing this "from the
outside", as it were: we still have to learn how actual
self-consciousnesses could learn this of themselves. So we have to see
how the protagonist self-consciousness could achieve this insight. It
is to this end that we further trace the learning path of
self-consciousness through the processes of *reason* (in
Chapter 5) before objective spirit can become the explicit subject
matter of Chapter 6 (Spirit).


Hegel's discussion of spirit starts from what he calls
*Sittlichkeit* (translated as "ethical
order" or "ethical
substance"--"*Sittlichkeit*" being a
nominalization from the adjectival (or adverbial) form
"*sittlich*", "customary", from the
stem "*Sitte*", "custom" or
"convention".) Thus Hegel might be seen as adopting the
viewpoint that since social life is ordered by customs we can approach
the lives of those living in it in terms of the patterns of those
customs or conventions themselves--the conventional practices, as
it were, constituting specific, shareable *forms of life* made
actual in the lives of particular individuals who had in
turn *internalized* such general patterns in the process of
acculturation. It is not surprising then that his account of spirit
here starts with a discussion of religious and civic law. Undoubtedly
it is Hegel's tendency to nominalise such abstract concepts in
his attempt to capture the *concrete* nature of such patterns
of conventional life, together with the tendency to
then *personify* them (as in talking about
spirit *becoming* self-conscious) that lends plausibility to
the traditionalist understanding of Hegel. But for non-traditionalists
it is not obvious that Hegel, in employing such phrases, is in any way
committed to any metaphysical supra-individual conscious being or
beings. To take an example, in the second section of the chapter on
spirit, Hegel discusses human culture as the
"world of self-alienated spirit". The idea seems to be
that humans in society not only interact, but that they collectively
create relatively enduring cultural products (repeatable stories,
stageable dramas, and so forth) within which members of that society
can recognise patterns of their own communal life as so reflected. We
might find intelligible the metaphor that such products "hold up a
mirror to society" within which "the society can regard
itself", without thinking we are thereby committed to some
supra-individual unitary mind achieving
self-consciousness. Furthermore, such cultural products
themselves provide conditions allowing individuals to adopt particular
cognitive attitudes by appropriating their resources. Thus, for
example, the capacity to adopt the type of objective viewpoint
demanded by Kantian morality (discussed in the final section of
Spirit)--the capacity to see things, as it were, from a detached
or universal point of view--might be enabled by
engaging with spirit's "alienations" such as the
myths and rituals of a religion professing a universal scope.


We might think that if Kant had written
Hegel's *Phenomenology* he would have ended it at Chapter
6 with the modern moral subject as the *telos* of the
story. For Kant, the practical knowledge of morality, orienting one
within the noumenal world, exceeds the scope of theoretical knowledge,
which had been limited to phenomena. Hegel, however, thought that
philosophy had to unify theoretical and practical knowledge, and so
the *Phenomenology* has further to go. Again, this is seen
differently by traditionalists and revisionists. For traditionalists,
Chapters 7, Religion and 8, Absolute
Knowing, testify to Hegel's disregard for Kant's
critical limitation of theoretical knowledge to empirical
experience. Revisionists, on the other hand, tend to see Hegel as
furthering the Kantian critique into the very coherence of a
conception of an *in-itself* reality that is beyond the
limits of our theoretical (but not practical) cognition. Rather than
understand absolute knowing as the achievement of some
ultimate God's-eye view of everything, the
philosophical analogue to the connection with God sought in religion,
post-Kantian revisionists see it as the accession to a mode of
self-critical thought that has finally abandoned all non-questionable
mythical *givens*, and which will only countenance
reason-giving argument as justification. However we understand this,
absolute knowing is the standpoint to which Hegel has hoped to bring
the reader in this complex work. This is the standpoint of
*science*, the standpoint from which philosophy proper commences,
and it commences in Hegel's next book, the *Science of
Logic*.


#### 3.1.2 *Science of Logic*


Hegel's *Science of Logic* is divided into three
books, dealing with the topics *of
being*, *essence*, and *the concept*, which appeared
in 1812, 1813, and 1816 respectively. For most of the 20th
century it was not received with the enthusiasm that often marked the
reception of *Phenomenology of Spirit*. First, as a work
of *logic* most have regarded it as radically outdated and
relying on an Aristotelian approach that was definitively surpassed in
the later nineteenth century--a view promoted especially by
Bertrand Russell in the early years of the twentieth. Thus many
readers sympathetic to particular doctrines in Hegel have attempted,
contrary to Hegel's insistence, to quarantine his philosophical
approach to particular areas from it. Recently, this skepticism has
started to change.


Some advocate that the *Science of Logic* be read as a
first-order *ontological* doctrine (Doz 1987) or as a category
theory that *simultaneously* represents structures of being and
thought (Houlgate 2005b), and so as having very little to do with what
has traditionally been known as logic. Others argue that
in contrast to the project of formal (or general) logic,
it is best understood as a version of what Kant had called
"transcendental logic" (di Giovanni 2010). In this sense
it should thereby be thought of as a successor to Kant's
"transcendental deduction of the categories" in
the *Critique of Pure Reason* in which Kant attempted to
derive a list of those non-empirical concepts, the
*categories*, which he believed to be presupposed by all
empirical judgments made by finite, discursive knowers like ourselves.
In short, taking the logic as a *category theory* opens up two
general lines of interpretation: should the categories be understood
as primarily *ontological* categories, as found in Aristotle,
or as primarily categories revealing the necessary structure
of *thought*, as in Kant? Those, such as the advocates of the
revised metaphysical interpretation, interpreting Hegel
as basically a metaphysician, typically stress the former, while
post-Kantian interpreters typically stress the
latter.


A glance at the table of contents of *Science of Logic*
reveals the same triadic structuring among the categories or
thought determinations discussed that has been noted
among the shapes of consciousness in
the *Phenomenology*. At the highest level of its branching
structure there are the three books devoted to the doctrines of
being, essence, and concept,
while in turn, each book has three sections, each section containing
three chapters, and so on. In general, each of these individual nodes
deals with some particular category. In fact, Hegel's categorial
triads appear to repeat Kant's *own* triadic way of
articulating the categories in the Table of Categories
(*Critique of Pure Reason* A80/B106) in which the third term in
the triad in some way integrates the first two. (In Hegel's
terminology, he would say that the first two were
*sublated* [*aufgehoben*] in the third--while
the first two are *negated* by the third, they continue to work
within the context defined by it.) Hegel's later treatment
of *the syllogism* found in Book 3, in which he follows
Aristotle's own three-termed schematism of the syllogistic
structure, repeats this triadic structure as does his ultimate
analysis of its component concepts as the moments of
universality, particularity, and
singularity.


Reading into the first chapter of Book 1, Being, it
is quickly seen that the *transitions* of the *Logic*
broadly repeat those of the first chapters of
the *Phenomenology*, now, however, as between the categories
themselves rather than between conceptions of the
respective *objects* of conscious experience. Thus,
being is the thought determination with which the work
commences because it *at first* seems to be the most
immediate, fundamental determination that characterises
any possible thought content at all. (In contrast, *being* in
the *Phenomenology*'s *Sense-certainty* chapter
was described as the known *truth* of the purported immediate
sensory given--the category that it was discovered to
instantiate.) Whatever thought is about, that topic must in some
sense *exist*. Like those purported simple *sensory
givens* with which the *Phenomenology* starts, the
category *being* looks to have no internal structure or
constituents, but again in a parallel to the *Phenomenology*,
it is the effort of thought to make this category explicit that both
undermines it and brings about new ones. *Being* seems to
be *both* immediate and simple, but it will show itself to be,
in fact, *only* something in opposition to something else,
*nothing*. The point seems to be that while the categories
being and nothing seem both absolutely
distinct and opposed, on reflection (and following Leibniz's
principle of the identity of indiscernibles) they appear identical as
no criterion can be invoked which differentiates them. The only way
out of this paradox is to posit a third category within which they can
coexist as *negated* (*Aufgehoben*) moments. This
category is *becoming*, which saves thinking from
paralysis because it accommodates both
concepts. Becoming contains being and
nothing in the sense that when something
*becomes* it passes, as it were, from nothingness to
being. But these contents cannot be understood apart
from their contributions to the overarching category: this is what it
is to be negated (*aufgehoben*) within the new category.


