Introducing Hegel E-Book

Lloyd Spencer

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Graphic Guides
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 108

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

INTRODUCING guide to the hugely influential German thinker. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is one of the greatest thinkers of all time. No other philosopher has had such a profound impact on the ideas and political events of the 20th century. Hegel's influential writings on philosophy, politics, history and art are parts of a larger systematic whole. They are also among the most difficult in the entire literature of philosophy. Introducing Hegel guides us through a spectacular system of thought which aimed to make sense of history. The book also provides new perspectives on contemporary postmodern debates about 'metanarratives' (Lyotard) and the 'end of history' (Fukuyama). It is an ideal introduction to this crucial figure in the history of philosophy, and is indispensable for anyone trying to understand such key modern thinkers as Marx, Lacan, Satre and Adorno.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP Email: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-184831-979-0

Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

The Life

Hegel’s Sister, Christiane

Foreseeing Psychotherapy?

Hegel’s Education

The Excerpt Mill

A Student in Tübingen

Hölderlin and Schelling

Hegel’s Reading

The Example of Goethe

The French Revolution

Hegel and the Spirit of ’89

Absolute Freedom and the Terror

Hegel as Private Tutor

The Swiss Aristocracy

Political Economy

Outstripped by Schelling

The Importance of Hölderlin

Introducing Kant

The 3 Critiques

A Schizophrenia in Philosophy

Church and State

The Christian Religion

Introducing Spinoza

Introducing Fichte

Enlightenment…

… Post-Enlightenment and German Idealism

Arrival in Jena

Differences between Schelling and Fichte

Genesis of The Phenomenology of Spirit

Napoleon Advances

What is the Phenomenology About?

“The Science of the Experience of Consciousness”

History as Self-Realization

The Master and the Slave

14 Stations of the Cross

Absolute Knowledge...

The Newspaper Editor

Hegel goes to Nuremberg

Hegel’s Marriage and Illegitimate Son

Is Philosophy Teachable?

Aristotelian Logic

Dialectical Thinking

Totality

Aufhebung or Sublation

A Grammar of Thinking

Negation

Three Kinds of Contradiction

Triadic Structure

What is Knowing?

Success at Last!

The Reformers Call Hegel to Berlin

Hegel’s Public Role in Berlin

The Fall of Napoleon

Hegel’s Politics

The Rise of a New Right

Nationalism and Anti-Semitism

Against Moral Subjectivism

Hegel’s Lectures

Freedom and the State

The State

The Evolution of Freedom

The Philosophy of Right

Social Ethics

Civil Society

“The Actual is the Rational”

The Philosophy of History

The Course of World History

The “Germanic World”

Freedom Without a Future?

The Philosophy of Nature

Unsatisfactory Science

Science is Incomplete Understanding

Nature as Idea

The Philosophy of Art

Art in Relation to Religion and Philosophy

Symbolic, Classic and Romantic Art

Classic or Greek Art

Romantic Art

The Five Arts

The Ideal in Painting

Poetry, the Highest Art

Philosophy, Higher than Art

The Problem of Irony

The End of Art

The Philosophy of Religion

The Trinity

Mystic Diagrams

The Triadic History of Religion

The Politics of Religion

The English Reform Bill of 1830

The End

The Decline of Hegelianism

Hegelians Left, Right and Centre

The Left or Young Hegelians

Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity

The German Ideology

An End to Reason

The Origins of Existentialism

Is Hegel Still Important?

Towards the Postmodern Impasse

Rediscovering Hegel and Marx

Critical Theory

Negative Dialectics

Deconstruction

History is Always Right

Fukuyama’s “End of History”

In Conclusion

Further Reading

Biography

Books on Hegel

Dedication

Artist’s Acknowledgements

Biographies

Index

Hegel is a philosopher of awe-inspiring, monumental ambition. His philosophy aims to incorporate the history of all previous philosophies. He conceives of this entire history as a process of completion, as all of existence, indeed the cosmos itself, evolves to full self-consciousness.

There is no room in Hegel’s philosophy for a God outside or beyond the universe. His system presents itself not only as the self-consciousness of the cosmos, as Absolute Knowledge, but at the same time as an expression of the thoughts of God.

I believe that in the course of my own development as a philosopher, I have recapitulated and given expression to the “autobiography” of the Absolute.

The Life

On 27 August 1770, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born at No. 53 Eberhardstrasse in Stuttgart.

