The struggle for recognition together with the master-slave dialectic form Hegel's recognition narrative. Hegel composed several versions of this narrative throughout his career. This paper argues that the versions written after 1807 differ significantly from the well-known version found in the Phenomenology of Spirit. A major difference concerns the continuity of the narrative. Whereas the Phenomenology posits essential narrative continuity between the two events of struggle and service, the later versions cancel this continuity. Furthermore, the later versions argue that service alone is a condition for genuine freedom. Self-assertive struggle is analyzed as a defect of normal, healthy development, akin to derangement or crime. This differs markedly from the Phenomenology in which self-assertive struggle is posited as a necessary stage in the development of free rational agency. The paper argues that Hegel made this change in the narrative in order to stress its pedagogical significance, i.e., that the narrative could be read as a literal (if idealized) story of education.
Precisely in his social philosophy it becomes clear that Hegel's thought is far from being a system of pure rational thinking and is instead an attempt to grasp real human life conceptually by, as Hegel says, "comprehending what is." The first half of this paper examines in what sense the method of the Philosophy of Right requires engaging with the factically existing world. That method weaves together two inseparable projects: a conceptual development of the idea of freedom and a "looking around" in the real world to find social practices that realize freedom in its various guises. The Philosophy of Right seeks to present the diverse practices of modern social life as an organic unity whose guiding concept is practical freedom in its diverse forms, and in doing so it uncovers the rational ends that animate real social life. The paper's second half focuses on a specific existing social practice private property in order to demonstrate how philosophical comprehension proceeds and what must be shown about a social practice in order for it to count as rationally "comprehended." The early part of the Philosophy of Right locates the rational purpose of private property in its giving individual property owners a social space within which to realize their "abstract" freedom as freely choosing persons, mostly unbound by ethical constraints. In its later discussion of Sittlichkeit, property, in addition to realizing personal freedom, is shown to serve higher ethical ends that can be achieved only by participating in "substantial" social institutions such as the family (in love and mutual care) and civil society (through recognition of one's productive contributions to social wealth and in corporations, within which individuals establish bonds of solidarity and work together to achieve collective rather than purely individual ends).
Brandom recently criticized the existing interpretations of Hegel's chapter SenseCertainty as committed to a "bad argument" that rests on a confusion between three kinds of repeatability (epistemic authority of sensuous deliverance, types of indexical, and properties). As a stronger alternative, he offers two arguments with respect to two new kinds of repeatability (classificatory and recollective repeatability). In this article, I argue that Brandom's criticism of the "bad argument" is a straw man argument. It rests on an unwarranted assumption that types of indexicals are universals only by analogy with properties. As Koch and Heidemann suggest, types of indexicals can be universals in terms of Fregean sense or Kaplanian character. I go on to point out that Hegel's argument in the chapter "Sense Certainty" only concerns types of indexicals; the other two kinds of repeatability are unnecessary for his argument. Meanwhile, Brandom's two alternative arguments have difficulties of their own in interpreting Hegel's text.
Over the past decade or two, the historiographical category of 'classical German philosophy' has made a comeback in research on German philosophy from around 1780 - 1840. This article sets out to trace the history of its emergence. To this end, it proposes a contextual study of the work in which this expression first appears: Ludwig Feuerbach and der Ausgang der klassisschen deutschen Philosophie by Friedrich Engels (1886). The article reconstructs the historiographical landscape of German philosophy in the second half of the 19th century and the theoretical debates surrounding German social democracy in the 1860s and 1880s, in order to establish the context in which Engels' writing appeared. This reconstruction of the context leads to two main results: 1) we explain why it was reading C.N. Starcke's book on Feuerbach that led Engels to undertake a thorough historiographical and theoretical rectification aimed at Social Democrats, and why he sought to restore Hegel and Feuerbach to their rightful place in this history; 2) it is also shown that, in proposing his own version of the history of 'classical German philosophy', Engels is led to oppose (without necessarily realising it) another narrative in circulation at the time, the one with which the expression 'German idealism' is associated. Engels' book thus offers an interesting perspective on the way in which the 1 9th century wrote the history of philosophy between 1780 and 1840.