In general this is how the *Logic* proceeds: seeking its
most basic and universal determination, thought posits a category to
be reflected upon, finds then that this collapses due to a
contradiction generated, like that generated by the
category being, and so then seeks a further category with which to
make retrospective senses of those contradictory categories. However,
in turn the new category will generate some further contradictory
negation and again the demand will arise for a *further*
concept that can reconcile these opposed concepts by
incorporating *them* as moments.


The method Hegel employs here, *determinate negation*, is often
compared with Spinoza's principle that "all determination
is negation", but while Hegel's is *related* to
Spinoza's thought, it cannot be identified with or reduced to
it. Spinoza's top-down determination starts with a single
category (in his case, *divine substance*) that is then
progressively divided by the application of concepts--the model
being Plato's method of division in which
a *genus* concept is divided into particular *species*
by the presence or absence of some differentiating property. From
Hegel's point of view, however, this cannot
capture *individuals* as other than *parts* of that
greater whole--a metaphysical picture in relation to Spinoza he
refers to as *acosmism*. So Hegel will
balance *this* type of determination by negation, with a
different type of negation modeled on that which holds
between *incompatible properties* of some object (for example,
red and blue as incompatible colors) and that is reflected in the
*term negation* of Aristotle's logic. This allows
Hegel to go beyond the determination of something
as *particular* (suggesting the part-whole relation) to a more
robust sense of *singularity* [*Einzelheit*]--the
sense of the pure *thisness* seen initially in
the *Phenomenology*'s Sense-certainty chapter, the truth
of which was then shown to be Aristotle's idea of an individual
thing's substantial form in the Perception
chapter. It is in terms of this category that we can think, along with
Aristotle, of a thing having an underlying substrate within which
properties inhere and which, unlike the properties
themselves, cannot be thought in *general* terms, but only in
terms of the category of *singularity*. And yet this will
encounter a problem for the *determinacy* of this underlying
substrate--*it* will have to find determining contrasts
that allow *it* to be determinately conceived. (In Book 2 of
the *Logic* we will learn that the category of singularity will
rely on particularity just as particularity has been shown to rely on
singularlity. Singular substrates or "essences" can only
be known in relation to the general properties that constitute their
appearances.)


Attempting to unravel the intricacies of the patterns of dependence
between such categories will be task of this mammoth work, but here a
general point might be made. If Hegel's thought here is
considered to be, like Spinoza's, *holistic*, it is only
so at a higher level of abstraction, such that these determinations
of *singularity*, *particularity*
and *universality* cannot themselves be understood in isolation
from each other but only via their complex interactions. Hegel
only *explicitly* explores the details of the interactions of
these determinations of conceptuality in his discussion of judgments
and syllogisms in Book 3, The Doctrine of Concept,
suggesting that concerns of logic as traditionally
conceived are not as irrelevant to the *Science of Logic* as
often thought. However, the general point separating his approach from
that of Spinoza clearly emerges earlier on. Determinate negation is
not Spinoza's principle as Spinoza's presupposes a whole
that *precedes* its parts, and that all *negations* are
negations of something that is primitively *positive*. In
contrast, Hegel's negations will be negations of determinations
that are *already* to be conceived as *themselves*
negations.


The other basic methodological principle of the *Logic* will
be that this categorical infrastructure of thought is able to be
unpacked using *only* the resources available to thought
itself: the capacity of thought to make its contents determinate (in a
way somewhat like what Leibniz had thought of as making clear but
confused ideas clear and distinct), and its capacity to be consistent
and avoid contradiction. Again, for some readers, this makes
Hegel's logic akin to Kant's transcendental logic that,
rather than treating the pure form of thought abstracted
from *all* content, treats thought as already possessing a
certain type of self-generated content, (in Kant's terminology,
"transcendental content") that is presupposed by the
subsequent acquisition of all *empirical* content. But if
Hegel's is akin to Kant's transcendental logic, it has
clear differences to it as well. For Kant, transcendental logic was
the logic governing the thought of finite thinkers like ourselves,
whose cognition was constrained by the necessity of applying general
discursive concepts to the singular contents given in sensory
intuitions, and he contrasted this with the thought of a type of
thinker not so constrained--God--a thinker whose thought
could directly grasp the world in a type of intellectual
intuition. While opinions divide as to how Hegel's approach to
logic relates to that of Kant, it is important to grasp that for Hegel
logic is not simply a science of the form of our thoughts. It is also
a science of actual *content* as well, and as such has an
ontological dimension.


The thought determinations of Book 1 lead eventually into those of
Book 2, The Doctrine of Essence. Naturally the logical structures and
processes implicit in essence-thinking are more developed than those
of being-thinking. Crucially, the contrasting pair essence and
appearance of Essence-logic allow the thought of some underlying
reality that manifests itself *through* a different overlying
appearance, in the way that the *forces* posited by the
operations of *the Understanding* (explored in
the *Phenomenology*'s Chapter 3) are grasped through the
appearances they explain. In contrast, the categories of Being-logic
seem to govern thought processes that are restricted to qualitative
phenomena and their co-ordinations. But distinction
between *essence* and *appearance* must itself
instantiate the relation of determinate negation, and the metaphysical
tendency to think of reality as made up of some underlying substrates
in contrast to the superficial appearances will itself come to grief
with the discovery that the notion of an essence is only meaningful
in *virtue* of the appearance that it is meant to explain
away. (In terms of the ultimate *conceptual* categories of
singularity, particularity and universality, this discovery would be
equivalent to grasping the idea that the *singularity* of the
underlying, non-perceivable substrate or substantial form is
meaningful only in relation to something that can bear
the *particular* qualities that constitutes its worldly
appearance.) For Hegel it is the complex modern, but pre-Kantian,
versions of substance metaphysics, like those of Spinoza and Leibniz,
that bring out in the most developed way the inherently contradictory
nature of this form of thought.


Book 3, The Doctrine of Concept, effects a shift from
the Objective Logic of Books 1 and 2, to
Subjective Logic, and metaphysically coincides with a
shift to the modern subject-based category theory of Kant. Just as
Kantian philosophy is founded on a conception of objectivity secured
by conceptual coherence, Concept-logic commences with the concept of
*concept* itself, with its moments of singularity,
particularity and universality. While in the two books of objective
logic, the movement had been between particular concepts,
being, nothing, becoming
etc., in the subjective logic, the conceptual relations are grasped at
a meta-level, such that the concept *concept* treated in
Chapter 1 of section 1 (Subjectivity) passes over into
that of *judgment* in Chapter 2. It is important to grasp
the basic contours of Hegel's treatment of judgment as it
informs his subsequent treatment of inference.