Hegel’s father, Georg Ludwig, was a minor civil servant at the court of the Duchy of Württemberg. This area (Swabia) produced a surprising array of outstanding writers, philosophers and theologians. Hegel kept his broad sing-song Swabian inflection even when teaching at the University of Berlin.

Hegel was the eldest of three children. His younger brother, also named Georg Ludwig, became an army officer, participated in Napoleon’s Russian campaign and died young.

Hegel’s mother began his education in Latin before he went to school. She died when Hegel was just 11.

Hegel appears to have kept on good terms with his father, until his student days, when his enthusiasm for the French Revolution opened up a rift between father and son.

Hegel’s Sister, Christiane

Hegel was very attached to his sister, Christiane. When Hegel set out his ideas on ethics, he did so by referring to Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone.

Christiane nursed a fierce attachment to her brother. After Hegel’s marriage (at age 40), Christiane suffered what Hegel would later call “hysteria” and had to resign from her post as governess. In 1820, she was committed to an asylum, but was released the following year. Troubled by bitterness over alleged wrongs, she gave vent to her jealousy of Hegel’s young wife.

From it, I drew the lesson that a sister’s love for a brother is the highest kind of love there is.

Foreseeing Psychotherapy?

Hegel suggested that therapy had to be dialectical: it had to involve sympathizing with the patient’s complaints, winning the trust of the disturbed. It would involve respecting the patient’s rational personality while at the same time overcoming the one-sidedness and abstraction of the patient’s “fixed ideas”.

But I also considered having Christiane treated by the French psychiatric reformer Philippe Pinel, whose new ideas had impressed me.

Philippe Pinel (1745-1826) came to prominence during the French Revolution as the liberator of the mad.

Two weeks after Hegel’s death, Christiane wrote a courteous, formal letter to his widow and included a brief memoir of her brother’s childhood in which she portrayed Hegel as a precocious and industrious schoolboy.

“Lacked all bodily agility. Must have been easy to get along with, for he always had many friends; loved to jump, but was utterly awkward in dancing lessons.”

Within three months of her brother’s death, Christiane went out for a walk and drowned herself.

Hegel’s Education

Hegel gained a thorough grounding in the classics and was fluent in Latin and Greek. The Greek tragedies were his favourite reading matter. He was at home in German literature. His scientific training, too, was good for the times.

My teachers received no salary and were dependent on fees. They attempted to maximize class sizes (even 60 or more) of varying ages and abilities.

This may have been the origin of the belief Hegel later expressed in the necessity of active and independent learning.

The Excerpt Mill

Early on and throughout his life, Hegel recorded everything he studied. Aged fifteen, he began a diary (not of personal matters but of his studies and findings).

I developed a “method of excerpting and abstracting” and wrote out (or summarized) long passages in notebooks … I wanted to absorb everything!

Everything was grist to his “excerpt mill” — philology and literary history, aesthetics, aphorisms and witticisms, “experiences and physiognomics”, mathematics, physics, psychology, pedagogy and, of course, philosophy. Hegel was already intellectually omnivorous. He wanted to absorb simply everything.

If, as is the case, the majority of quotations in Hegel’s mature works contain mistakes or are mistakenly attributed, this is because Hegel almost always quotes from memory. The range of material he had “internalized” is staggering.

Germany in Hegel’s time was a patchwork of tiny states (such as the Duchy of Württemberg where Hegel was born). There were no cities of any size and very little industry. In Prussia, serfdom was abolished, and the Jews emancipated, only after defeat by Napoleon. In 1765, James Hargreaves introduced the Spinning Jenny to England, but at the time of Hegel’s birth, Germany’s industrialization still lay in the future. (The first German railway opened in 1835 — four years after Hegel’s death.)

Born

1749 — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (d. 1832)

1759 — Friedrich Schiller (d. 1805)

1762 — Johann Fichte (d. 1814)

1767 — A.W. Schlegel (d. 1845)

1769 — Napoleon Bonaparte (d. 1821)

Born in 1770:

— Hegel (d. 1831)

— Friedrich Hölderlin (a poet and Hegel’s closest friend during their student years) (d. 1843)

— Ludwig van Beethoven (d. 1827)

— William Wordsworth (d. 1850)

Born after 1770:

1772 — F. Schlegel (d. 1829), Novalis (d. 1801) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (d. 1834)

1774 — Caspar David Friedrich (d. 1840)

1775 — J.M.W. Turner (d. 1851)

Events

1770 — Marie Antoinette married the Dauphin of France and James Cook was sailing around the world on his way to discovering Australia

1774 — Goethe’s first novel, The Sorrows of the Young Werther, appeared

Meanwhile in America (and initiating events which would have a huge impact on the politics of Europe):

1770 — the Boston Massacre by British troops in the American colony anticipated the War of Independence (which began in 1775)

1776 — the U.S. Declaration of Independence

By the time Hegel died in 1831, the United States was an independent republic reaching across the continent to the Western ocean, and Karl Marx was 13.