This article argues that Hegel understands the constitution of a state not merely as its fundamental laws, but rather as the way of life in that society. We should accordingly understand the constitution as a mode of inhabiting the social space of objective spirit. Societies without written laws can therefore also possess a constitution. The article explains Hegel's concept of the constitution through a dialectical double movement: on the one hand, the constitution objectifies and expresses human subjectivity; on the other hand, in its objectivity, the constitution manifests itself within (thereby also giving support to) the subjectivity of the individual citizens. The constitution of a state describes the dynamic by which the interplay between individuals' subjective attitudes and the objective state institutions shape a people's social life-world. Hegel's dialectical position is thus distinct from both simple constructivist and normative theories of society. Whereas these claim to determine what the supposedly correct constitution should be, Hegel's theory anticipates the position now known as "social constitutionalism."
The protagonist of Hegel's Anthropology, in the Philosophy of Nature, is the concept of the soul or "natural spirit." Reaching back to the doctrine of life from the section on Organic Physics, where spirit is shown to result from the logically necessary death of natural individuals, Hegel's explication of the paradox of "natural spirit" develops along what he takes to be its fundamental, pre-conscious phases in human individuality: sentience and feeling. The journey culminates in the soul's self-sublation into the "I" or conscious spirit, which furnishes the subject-matter of the subsequent division of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. The present contribution centers on a particular aspect of the feeling-phase of the soul, viz. the uniquely human capacity to be affected by derangement (Wahn). Hegel defines it as individuals' relapse from their consciousness of objectivity to its logically preceding phase, feeling subjectivity. In view of its specificity to the human species, and without neglecting the role of its somatic catalysts (after all, the soul is always also a living body), Hegel locates the roots of the most radical or authentic forms of derangement in the historical ruptures of the social life of the political animal.
Correcting all previous biographies and studies of the young G.W.F. Hegel's intellectual formation in Stuttgart, this article presents the first accurate reconstruction of Hegel's date of entry into the Untergymnasium (the Lower Gymnasium) of the Stuttgart Gymnasium IIlustre. Pivotal to this reconstruction is newly uncovered historical evidence that proves that the normal course of study at the Stuttgart institution must have been thirteen not twelve years long, as researchers have previously assumed. This discovery puts the date of Hegel's entry into the Untergymnasium at October 1775. Carefully sifting through the historical documents and contending with the current scientific consensus, canonised in the Meiner Gesammelte Werke, this article demonstrates how this new dating allows for almost all available historical evidence to come into proper alignment. The consequences of this new dating shall only be pursued in further research papers, but three immediate benefits can be pointed to. First, with this new dating Hegel researchers now possess an accurate and up to date historical-biographical record. Second, Christiane Luise Hegel's recollections about her brother's early education are vindicated as more accurate than previously assumed. Third, a definitive list of the teachers Hegel encountered in the Untergymnasium can be produced for the first time. This list can be found at the close of this intellectual-biographical article.
In this article, I explore the extent to which it is illuminating to analyze Hegel's notion of ethical life in terms of a lifeworld. I start (I) by distinguishing two ways in which Sittlichkeit is alive: first, insofar as it is realized as a spiritual form of life actualizing the living good; secondly, insofar ethical life takes up and transforms the natural lives of its members. Developing the peculiar vitality this lends to Hegel's notion of the ethical (II), we can see that it is instructive to consider Sittlichkeit in terms of a lifeworld. However, the Hegelian framework allows us to overcome two worries we might have with regard to this characterization (III): the worry that "lifeworld" restricts the ethical realm to a narrow particularity of a certain life-form and the concern that "lifeworld" involves an organicist understanding of the social. Hegel's account reveals that the vitality of the lifeworld depends on the way it exceeds itself and reaches beyond an organic mode of integration. This becomes clear in Hegel's conception of modern ethical life which contains an essentially inorganic mode of actualization in civil society. This inorganic modality is not to be understood as a deterioration of ethical life but as a mode of its liberation and intensification. It allows for a deeper recognition of the inherent right of the individual subject, even where it stands in opposition to ethical unity, and an acknowledgment of the elusive vitality of ethical life itself which constantly pushes beyond each of its found forms. Understood in this way, the inorganic ethical life of civil society does not simply enforce the norms of ethical life in a non-conscious manner, but uncovers and explores a dynamic unconscious dimension of ethical life. A modernity that takes on the task of liberation in all its depth has to recognize not only the right to particularity and the right of subjective will but also the right of the unconscious.