Reprising an etymological point made by Holderlin, Hegel notes
that a judgment (*Urteil*) involves a separation
(*Teilung*) of parts: in basic terms a predicate is said of
some subject giving the judgment the grammatical form "*S*
is *P*", but in *saying*
"*S* *is* *P*", the judging subject
affirms the *unity* existing between the parts. *S*
and *P* are thus meant (1) to be diverse, but (2) to form a
unity--a situation we are now familiar with in terms of
the *Aufhebung* of parts in a whole. Hegel takes this as
signaling two ways of thinking of the relation of subject and
predicate in the judgment. One can take subject and predicate terms as
self-subsistent entities that are *joined* in the judgment, or
one can take the judgment itself as the primary unit
that *splits* into subject and predicate terms. This in fact
coincides with the two different ways in which logical relations have
been conceived in the history of philosophy: the former represents
the *term-logical* approach characteristic of Aristotle, while
the latter represents the *propositional* approach
characteristic of the Stoics and much recent philosophy. From the
former point of view one thinks of the subject term as designating a
substance, typically grasped as an instance of a kind, in which
properties, designated by predicate terms, *inhere*. From the
latter point of view, one thinks of predicate terms as abstract
universals that *subsume* or are satisfied by entities to which
the subject terms refer, an approach which conceives of the
propositional content, in Stoic terminology--the
*lecton*, the *what-is-said*--as having a
primacy over the parts. Using a distinction from the Medievals, we can
describe the first type of judgments as *de re* (about things)
and the second as *de dicto* (about sayings). These
alternative *joining* and *splitting* approaches can in
turn be applied to the relationship of *judgments*
within *inferences* or *syllogisms*. While it is more
common for inferences to be thought of as *composed* of
judgments which have their own *truth values*, the judgments
themselves can be thought of as gaining their meaning via the role
they play in inferences, parallel to the way that the *parts*
of the judgment can be thought of as resulting from the
judgment's *splitting*. Within recent semantic theory,
Robert Brandom has argued for such an *inferentialist*
analysis and has suggested this way of understanding Hegel's
logic (Brandom 2014), a view that fits with Hegel's idea that
the *syllogism* is the "truth of the judgment" (SL:
593). Thought of in terms of the framework of Kant's
transcendental logic, Hegel's position would be
akin to allowing inferences--syllogisms--a
role in the determination of the transcendental content
of judgments, a role that is not allowed in Kant.


As we have said, Hegel's logic is meant somehow to generate a
content--to *produce* a type of ontology--and this
comes into explicit focus with Hegel's puzzling claim in Book 3
concerning a syllogism that has become "concrete" and
"full of content" that thereby has *necessary*
existence (SL: 616-7). In contrast with Kant, Hegel seems to go
beyond a transcendental deduction of the *formal* conditions of
experience and thought and to a deduction of their *material*
conditions. Traditionalists will here point to Hegel's allusions
to the ontological proof (SL: 625) of medieval theology in which
the *existence* of God is seen as necessitated by his
concept--an argument undermined by Kant's criticism of the
treatment of *existence* as a predicate. In Hegel's
version, it is said, the objective existence that God achieves in the
world is seen as necessitated by his essential
self-consciousness. Non-traditional readings, in contrast, would have
to interpret this aspect of Hegel's logic very
differently. Brandom's inferentialist interpretation of Hegel,
when joined to ideas taken from Hegel's treatment of
self-consciousness in the *Phenomenology*, suggests a way
forward here.


The first thing to be emphasized here is that we shouldn't
think of judgments and their contents as something
like *mental* contents--subjective or psychological states
of a thinker's mind. Such a psychologistic
attitude was opposed by Hegel just as it was opposed by a figure as
central to modern logic as Gottlob Frege. For Frege, thoughts are not
mental, rather they are *abstract* entities like
numbers, so the problem facing us is not how to go from mental
contents to the concrete world, it is how to go from *abstract*
to concrete ones. But here we must keep in mind Hegel's two-fold
way of thinking about judgments, *de dicto* and *de re*,
and while it is usual to think of the contents of *de dicto*
judgments as abstract (here to think of the content
as *propositional* is usual), some have thought of the contents
of *de re* judgments as including *the thing* itself
(the "*re*") that the judgment is about. (In fact
Bertrand Russell had, at points in his career, entertained such an
idea of *propositional content* itself.) Thus when Hegel
characterizes some judgment structures (typically perception based
judgments) as *judgments of existence* one might take the
perceived thing *itself* as straightforwardly part of the
content of the judgment. It is a concrete object, but
not grasped as a concrete *simple*, but grasped in relation to
what is judged *of it* in the predicate. And to the extent
that *judgments* can be considered components of syllogisms, we
might appreciate how syllogisms might have become
contentful in a process that has culminated in the *concrete* syllogism of
necessity.


If the concrete object of a *de re* judgment is effectively
what had been under consideration in Chapter 2, Perception, in
the *Phenomenology* (the thing with properties), we now might
envisage where Hegel's thought is headed in these sections of
the subjective logic. In the *Phenomenology* it turned out that
the capacity for a subject to entertain objects of consciousness such
as perceptual ones was that such a subject was capable
of *self-consciousness*. It then turned out that to be capable
of self-consciousness the subject had to exist in a world with other
embodied subjects whose intentions it could recognize. It is here that
we might pick up Robert Brandom's suggestion, following Sellars,
that we should think of the existence of inferential processes or
processes of reasoning as presupposing participation within social
communicative interactions in which the making of an assertion is
considered as a move in a language-game of the "giving and
asking for reasons". In short, we may think of Hegel's
syllogism of necessity, which constitutes the ground or
"truth" of the earlier *formal* conception of
syllogisms, as a type of inter-subjective practice embodying
thought--a type of *syllogising* practice that is by
necessity inter-subjective and recognitive. Formally considered we
might think of this syllogism as the logical schematization of the
most *developed* form of recognition in which thinkers
acknowledge others *as* free thinkers.


I have suggested that in the syllogism of necessity with which
Hegel's treatment of inference terminates we get a glimpse of a
type of contentful and dynamic rational process unfolding in the midst
of the recognitive and communicative interactions between finite
living and intentional beings. What we see here is a reprise of the
conception of logos as an objective process running through the world
as had been conceived by the ancient Stoics and neo-Platonists. But it
is now embedded not simply in the world as
such--in *nature*--but in
objectivized *spirit*, in human communities of thinkers. We are
now returned to the domain of *objectivity* that had
characterized Books 1 and 2 of the *Science of Logic*, but we
might expect such a return *from* subjectivity to have effected
a change in *objectivity* as earlier understood.


To cross straight into a consideration of the objectivity of the
human world of action and thought--spirit--would be to break
the developmental pattern of the logic because thought about such a
complex form of objective existence will presuppose thought about
simpler forms. And so the starting point for the consideration of
objectivity will again be that of the simple object as something
immediately grasped by thought. But this object can now be
developed with that elaborate conceptual apparatus that
has emerged in the preceding section. Progression here will be from a
naive and immediate concept of an object as simple
self-sufficient thing, a thing with its identity centered on itself,
through the more complex idea of an object as grasped from within the
interstices of physical and chemical thought, to the models of
teleological and living systems. The *Logic* then transitions
into a consideration of the "*adequate concept*, the
objectively *true*, or the *true as such*" (SL:
670). This adequate concept is *the Idea*, which, after tracking through
considerations of the living individual and theoretical and
practical cognition, emerges as *the Absolute Idea*.


### 3.2 Hegel's *Encyclopaedic* System and its Expansions


As we have mentioned, Hegel's *Encyclopaedia of
Philosophical Sciences* was written as a teaching manual, various
parts of which were later expanded upon in lecture courses devoted to
specific parts of the system. The first part of
the *Encyclopaedia* is essentially a condensed version of his
earlier *Science of Logic*, considered above. We will pass over
a consideration of this work to the next component of
the *Encyclopaedia*, Hegel's *Philosophy of
Nature*.


