The Man
In every painting and drawing I’ve seen of Hegel – and there are only a couple – he presents a formidable image. Dour and watchful. Angry, almost; consumed, certainly. Purely and whole-heartedly serious, there is no fooling around in those eyes. There’s also none of the Play Drive, that synthesis of the sense and form drives that his predecessor Schiller wrote so eloquently about, to be found in him. Or is there?
He was a vibrant, intelligent, idealistic youth. Extremely precocious, he was writing in Latin by age 14 and Greek by 16, and was well-versed in the classics as well as contemporary German high literature by the time he entered college. Fascinated, as all were at the time, with the radical ideals of the French Revolution, for French history during his life was also German history. He and a few friends planted a “liberty tree” one afternoon.
Did he believe in God? Is there a God in his philosophy? I don’t know, but I don’t think so. However, despite obtaining a degree in theology he was radically anti-Christian as a young man; though whether simply following the fashion of the times or simply to clarify his thinking (none of this was published) it is not known. But as an old man he was able to let himself attend Lutheran services, so I give him the benefit of the doubt.
He was madly in love with philosophy and was the last of the great system builders. Not a bad epithet, eh? Oh, and as far as dour is concerned: he signed his correspondence with his friends and colleagues with a brusque Hegel, but that was common for the time; but he signed his letters to his wife and sister, simply, as Wilhelm.
The Philosophy
Hegel’s philosophy hinges on two key ideas: Geist, and its progress. Thus, it is an ideal philosophy, meaning that it points to something mental, something intangible, yet something very real. It is also a dynamic philosophy, always moving, growing, reaching, striving for a destination. Perhaps even learning, too, or maybe more appropriately, evolving.
I would have liked a clearer conception of Geist. Paradoxically, something more concrete. Me and probably a couple million amateur armchair philosophers over the past two hundred years. Yes, I know it is translated from the German, but so’s Nietzsche, and in any random passage of his, the ideas he is trying to convey are intelligible. Many is the time I read a Hegelian paragraph, then re-read it, then re-read it again, sentence by sentence, even word by word, and had no idea what I was supposed to be understanding.
During my readings I swung wildly back and forth with what exactly this Geist was, from a literal, spiritual presence to an coldly analytical, Positivist interpretation of the Psychology of Mind (yes, with capitalized nouns). Finally, I settled on an idealized kind of “Spirit of the Times” which has some sort of nebulous reality. I could make the bold assumption that it’s God for Hegel, but I’d probably be wrong. Besides, there’s too much mention of another nebulous reality, which he calls the Absolute, to be able to choose between the two for the title of God.
But Geist is dynamic. It uses us as its clay, or rather, it uses our societies, to grow, to realize itself, to become conscious of itself. And what is the marker on its journey of self-realization? Freedom. Hegel traces the progress of freedom through thousands of years of history, from the ancient Persians, Indians, Hebrews, to the Greeks, through the Middle Ages, particularly the Reformation in Europe, and finally to 19th century Prussia, arguably the end of history for the man. Even I, somewhat educated in history but certainly no expert, could feel how he somewhat uncomfortably shoehorns these various cultures to fit this theory.
I found his Lectures on Aesthetics to be the most readable of his works (the Lectures on various topics were not written by Hegel per se, but gathered by later authors from student notes). In keeping with his great themes, art is seen as a progression. Some forms of art are of greater aesthetic value than others. Hegel’s progressions range from architecture to sculpture to painting to music to poetry; they seem to depend on what principle the art takes – symbolic, classical, or romantic – and how they constitute the self-unfolding Idea of Beauty. I think.
Hegel was a great admirer of Greek society, as was Goethe, especially as a young man. Indeed, he sought to integrate Kant and German Idealism with Goethe, the leading light of the Romantic movement in German literature at the time. So, in his philosophy, Reason, with a capital R, reigns supreme, but has passion and emotion at its side to support it. His passion for the Grecian ideals of strength, power, and intelligence are seen in his admiration of Napoleon, the “World-Soul”, whom he glimpsed as the latter toured the conquered city of Jena, where Hegel struggled and taught and wrote. Is it any wonder that to Hegel, who lived through years of war in Europe, the need for philosophy is a restoration of harmony?
The Works
The Philosophy of History (published posthumously, culled from a collection of students’ notes) and the Lectures on Aesthetics (ditto) were the most readable, intelligible selections I read. The Philosophy of History is the best place to start with Hegel.
The Science of Logic (1812-16) and The Philosophy of Right and Law (1821) were exercises in pure mental brutality. It was an extreme effort of will to get through the lengthy selections from these works – a combined 157 pages of dense esoterica that I would have to read over at least two more times before I had any true understanding of where Hegel was going. Oh, and I’d need to quit my job, so you’d need to pay me a comparable salary while I’m doing it. And you’d have to give me, say, $50,000 extra to do it. It was that rough.
The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel’s breakthrough work, was also rough going, not as bad as the Logic or Philosophy of Right because I was interested in it more. But it would require another two more readings before I comprehended it enough to be able to talk extemporaneously about it. I will take up the book again, at some future point in my life. That I promise to myself.
A Note on Secondary Sources
Hegel, by Walter Kaufmann, is an excellent companion to the philosopher’s works. Kaufmann traces Hegel’s development from a youth to his mature writing stage, offering a lot of neat little insights into Hegel as well as his contemporaries and the world in which he moved. I’ve read several books by Kaufmann, including a book entitled Twenty German Poets and a college text on Existentialism, where I first read the powerful “The Wall” by Sartre.
My sneaking suspicion that the Peter Singer who wrote a slim book introducing Hegel and his thought was the Peter Singer turned out to be true. Singer’s a somewhat notorious “bioethicist” who has tenure at Princeton. I find this loathsome man’s views extremely repugnant. So do many. I threw the book out in the trash with no regret, and reassured Hegel that his reputation, as far as I was concerned, was not tainted by association.
“Thus we must say quite generally that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.”
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