After pointing out the ambiguity of the German word Gewalt, which means both "violence" and "power", the paper first examines, starting with Aristotle, the relationship between violence and rationality, which in contemporary thought has been subject to a series of critical inquiries, for example in Adorno, Levinas, and Derrida. It then focuses on the relationships between violence and law, which are the subject of Benjamin's Zur Kritik der Gewalt. In order to escape from the "magic circle" criticized by Benjamin, it examines the way in which Hegel, in his Logic, Phenomenology of Spirit and Rechtsphilosophie, reconsiders the relationships between Macht, Gewalt, and Zwang: indeed, violence is the opposite of law, but it is also what enables it to be instituted.
Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right have the reputation of being a scandalously conservative book. He not only equates what is actual with what is rational (and vice versa); he also claims that the punishment of a criminal is his or her "will as it is in itself' and an "existence of his [or her] freedom" (Hegel [1821] 2003, 126; GW 14,1: 92). Defenses of the first equation are numerous and, as far as I am concerned, show in all necessary clarity that the actual must not be identified with the Prussian state of the early 19th century (see e.g. Kervegan 2018). Such identifications demonstrate, however, that the Philosophy of Right is difficult to read. The paragraphs follow a logical sequence, which makes it almost impossible to realize that Hegel is actually trying to solve a problem a problem that is the modern problem: How can individual wills be coordinated in a constituted order, which actualizes the freedom of all? In what follows, I will present a reading of the second claim (punishment is the criminal's own will) that stresses its connection to Hegel's basic problem. As I will show, such a reading does not only explain why Hegel has to refer to the paragraphs on "ethical life" in order to "solve" problems in the sphere of abstract right; it also implies shocking repercussions for the very foundations of his theory of will formation. And those repercussions might explain why Hegel's Philosophy of Right is so difficult to interpret. It presents a model of modernity which incorporates its own critique.
This paper argues that Kant's dilemma in the antinomy of pure reason (especially the "first conflict") is an expression of a deficient conception of infinity as principled incompleteness that is still pervasive today. Such incompleteness is properly conceived only as a rule/dynamic, not as an attribute assignable to objects. For Kant, the antinomy arises from the apparent impossibility of conceiving both unboundedness and completeness/closedness in conjunction. This contradiction is also inherent in the ordinary understanding of infinity, which Hegel calls the merely "bad infinite". The paper shows that Hegel's concept of "true infinity" mediates between unboundedness and closedness and thus provides a way out of the dilemma by transforming the cyclical repetition into a closed circle. The paper further argues that this Hegelian figure of thought may also provide a solution to fundamental problems of epistemology and cosmology, and shows that the current state of natural scientific research already enables us to conceive a "true infinity" of space-time.
This essay concerns the question, why Hegel discusses the mathematical subdisciplines of arithmetic and geometry at different places within his system. As an introduction, I argue that this is unusual compared to Hegel's treatment of other sciences. Furthermore, I discuss four possible models of how mathematics as a whole is located in Hegel's philosophy. I then argue for the most plausible of these models by first elaborating a structural parallel between Hegel's discussion of the concept of number in his Logic and his development of the concept of space at the beginning of his Philosophy of Nature: For Hegel, both number and space have the determinations of continuity, discreteness, and externality. After this, I discuss the specific difference between Hegel's concept of number and his treatment of space. It consists of the fact that space is necessarily related to intuition, while number is not. In a final step, I discuss various possibilities of the relationship between number and space in order to demonstrate that both concepts (and thus Hegel's foundations of arithmetic and geometry) - despite the different locations in which they are addresse - are understood by Hegel as part of a coherent mathematical science. I conclude that the most plausible relationship between number and space is one in which the concept of number conceptually grounds Hegel's geometrical understanding of space.