#### 3.2.1. Philosophy of Nature


Hegel's *Philosophy of Nature* (first published as
such in 1842, and based on SSSS245-376 from the
1830 *Encyclopaedia*, supplemented by material and student
transcripts from Hegel's Berlin lectures) has often been damned
by the contention that Hegel had simply *dismissed* the
activity of the natural sciences, especially Newtonian science, as
based upon the inadequacies of the Understanding, and in
their place had tried to somehow deduce the natural
world from philosophical first principles. Recently, however, defenses
of Hegel's philosophy of science have started to emerge,
especially from the side of Hegel's reformed
metaphysical interpreters. Thus, it has been argued by Westphal
(2008) for example, that Hegel's philosophy of nature actually
represents a sophisticated attempt to think through epistemological
assumptions that are presupposed by the development of Newton's
theory. Defending Hegel's philosophy of science from a similar
point of view, James Kreines (2008) has argued for the relevance of
Hegel's logical categories for the biological sciences of his
times. We won't here attempt to present such arguments, but
before any such reassessment of Hegel's work here *could*
be undertaken, the fundamental criticism raised above of a project
that attempts to base a philosophy of nature on his logic rather than
the empirical sciences must be addressed. Was not Hegel simply trying
to pre-empt the work of empirical scientists by somehow attempting to
anticipate the very *contents* of their discoveries from
logical considerations alone?


This objection is often summed up under the slogan of
"deducing Krug's pen", in that in 1801 the
philosopher W.T. Krug had accused *Schelling*'s idealist
philosophy of nature of aiming to deduce the nature of all contingent
phenomena, even that of the pen with which he, Krug, was writing his
critique. Hegel responded to Krug's accusation in the following
year, claiming that Krug had made the common mistake of conflating the
understanding with reason, and treating the Absolute as something on
the same level as finite things.


Hegel was, at this time, closely aligned with Schelling's
views, and would separate his own views *from*
Schelling's in subsequent years leading up to the writing
of *Phenomenology of Spirit*. Nevertheless, Hegel clearly
thought that his point held regardless of the relation of his own
views to Schelling's as he was to make similar points against
Krug in a remark added to the *Philosophy of Nature* from the
Heidelberg and Berlin periods. While logic must not be restricted to
the "form" of an externally given "matter",
nevertheless,



> it is the height of pointlessness to demand of the
> concept that it should explain ... construe or deduce these
> contingent products of nature. (PN: SS250, remark. Krug is
> mentioned explicitly in a footnote at this point.)
> 
> 
> 



The point is expanded upon further when it is
said that it is



> an error on the part of the philosophy of nature
> to attempt to face up to all phenomena; this is done in the finite
> sciences, where everything has to be reduced to general conceptions
> (hypotheses). In these sciences the empirical element is the sole
> confirmation of the hypothesis, so that everything has to be
> explained. (PN: SS270, addition)
> 
> 


In keeping with the more general idea that that philosophy attempts
to discern or recognize *concepts* in
*representations* (*Vorstellungen*) or empirical appearances, philosophy of
nature investigates the conceptual structures that are manifest in the
products of the scientific work that is done on the basis of those
appearances.



> Traces of conceptual determination will certainly
> survive in the most particularized product, although they will not
> exhaust its nature. (PN: SS250 remark)
> 
> 
> 



Clearly, philosophy of nature is not in competition with the empirical
natural sciences; it takes as its subject matter the results of those
sciences in order to discover within them the particular ways in which
the necessary categorial structures deduced in the logic are
expressed.


In terms of topics treated, the *Philosophy of Nature*
largely coincides with those treated in the third book of
the *Science of Logic* when the logical processes and relations
in question have returned to objectivity after the
excursion into the *subjectivity* of formal logic at the outset
of Book 3. In Mechanism Hegel had reconstructed a
movement in thought from a primitive cosmology in which all objects
are conceived in relation to a central object (the sun) that
exemplifies objecthood *per se*, to a system of objects within
which any such self-sufficient center has been
eliminated. In this Newtonian world, that which gives order to the
whole now has the ideality of law, but this
is *itself* thought of as external to the system
of objects.


After an Introduction, Section One of
the *Philosophy of Nature*, Mechanics, expands on this
progression through considerations of space and time, matter
considered as the diversity of individual bodies distributed in space
and time, and finally the idea of universal gravitation as the
determinate concept of such corporeal matter realized as *idea*
(PN: SS270). In the Newtonian laws of mechanics, however, the
unity of matter is still only *formal*, and in Section
Two, Physics, the determinateness of form is now considered
as *immanent within* such corporeal matter.



> 
> Matter has individuality to the extent that it is
> determined within itself by having being-for-self developed within
> it. It is through this determination that matter breaks away from
> gravity and manifests itself as implicitly self-determining. (PN:
> SS273)
> 
> 
> 



While Mechanics clearly reflects the
more space-filling conception of matter dominant in
British thought, Physics is consistent with the more
dynamic continental European conception of matter
originating in Leibniz with his idea of living
forces. Within this framework, Hegel attempts to organize a
vast array of areas of contemporary physical investigation including
meteorology, theories of sound and heat, light and electricity up to
and including *chemical* processes which stand on the
threshold of Organic Physics, dealt with in Section
Three. The study of organics represents a return to the consideration
of the individual *body* with which Mechanics had
started, but now considered as "infinite process in which
the individuality determines itself as the *particularity or
finitude* which it also negates, and returns into itself by
re-establishing itself at the end of the process as the beginning". The
body is now "an *impregnated* and negative unity, which
by relating itself to itself, has become essentially *self-centred
and subjective*" (PN: SS337). From such a conception,
the first *body* to be considered is that of *the earth
itself*, along with its history. Chapter Two moves to a
consideration of the plant and Chapter Three, the animal
organism.


From the point of view of the actual content of scientific theories
and approaches that Hegel summarizes and locates within his system,
his *Philosophy of Nature* is clearly a product of his time.
Nevertheless, many of the underlying philosophical issues dealt with
are still now far from settled. Thus, while Newtonian physics clearly
became established in ways that made Leibniz's dynamic physics
seem obsolete as *empirical* theory, debate still goes on as to
whether conceptions of space-time in post-Newtonian physics is to be
conceived in Newtonian or Leibnizian ways.


#### 3.2.2 Philosophy of Subjective and Objective Spirit


In the *Encyclopaedia*, *Philosophy of Nature* is
followed by *Philosophy of Spirit* (*Geist*).
Hegel's usual triadic pattern when applied here results in
sections devoted to the philosophies of subjective spirit, objective
spirit, and absolute spirit. Philosophy of *subjective* spirit
constitutes what is closest in Hegel's philosophy to a
philosophy of mind in the contemporary sense, while the philosophy
of *objective* spirit concerns those objective patterns of
social interaction and the cultural institutions within which spirit
is objectified in patterns of human life we have seen at work
in *Phenomenology of Spirit*. Within subjective spirit, we may
anticipate that the first division, Anthropology, will
follow on from topics with which *Philosophy of Nature*
ends--the animal organism--and so it does. Thus here Hegel
is concerned with what he terms "*Seele*",
"soul"--which seems to translate more the ancient
Greek term, "psyche"--and hence
the *mind-body* relation:



> If soul and body are absolutely opposed to one
> another as is maintained by the abstractive intellectual consciousness,
> 
> 
> 



Hegel comments,



> then there is no possibility of any community
> between them. The community was, however, recognized by ancient
> metaphysics as an undeniable fact. (PN: SS 389
> add)
> 
> 