A Student in Tübingen

In 1788, Hegel was enrolled as a student in the Protestant theological foundation (or Stift) at the University of Tübingen, in training to become a Lutheran pastor.

I was sociable and enjoyed a drink with the other students. We found him old-fashioned in his dress, a little ponderous in his manner, and nick-named him “the Old Man”.

Hegel roomed together in a loft with Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) who became his closest friend. Even as a student, Hölderlin began to prove his poetic genius and was soon to earn the friendship and recognition of the great lights of German literature, Schiller and Goethe.

Hölderlin and Schelling

During the first years of their intense friendship, Hegel absorbed from Hölderlin an idealization of the ancient Greeks and a belief that only poetry could heal the rift that had grown up between Religion and Reason.

Unfortunately, I’m no poet!

Hegel and Hölderlin were befriended by Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854), son of a learned Lutheran pastor, five years younger than both of them, and already showing signs of being a philosophical boy-wonder. He had been admitted at the age of fifteen to the Stift at Tübingen.

Hegel’s Reading

Hegel’s teachers at the theological seminary noted the amount of time he devoted to philosophy. Hegel’s knowledge of the Greeks was profound.

Speculations about Being among the pre-Socratics, Plato’s doctrine of ideas (as being more real than appearances) and neo-Platonic ideas about Nous or Spirit — these seem to us to offer profound, if often obscure, answers to metaphysical questions.

Hegel’s favourite reading at the time was the French Enlightenment writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78). He also read all of the great literary works and essays of J.W. von Goethe (1749-1832) and F. Schiller (1759-1805) as they appeared.

The Example of Goethe

Goethe’s works, and charismatic personality, had a profound influence on Hegel’s whole generation. As he produced masterpiece after masterpiece, each one in a new genre, sometimes inventing genres and opening out onto a new view of the world, Goethe appeared to be making and remaking himself anew.

He was Bildung (education, culture and development) personified.

Hegel’s admiration for and identification with Goethe was enduring. After Hegel had left university, he and Goethe corresponded and he visited Goethe frequently. In 1825, Hegel wrote to Goethe from Berlin:

…When I survey the course of my spiritual development, I see you everywhere woven into it and would like to call myself one of your sons…

The French Revolution

In 1789, just before Hegel’s 19th birthday, news of the fall of the Bastille and the events of the French Revolution reverberated around Europe. When a bunch of French — and francophile — students formed a “Political Club”, Hegel joined in order to involve himself in their enthusiastic discussions about the ethical rebirth of Europe after the Declaration of Human Rights. One of the ringleaders, Wetzel, fled to Strasbourg to escape official censure.

Hegel and the Spirit of ’89

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) (same age as Hegel)

One Sunday morning, in the spring of 1791, Hegel joined the young enthusiasts of freedom when they went out to a meadow just outside Tübingen to plant a liberty tree, singing the Marseillaise and reciting Schiller’s Ode to Joy (later used by Beethoven in the 9th Symphony).

Schelling and another associate were very nearly forced to leave because they had translated the Marseillaise. The authorities kept a surveillance file on Hölderlin’s activities.

I managed to keep up contacts with Jacobin secret societies which were being ruthlessly suppressed.

Both the authorities who had paid for his training as a pastor, and his pious mother, to whom he was very close, expected him to settle down to a life of conventional religious service.

Absolute Freedom and the Terror

Throughout his life, Hegel celebrated Bastille Day. Freedom remained a central concern of Hegel’s thought. In later years, he recalled the “spirit of ’89”.

All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch.

But even in his youth, Hegel was hostile to the brutal excesses of the Jacobins. In a letter to Schelling, at Christmas 1794, Hegel wrote:

For Hegel, as for many of his contemporaries, the degeneration of the revolution into “absolute Fear” presented the most profound crisis of the spirit. An important section of Hegel’s first major book, the Phenomenology