A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein by Roger Scruton

Author:Roger Scruton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Humanities, History & Surveys, Philosophy, Modern, General
ISBN: 9780415267632
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1993-01-01T23:00:00+00:00

12 - HEGEL

G.W.F.Hegel (1770-1831) was influenced by three separate intellectual movements: first, and most importantly, by post-Kantian idealism and by Kant himself. Secondly, by Christianity, and in particular by New Testament theology, to the subject of which much of Hegel’s early writing was devoted. (Hegel sought to give the complete exposition of the thought that ‘in the beginning was the Word’.) Finally, in his outlook and manner, by the literature of late German romanticism, for which he provided an elaborate philosophical justification. Hegel was a highly cultivated man of letters, and a friend of many of the artistic figures of his day, notably of the poet Hölderlin. Despite his bohemian entourage, however, he did not allow the fashion for romantic despair to overcome his will for success and establishment, and ended his life as the revered and comfortable official philosopher in the Prussian state which, by a happy but characteristic turn of thought, he had foretold as the highest expression of the political life of man.

Hegel’s lectures, published after his death, contain influential works on aesthetics and the philosophy of history; while the Encyclopedia (1817, enlarged 1827) adumbrates an entire system in which science, logic, mind, art, morality and religion are given their respective situations, and in which the whole of the world, as it appears to reason, is blessed, as it were, by an act of philosophical recognition. There are three specific works which will concern us, all published in Hegel’s lifetime: The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), The Science of Logic (1812-1816) and The Philosophy of Right (1821), which will be considered in chapter 14. The first two are notorious for their difficulty, in despite of which they have spawned interpretations and rival philosophies by the thousand. To many of Hegel’s contemporaries it did indeed seem true that the key to the mysteries of the universe had been found, and that Hegel’s implicit claim to utter the ultimate truth about everything should be upheld. Since his death the course of philosophy has been, to put it roughly, a process of steady disillusionment with Hegel, culminating in the vigorous rejection of his thought and method by analytical philosophers in the early years of the twentieth century. But even in our century his influence is felt. His philosophy of ‘being’ survives in amended form in the writings of Heidegger, and his theory of self-knowledge is present, in some version or other, in most of the major works of phenomenology, and in most theories of art. In this chapter I shall try to sketch certain central Hegelian themes in order to show why Hegel must still be seen as a towering presence in modern philosophy.

In one sense it was unfortunate that Hegel sought to found his philosophy in a general theory of logic, and particularly unfortunate that he should have advanced the theory of the ‘dialectic’ as containing the whole of metaphysics, thus illustrating, in Bertrand Russell’s words, ‘an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise’.

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