The *Seele* of Anthropology should therefore not be
confused with the modern subjective conception of mind, as exemplified
by Descartes and other early modern philosophers. Aristotle had
conceived of the soul as the *form* of the body, not as a
substance separate from that of the body, and had attributed lesser
souls to animals and even plants. (Again, Aristotle's notion of
*substantial form* comes into view.) Concomitantly, in
this section Hegel describes spirit as *sunk* in nature,
and treats consciousness as largely limited to what now might be
described as *sentient* or *phenomenal* consciousness
alone--the feeling soul. *Consciousness* in
the sense of the modern subject-object opposition only makes its
appearance in the following second section, Phenomenology of
Spirit, which, reprising key moments from the earlier book of
that name, raises a problem for how we are to understand the relation
of phenomenology and systematic philosophy: is it
a *path* to it or *part* of it? Given that the
recognitive approach to self-consciousness *presupposes* that
potential self-consciousnesses are *in fact* embodied and
located in the world, we would expect the mind as treated
in Psychology to be no less embodied as the way in which it
is conceived in Anthropology. What in fact distinguishes the
mind of Psychology from that of Anthropology is its
rational capacities, considered in terms that would now be described
as normative rather than simply naturalistic, and this
for Hegel clearly signals a difference in the way in which an actual
psychological subject *relates to* his or her own body. The
type of *abstractive* thinking found in Psychology
does not, of course, as in mythical images of metempsychosis--a
favorite trope of Platonists--involve the mind leaving
the body. This would count for Hegel as a piece of mythical
picture thinking--a *Vorstellung.* Rather,
it involves a certain capacity of the psychological subject to suspend
unreflected-upon endorsement of the *claims* made on behalf of
his or her body, for example, to subject the evidence
given by the senses to rational scrutiny.


Given the dialectical mode in which Hegel's texts progress,
as seen already in both *Phenomenology of Spirit*
and *Science of Logic*, we will expect the capacities examined
in Psychology to ultimately depend upon those that come under
consideration in the context of *objective* spirit. In this
sense, we are witnessing within another mode, the type of progression
seen in the movement in Phenomenology from shapes of
consciousness to shapes of spirit. The
internal *Phenomenology of Spirit* seems to play an important
role in setting up this transition from Psychology
to *Objective Spirit* (Williams 2007), but it might also be
seen as crucial in relating the more cognitive dimensions
of Psychology back to the theme of embodiment prominent
in Anthropology (Nuzzo 2013a).Thus any *naturalistic analysis* is ultimately
surpassed by a social and historical one, which *itself* cannot
be understood as *anti*-naturalistic.


The philosophy of *subjective* spirit passes over into that
of *objective spirit*, which concerns the objective patterns of
social interaction and the cultural institutions within which spirit
is objectified. The book entitled *Elements of the Philosophy of
Right*, published in 1821 as a textbook to accompany Hegel's
lectures at the University of Berlin, essentially corresponds to a
more developed version of the philosophy of objective spirit and will
be considered here.


##### Elements of the Philosophy of Right


The *Philosophy of Right* (as it is more commonly called)
can be read as a political philosophy that stands independently of the
system (Tunick 1992), despite the fact that Hegel intended it to be
read against the background of the developing conceptual
determinations of the *Logic*. The text proper starts from the
conception of a singular willing subject (grasped from the point of
view of its individual self-consciousness) as the bearer of
*abstract* right. While this conception of the individual
willing subject possessing some kind of fundamental rights was in fact
the starting point of many modern political philosophies (such as that
of Locke, for example) the fact that Hegel commences here does not
testify to any ontological assumption that the consciously willing and
right-bearing individual is the basic atom from which all society can
be understood as constructed--an idea at the heart of standard
social contract theories. Rather, this is simply the
most immediate starting point of Hegel's
presentation and corresponds to analogous starting places of
the *Phenomenology* and the *Logic*. Just as the
categories of the *Logic* develop in a way meant to demonstrate
that what had at the start been conceived as simple is in fact only
made determinate in virtue of its being a functional part of some
larger structure or process, here too it is meant to be shown that any
simple willing and right-bearing subject only gains its determinacy in
virtue of a place it finds for itself in a larger social, and
ultimately historical, structure or process. Thus, even a contractual
exchange (the minimal social interaction for contract theorists) is
not to be thought simply as an occurrence consequent upon the
existence of two beings with natural animal wants and some natural
calculative rationality, as in Hobbes, say; rather, the system of
interaction within which individual exchanges take place (the economy)
will be treated holistically as a culturally-shaped form of social
life within which the actual wants of individuals as well as their
reasoning powers are given determinate forms. Hegel is well aware of
the distinctive modernity of this form of social-life.


Here too it becomes apparent that Hegel, taking up themes from
the Phenomenology, follows Fichte in treating property in
terms of a *recognitive* analysis of the nature of such a
right. A contractual exchange of commodities between two individuals
itself involves an implicit act of recognition in as much as each, in
giving something to the other in exchange for what they want, is
thereby recognizing that other *as* a proprietor of that thing,
or, more properly, of the inalienable *value* attaching to it
(PR: SSSS72-81). By contrast, such proprietorship would
be *denied* rather than recognised in fraud or
theft--forms of wrong (*Unrecht*) in which
right is negated rather than acknowledged or posited
(SSSS82-93). Thus what differentiates property from
mere *possession* is that it is grounded in a relation of
reciprocal recognition between two willing subjects (SS71 and
remark). Moreover, it is in the exchange relation that we can see what
it means for Hegel for individual subjects to share a *common
will*--an idea which will have important implications with
respect to the difference of Hegel's conception of the state
from that of Rousseau. Such an interactive constitution of the common
will means that for Hegel that the identity among wills is
achieved *because of* not *in spite of* co-existing
differences between the particular wills of the subjects involved:
while contracting individuals both will *the
same* exchange, at a more concrete level, they do so with
different ends in mind. Each wants something different *from*
the exchange. Without this difference, the type of
absorption of individual subjects into
collective *substance* of the type of Hegel worries about in
relation to Spinoza would occur (SS258 remark).


Hegel passes from the abstractly individualistic frame of
Abstract Right to the social determinacies of
*Sittlichkeit* or Ethical Life (PR: SS142) via
considerations first of *wrong*, the negation of right,
(SSSS82-96) and the punishment that such wrong entails
the negation of wrong, and hence the "negation of the
negation" of the original right (SSSS97-104), and
then of *morality*, conceived more or less as an
internalisation of the external legal relations presupposed by
punishment. Consideration of Hegel's version of the
retributivist approach to punishment affords a good example of his use
of the logic of negation. In punishing the criminal the state makes it
clear to its members that it is the acknowledgment of right *per
se* that is essential to developed social life: the significance
of acknowledging another's right in the contractual exchange
cannot be, as it at first might have appeared to the participants,
simply that of an instrumental means by which each gets what he or she
wants from the other.


Hegel's treatment of punishment also brings out the
continuity of his way of conceiving of the structure and dynamics of
the social world with that of Kant, as Kant too, in
his *Metaphysics of Morals* had employed the idea of the
state's punitive action as a *negating* of the original
criminal act. Kant's idea, conceived on the model of the
physical principle of action and reaction, was structured by the
category of community or reciprocal interaction, and was
conceived as involving what he called *real
opposition*. Such an idea of opposed dynamic forces seems to
form something of a model for Hegel's idea of contradiction and
the starting point for his conception of reciprocal
recognition. Nevertheless, clearly Hegel articulates the structures of
recognition in more complex ways than those derivable from
Kant's category of community.


First of all, in Hegel's analysis of *Sittlichkeit*
the type of sociality found in the market-based civil
society is to be understood as dependent upon and in
contrastive opposition with the more immediate form found in the
institution of the family: a form of sociality mediated by a
quasi-natural inter-subjective recognition rooted in sentiment and
feeling--love (PR: SSSS 158-60). (This dependence
shows how *anthropological* determinations do not simply
disappear with the development of more *psychological*
ones--they are *preserved* as well as
*negated* as in the pattern of what
is *aufgehoben*. It also shows the mutual dependence of the
determinations of the *singularity* of the atomistic subjects
of civil society and their *particularity* as members (parts)
of holistically conceived families.) Here Hegel seems to have extended
Fichte's legally characterized notion of recognition into the
types of human inter-subjectivity earlier broached by Holderlin
and the romantics. In the family the particularity of each individual
tends to be absorbed into the social unit (one is a *part of*
one's family), giving this manifestation
of *Sittlichkeit* a one-sidedness that is the inverse of that
found in market relations in which participants grasp themselves in
the first instance as *singular* [*einzeln*]
self-identical individuals who *then* enter into relationships
that are external to them.


These two opposite but interlocking principles of social existence
provide the basic structures in terms of which the component parts of
the modern state are articulated and understood. As both contribute
particular characteristics to the subjects involved in them, part of
the problem for the rational state will be to ensure that each of
these two principles mediates the other, each thereby mitigating
the *one-sidedness* of the other. Thus, individuals who
encounter each other in the external relations of the
market place and who have their subjectivity shaped by such relations
also belong to families where they are subject to opposed
influences. Moreover, even within the ensemble of production and
exchange mechanisms of civil society individuals will belong to
particular *estates* (the agricultural estate, that of
trade and industry, and the *universal* estate of civil
servants (PR: SSSS199-208)), whose internal forms of
sociality will show family-like features.


Although the actual details of Hegel's mapping
of the categorical structures of the *Logic* onto
the *Philosophy of Right* are far from clear, the general
motivation is apparent. Hegel's logical categories can be read
as an attempt to provide a schematic account of the material (rather
than formal) conditions required for developed self-consciousness for
whom rationality and freedom are maximized. Thus we might regard the
various syllogisms of Hegel's *Subjective
Logic* as attempts to chart the skeletal structures of those
different types of recognitive inter-subjectivity necessary to sustain
various aspects of rational cognitive and conative functioning
(self-consciousness). From this perspective, we might
see his logical schematisation of the modern
rational state as a way of displaying just those sorts
of mediating institutions that a state must provide if it is to answer
Rousseau's question of the form of association needed for the
formation and expression of the *general will*.


Concretely, for Hegel it is representation of the estates within
the legislative bodies that is to achieve this (PR:
SSSS301-14). As the estates of civil society group their
members according to their common interests, and as the deputies
elected from the estates to the legislative bodies give voice to those
interests within the deliberative processes of legislation, the
outcome of this process might give expression to the general
interest. But Hegel's republicanism is here
balanced by his invocation of the familial principle: such
representative bodies can only provide the *content* of the
legislation to a *constitutional monarch* who must add to it
the form of the royal decree--an individual "I will
..." (SSSS275-81). To declare that for Hegel
the monarch plays only a symbolic role here is to miss
the fundamentally idealist complexion of his political philosophy. The
expression of the general will in legislation cannot be thought of as
an outcome of some quasi-mechanical process: it must
be *willed*. If legislation is to express the general will,
citizens must recognize it as expressing *their* wills; and
this means, recognising it *as* willed. The monarch's
explicit "I will" is thus needed to close this recognitive
circle, lest legislation look like a mechanical compromise resulting
from a clash of contingent interests, and so as
actively *willed* by nobody. Thus while Hegel is critical of
standard social contract theories, his own conception of
the state is still clearly a complicated transformation of those of
Rousseau and Kant.


Perhaps one of the most influential parts of
Hegel's *Philosophy of Right* concerns his analysis of
the contradictions of the unfettered capitalist economy. On the one
hand, Hegel agreed with Adam Smith that the interlinking of productive
activities allowed by the modern market meant that "subjective
selfishness" turned into a "contribution towards the
satisfaction of the needs of everyone else" (PR: SS199). But
this did not mean that he accepted Smith's idea that this
"general plenty" produced thereby *diffused* (or
"trickled down") though the rest of society. From within
the type of consciousness generated within civil society, in which
individuals are grasped as *bearers of rights* abstracted
from the particular concrete relationships to which they belong,
Smithean optimism may seem justified. But this simply attests to the
one-sidedness of this type of abstract thought, and the need for it to
be mediated by the type of consciousness based in the family in which
individuals are grasped in terms of the way they *belong to*
the social body. In fact, the unfettered operation of the
market *produces* a class caught in a spiral of poverty.
Starting from this analysis, Marx later used it as evidence of the
need to abolish the individual proprietorial rights at the heart of
Hegel's civil society and socialise the means of
production. Hegel, however, did not draw this conclusion. His
conception of the exchange contract as a form of recognition that
played an essential role within the state's capacity to provide
the conditions for the existence of rational and free-willing subjects
would certainly prevent such a move. Rather, the economy was to be
contained within an over-arching institutional framework of the state,
and its social effects offset by welfarist intervention. Some of
Hegel's most telling criticisms of the unmediated effects of
modern civil society concern those on the psychological lives of
individuals. Recently, an approach to social reality with Hegelian
provenance that uses the notion of recognition to articulate such
pathologies has been developed by Axel Honneth (2010),
testifying to the continuing relevance of Hegel's analyses.


##### Philosophy of History


The final 20 paragraphs of the *Philosophy of Right* (and
the final 5 paragraphs of objective spirit section of
the *Encyclopaedia*) are devoted to *world history*
(*die Weltgeschichte*), and they also coincide with the point
of transition from objective to *absolute* spirit. We have
already seen the relevance of historical issues for Hegel in the
context of the *Phenomenology of Spirit*, such that a series of
different forms of objective spirit can be grasped in terms of the
degree to which they enable the development of a universalizable
self-consciousness capable of rationality and freedom. Hegel was to
enlarge on these ideas in a lecture series given five times during his
Berlin period, and it was *via* the text assembled on the basis
of these lectures by his son Karl, that many readers would be
introduced to Hegel's ideas after his death.


World history is made up of the histories of *particular*
peoples within which spirit assumes some "particular principle
on the lines of which it must run through a development of its
consciousness and its actuality" (PM: SS548). Just the same
dialectic that we have first seen operative among shapes of
consciousness in the *Phenomenology* and among categories or
thought-determinations in the *Logic* can be observed here. An
historical community *acts* on the principle that informs its
social life, the experience and memory of this action and the
consequences it brings--a memory encoded in the stories that
circulate in the community--results in this principle becoming
available for the self-consciousness of the community, thus breaking
the *immediacy* of its operation. This loss of immediacy brings
about the decline of that community but gives rise to the principle of
a new community:



> in rendering itself objective and making this its
> being an object of thought, [spirit] on the one hand destroys the
> determinate form of its being, and on the other hand gains a
> comprehension of the universal element which it involves, and thereby
> gives a new form to its inherent principle ... [which] has risen
> into another, and in fact a higher principle. (PWH: 81)
> 
> 
> 



This dialectic linking concrete communities into a
developmental narrative which shows



> the path of liberation for the spiritual
> substance, the deed by which the absolute final aim of the world is
> realized in it, and the merely implicit mind achieves consciousness
> and self-consciousness. (PM: SS549)
> 
> 
> 



It is a dialectic, however, which only passes
 through *some* communities. Hegel's is a
 clearly *Eurocentric* account of history.


It is thus that "the analysis of the successive grades [of
universal history] in their abstract form belongs to logic"
(PWH: 56), but once more, it must be stressed that, as with philosophy
of nature, philosophy of history is not meant to somehow
magically *deduce* actual empirical historical phenomena, like
Krug's pen; rather, it takes the results of actual empirical
history as its material and attempts to find exemplified within this
material the sorts of categorial progressions of the logic. Thus the
activity of the philosophical historian presupposes that of
"original" and "reflective" historians (PWH:
1-8). The actual world is full of contingencies from which
empirical historians will have already abstracted in constructing
their narratives, for example, when writing from
particular *national* perspectives. To grasp
history *philosophically*, however, will be to grasp it
from *the perspective of world-history* itself, and this
provides the transition to *absolute* spirit, as world history
will understood in terms of the manifestation of what from a religious
perspective is called "God", or from a philosophical
perspective, "reason". Hegel clearly thinks that there is
a way of cognitively relating to history in a way that goes beyond the
standpoint of consciousness and the
understanding--the standpoint of what we now think of as
informing scientific history. From the perspective of consciousness
history is something that stands over against me *qua*
something known, but from the standpoint
of *self*-consciousness I grasp this history as the history of
that which contributes to *me*, qua rational and free
being.


#### 3.2.3 Philosophy of Absolute Spirit


The subject matter of the final 25 paragraphs of
the *Encyclopaedia Philosophy of Spirit*, Absolute
Spirit, came to be expanded massively into the contents of
three different lectures series on philosophy of art, religion, and
history of philosophy given multiple times during Hegel's decade in
Berlin. Assembled and published in the years immediately following his
death, these were the works through which Hegel was to become known as
perhaps the most significant synoptic theorist of these cultural
phenomena. Rather than to attempt to capture the richness of his
thought here in a few paragraphs, which would be bound to be futile, I
will simply try to allude to how this material is meant to draw upon
the conceptual resources noted so far.


##### Art


Hegel was writing in a time of intense development of ideas about
the arts. Kant had treated aesthetic experience largely in relation to
the experience of the beauty of nature, but for Hegel aesthetics
becomes primarily about *art*. The reason for this is simple:
art is an objective medium in which a community collectively reflects
upon itself, and the art of historical peoples is to be understood
as the attempt to bring before the consciousnesses of its members the
totality of what is. It is *as* art that "consciousness
of the Absolute first takes shape" (PM: SS556). The
peculiarity of art lie in the *sensuousness* of the medium in
which its content is objectified.


In the 1790s, Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel had given
aesthetics an historical dimension, distinguishing the forms of
ancient and modern art in terms of the contrasts
naive-sentimental and classical-romantic
respectively. Hegel adopts Schlegel's terminology to distinguish
as *classical* the art that thrived in the Greek and Roman
worlds from the *romantic* art of post-classical
times. Again, the romantic or modern here will be characterized by the
depth of a form of individual *subjective* consciousness that
is largely missing in antiquity. But those in Greek antiquity,
where *psychological* determinations were closer
to *anthropological* ones, had lived with a comfortable felt
unity between spirit and body and between the individual and
society. A characteristic of the Greeks was their
*Heimatlichkeit*--their collective feeling
of being *at home* in the world as they were each
at home in their bodies. Modern subjectivity is thereby
purchased as the expense of a sense of *abstraction*
and *alienation* from the actual world and from the
self--a consequence of the way the modern subject has become
related to his or her body in a different way.


Hegel, influenced by the work of a former colleague, the Heidelberg
philologist Friedrich Creuzer, adds to Schlegel's categorization
of art forms by positing a further category of *symbolic*
art, characterizing the material cultures of ancient Eastern
civilizations such as Persia, India and Egypt. The symbolic art of
pantheistic religions of the East used *natural elements* to
symbolize the gods of their cultures: Zoroastrianism had taken light,
for example, to symbolize the divine (Aes I: 325), and animal worship
was found in the Egyptians (Aes I: 357). But such
actual *things* had to be distinguished from what was meant to
be symbolized by them, so violence had to be done to such natural
forms in attempts to represent the absolute--such cultural
products thus becoming "bizarre, grotesque, and tasteless"
(Aes I: 77), This, however, undermined their initial function, and the
Greeks were able to offer a dialectical solution to this
contradiction. They gave expression to the Absolute or
the Idea by taking as its material the
specifically *human form*, but only on condition of its being
rendered "exempt from all the deficiency of the purely sensuous
and from the contingent finitude of the phenomenal world". But
even as idealized in Greek sculpture, say, the represented Greek god
is still an object of "naive intuition and sensuous
imagination" (Aes I: 77-8), and as such the classical gods
contained the germ of their own decline as they could not evade



> the finitudes incidental to anthropomorphism
> [which] pervert the gods into the reverse of what constitutes the
> essence of the substantial and Divine (Aes I: 502-4)
> 
> 
> 



A new form of art will be needed to resolve these contradictions, and
this is provided by romantic art. But the *material* for this
form will not come from within art itself. While Greek art can be
understood as simultaneously belonging to aesthetic and religious
realms, romantic art results from a fission within the symbolic realm
of what in the *Phenomenology* Hegel had treated as a single
category, Art-Religion. The transition from classical art to romantic
art represents both a liberation of art from religion and of religion
from art and the sensuous. Thus Christianity, whose rituals centered
around the myth of God becoming man in the person of Jesus, had
avoided the type of reliance on the beautiful productions of art in
the way that characterized Greek religions. The shift from classical
to romantic art, then, represents a broader shift between a culture
whose final authority was an aesthetic one and a culture in which this
authority was handed over to religion, and thus represents a shift in
the authoritativeness of different cognitive forms. This loss of
ultimate authority is the meaning of Hegel's often misunderstood
thesis of *the death of art*.


For further discussion, see the entry on 
Hegel's aesthetics.


##### Religion


It is well known that after Hegel's death in 1831, his
followers soon split into left, centre and right
factions over the issue of religion. A dispute over an
appropriately Hegelian philosophical attitude to religion had been
sparked by the publication in 1835-6 of David
Strauss's *The Life of Jesus Critically
Examined*--the conservative *right* claiming that
Hegelianism reflected Christian orthodoxy, the *left* seeing it
as a humanistic doctrine concerning the historical emancipation of
mankind. In fact the implications of Hegel's philosophy for
religious belief had been contentious since his rise to prominence in
the 1820s. While officially declaring that philosophy and religion had
the same *content*--God--Hegel claimed
that the *conceptual* form of philosophy dealt with this
concept in a more developed way than that which was achievable in the
imagistic representational form of religion. Many opponents were
suspicious that the concept of God was emptied of its
proper meaning in the process of Hegel's philosophical
translations and Hegel was suspected by some of pantheism or
atheism. Ultimately, then, the source of the corrosive effects of
Hegel's philosophy on religion indeed could appear to be the
insistence that the content of religious belief, like everything else,
be grounded on rational, in fact *logical*,
considerations--the logical coherence of the system of philosophy
itself--rather than on anything like revelation.


In the writings he had produced in the 1790s Hegel had shown a
clear attraction to the type of folk art-religions of ancient Greece
in contrast to Christianity, whose other-worldly doctrines did not
reflect the kind of *Heimatlichkeit* he valued in
the ancient world, and it is common to see Hegel's later embrace
of the Christianity he described as "the consummate religion" as an
expression of a cultural and political conservatism of his later
years. This under-estimates the complexity of Hegel's evolving
views on both philosophy and religion, however. The limitations of
Greek *at-homeness* in the world had to do with the inability
of Greek life and thought to sustain that dimension of human existence
that is reflected in the category of *singularity* of the
subject. The fate of Socrates had thus represented the ultimate
incompatibility with the Greek form of life itself of the type of
individual, reflective individual who could reflectively
bring *any* belief into question and take a stand against
convention. Similar incompatibilities could be seen reflected in Greek
tragedies such as *Antigone*.


With the decline of the Greek world and the rise of the Roman one,
movements such as Stoicism and Christianity would come to give
expression to an individual point of view, but under the social
conditions of Rome or the Middle Ages such a subjective point of view
could only be an alienated one attracted to what, in contrast to Greek
concreteness, would be seen as abstractions. Prior to the modern world
there would be no *real* place in either everyday life or in
philosophical culture for any *non*-alienated versions of the
reflective or subjective position that had first emerged with
Socrates--no form of life in which this individual dimension of
human subjectivity *could be* at home. But
Christianity marked a type of advance over Stoicism in that its
doctrines of the nature of a good life had a this
worldly *exemplar*. Thus in describing the doctrine of the
Stoic sage, Hegel seemed fond of quoting Cicero's dictum
that *nobody can say who this sage is* (LHP II: 250-1,
256). It was the abstractness of the Stoic's conception of the
good man that was answered by the new religious cult centred on the
life of the historical Christ.


In this sense Christianity marked a definite advance over the more
intuitively based religious cults to which Hegel had been attracted in
his youth, but it would only be in the modern world that the content
of the core ideas of Christianity could be given proper
expression. Thus Hegel treats medieval Catholicism as still caught in
the abstractions of a transcendent realm and as caught up in a type of
literal reading of this
religion's *Vorstellungen*--its
pictures. These need to become conceptualized, and this
happens under modern Protestantism, and this, for Hegel, requires a
type of demythologization of the religious content
handed down from the past. Christ must somehow come to stand as an
example of the human kind in general, which is the ultimate bearer of
the status of being the *son of God*. Once more, it is the
purported *singularity* of the category *son of God*
that must be brought back into relation to the *universality*
of the human *genus*. It is the nature of this result that
divided Hegel's followers into their right and
left camps. The understanding of what Hegel means by the
concept *religion* in turn becomes tied to understanding what
he means by *philosophy*. Appropriately the *Philosophy of
Religion* thus passes over into the final form of *Absolute
Spirit*, Philosophy--a science that is the "unity of
Art and Religion" (PM: SS572). The mere six paragraphs devoted to this
science in the *Encyclopaedia* and dealing almost exclusively
with the relation of philosophy to religion were to be expanded into
the massive posthumously published three volumes on the
(philosophical) history of philosophy based on various sources
including student transcripts for his lecture series given in
Berlin.


##### History of Philosophy


In Hegel's time, the idea that philosophy *had* a
historical development had only recently come into focus. Both Fichte
and Schelling had discussed the idea of a history of
reason following Kant's allusion to such a notion in the
closing pages of *Critique of Pure Reason*, and systematic
approaches to the history of philosophy had emerged like that of
W.G. Tennemann, who presupposed a type of Kantian framework. Clearly
Hegel's history of philosophy would be a present-centered one,
in which the philosophical narrative would reveal a development up to
the point represented by his own philosophy as *its*
culmination. It is thus predictably Eurocentric: philosophy
"commences in the West" because the West is where
"this freedom of self-consciousness first comes forth"
(LHP I: 99). There is an important caveat to add here,
however. Philosophy is often identified with the capacity
for *abstract* thought, and this is not confined to Europe and
its history. Rather, it is typical of *eastern* cultures like
those of India and China. As we have seen in the context
of *art*, Hegel identifies Greek culture with a type of
at-homeness in the world--what we might think of as
the *opposite* of a tendency to abstraction and its typical
attraction to the *transcendent* or *other-worldly*.


Greek philosophy, and so *philosophy itself*, starts with
Thales and Ionian natural philosophy. When Thales
choses *water* as the "the principle and substance of all
that is" (LHP I: 175) he has abstracted the *concept*
water from the stuff immediately encountered in puddles and so
on. Subsequent attempts to specify what it is that underlies all
things show influences of eastern abstraction as in
Pythagoras's numericism, which is static and "destitute of
process or dialectic" (LHP I: 212) but later thinkers such as Zeno and
Heraclitus grasp that which is at the heart of things in more dynamic
ways. This type of dialectical thought which grasps the *unity*
of opposites, familiar from the *Phenomenology* and
the *Logic*, comes to fruition in Plato's
dialogue *Parmenides* (LHP I: 261). What we are witnessing
here, of course, is meant to be a progression that in some sense
mirrors the progression of categories in Hegel's
own *Logic*, but this progression of objective *content*
gets joined to another dynamic with the appearance of Socrates. 


Socrates was more than a philosopher: he was a
"world-historical person"--a "main
turning-point [*Hauptwendepunkt*] of spirit on itself"
exhibited itself in his philosophical thought (LHP I: 384). In short,
Socrates had added a *subjective dimension* to the otherwise
natural moral lives of Athenian citizens, in that he had
challenged them to find the principles not of worldly things but
of *their own actions*, and challenged them to find these
within the resources of *their own individual consciousnesses*.



> In him we see pre-eminently the inwardness of
> consciousness that in an anthropological way existed in the first
> instance in him and became later on a usual thing. (LHP I: 391)
> 
> 
> 



With this we see "moral substance [*Sittlichkeit*] turn
into reflective morality [*Moralitat*]" and
"the reflection of consciousness into itself". "The
spirit of the world here begins to turn, a turn that was later carried
to its completion" (LHP I: 407). This completion would be only
achieved in modernity because, as we have seen, Socrates's
challenging of convention in terms of resources taken from individual
consciousness itself was incompatible with the immediacy of
Greek *Sittlichkeit*.


Plato and, especially Aristotle, represent the pinnacle of ancient
philosophy, but this philosophy, no matter how great,
represents *its time*, that is, the time of the Greek form of
spirit, raised to the level of thought. Neither Plato nor Aristotle
can break free in thought from the contradiction between the
conception of autonomous subjectivity represented by Socrates and the
essential collectivity of Greek culture. Classical Greek philosophy
will succumb in the same way that the Greek polis succumbs to its own
internal contradictions, and what will eventually replace it will be a
type of philosophizing constrained within the doctrinal constraints of
the new religion, Christianity. But Christianity, as we have seen,
gives representation to a solution to the problem of subjectivity
encountered in the form of Socrates.


Philosophy proper only thrives under conditions of
at-homeness in the world and such conditions obtained in
neither the Roman nor medieval world. Hegel then sees both periods of
philosophy as effectively marking time, and it is only in the modern
world that once more develops. What modern philosophy will reflect is
the universalization of the type of subjectivity we have seen
represented by Socrates in the Greek polis and Jesus in the Christian
religious community. Strangely, Hegel nominates two very antithetic
figures as marking the onset of modern philosophy, Francis Bacon and
the German Christian mystic, Jacob Bohme (LHP III:
170-216). In the 1825-6 lectures, from there Hegel traces
the path of modern philosophy through three phases: a first
period of metaphysics comprising Descartes, Spinoza and
Malebranche; a second treating Locke, Leibniz and others; and the
*recent* philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Jacobi and
Schelling. Of course the perspective from which this narrative has
been written is the absent *final* stage within this
sequence--that represented by Hegel himself. Hegel concludes the
lectures with the claim that he has



> tried to exhibit their (this series of
> spiritual configurations) necessary procession out of one
> another, so that each philosophy necessarily presupposes the one
> preceding it. Our standpoint is the cognition of spirit, the knowledge
> of the idea as spirit, as absolute spirit, which as absolute opposes
> itself to another spirit, to the finite spirit. To recognize that
> absolute spirit can be *for it* is this finite spirit's
> principle and vocation. (LHP 1825-6, III: 212)
> 
>