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Actualization: Hegel

Rocío Zambrana

in Hegel'S theory of Intelligibility

This chapter examines Hegel’s Faith and Knowledge, the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, and the Preface to the Subjective Logic in the Science of Logic in order to assess Hegel’s critique of ... More

This chapter examines Hegel’s Faith and Knowledge, the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, and the Preface to the Subjective Logic in the Science of Logic in order to assess Hegel’s critique of Kant and Fichte. It shows that these texts introduce Hegel’s notion of the idea as the concept that inherits Kantian synthesis via Fichtean positing. It also clarifies Hegel’s logic of actualization by discussing Hegel’s notions of reason, Geist, and history.Less

Hegel on the Political Significance of Collective Self-Deceit

Robert Pippin

Marcel van Ackeren and Lee Klein (eds)

in Philosophy and the Historical Perspective

In a famous passage in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel claimed that ‘philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought’. But our time is very different from Hegel’s, so two approaches ... More

In a famous passage in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel claimed that ‘philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought’. But our time is very different from Hegel’s, so two approaches have developed to understanding the relevance of his work for the contemporary world. One looks to remaining points of contact, such as his criticism of a contractualist view of the state. Another tries to apply his general approach to contemporary issues. Both are valuable, but in this article, the latter is taken up, and one issue is the focus. The question is, assuming there can be collective intentionality and collective agency (what Hegel calls Geist (spirit)), how should we understand Hegel’s claim that such group agents can be collectively self-deceived? And how would that claim bear on the contemporary political world?Less

Hegel: Logos as Spirit (Geist)

John H. Smith

in Dialogues between Faith and Reason: The Death and Return of God in Modern German Thought

This chapter examines how Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel came to embrace the notion of God's logos as spirit (Geist). To understand Hegel's approach to religion, it shows how his conception of God is ... More

This chapter examines how Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel came to embrace the notion of God's logos as spirit (Geist). To understand Hegel's approach to religion, it shows how his conception of God is defined in terms of Geist and goes on to review the significance of that concept in terms of uniting the oppositions maintained by previous theologies. It also considers how Hegel arrived at this philosophical and theological concept himself through a process of intellectual development, from his theological manuscripts to his later philosophy of religion. It argues that Hegel's God is spiritual in a new sense defined by him, that is, religion is defined in terms of a living Geist that is both objective and subjective, transcendental and concrete. For Hegel, God reveals himself in the historical unfolding of a spirit, which is both substance and subject. His philosophy is one of the greatest modern attempts to save Christianity by grounding the identity of logos and God in a notion of absolute spirit.Less

Logos and Its Others: Feeling, the Abyss, Willing, and Kritik (Schleiermacher, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach)

John H. Smith

in Dialogues between Faith and Reason: The Death and Return of God in Modern German Thought

This chapter examines the responses and alternatives of four philosophers to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's conception of God as spirit or Geist: Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph ... More

This chapter examines the responses and alternatives of four philosophers to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's conception of God as spirit or Geist: Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Ludwig Feuerbach. More specifically, it considers the four philosophers' argument that the truly religious can be understood and, perhaps salvaged, only by attacking the dominance and apparent self-sufficiency of rationality. It explains how these four thinkers worked through the ratio that would embrace God, world, and man in a totalizing system and saw the need to open up logos toward a radical conception of Otherness that is more closely aligned with a genuine Christianity.Less

Zur Sache Selbst: The Common and the Universal in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

Étienne Balibar

in Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology

This chapter outlines a structural interpretation of the Hegelian statement, “Tun aller und jeder,” or TAJ, and its function within Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, in order to pave the way for a ... More

This chapter outlines a structural interpretation of the Hegelian statement, “Tun aller und jeder,” or TAJ, and its function within Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, in order to pave the way for a better understanding of what at the heart of the “system,” and sometimes against it, constitutes the irreducible singularity of this work. At the same time the chapter also considers the debates surrounding interpretations of Hegel's work. The expression das Tun aller und jeder occurs at the end of Chapter V, Section C, §a (“The spiritual animal kingdom and deceit, or the 'matter in hand' itself”), and it is almost immediately taken up again in the Introduction to Chapter VI (“Spirit,” der Geist).Less

Does German Philosophy Have a History? And Has There Ever Been a “German Spirit”?

Vittorio Hösle

in A Short History of German Philosophy

This chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to provide a brief survey of German philosophy and thereby to bring out peculiarities that distinguish this philosophy from those of other ... More

This chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to provide a brief survey of German philosophy and thereby to bring out peculiarities that distinguish this philosophy from those of other European nations. The book shows that reflection on the concept of Geist (spirit) is a crucial part of the German spirit. Despite all the changes in German philosophy, plausible lines of development will be made clear; without them, a history really cannot be written. The chapter then explains the reasons why it makes sense to produce a new account of the history of German philosophy at the beginning of a century that will no longer be a European one.Less

John McDowell’s Germans

Robert B. Pippin

in Interanimations: Receiving Modern German Philosophy

The central issue in John McDowell’s understanding of Kant and Hegel (and in his own work) is the right way to understand at the highest level of generality the relation between active or spontaneous ... More

The central issue in John McDowell’s understanding of Kant and Hegel (and in his own work) is the right way to understand at the highest level of generality the relation between active or spontaneous thought and our receptive and corporeal sensibility and bodily embodiment. For McDowell this problem involves both the question of how thought informs our sensibility and of how thought could be said to inform, to be active in, bodily movement. There are two main areas of disagreement discussed in this chapter: (i) how to state the role of concepts and especially conceptual activity in the sensible uptake of the world and (ii) what to make of Hegel’s claim for a speculative ‘identity’ between inner and outer in action, or how to state the role of intentions in bodily activity. In both cases, McDowell thinks I have not properly stated the issue and have misread the Hegelian version of it. This chapter summarizes past exchanges and offers a further response to the objections.Less

Axel Honneth’s Hegelianism

Robert B. Pippin

in Interanimations: Receiving Modern German Philosophy

I express here enthusiastic solidarity with Axel Honneth’s inheritance and transformation of several core Hegelian ideas, and express one major disagreement. The disagreement is not so much with ... More

I express here enthusiastic solidarity with Axel Honneth’s inheritance and transformation of several core Hegelian ideas, and express one major disagreement. The disagreement is not so much with anything he says, as it is with what he doesn’t say. It concerns his rejection of Hegel’s theoretical philosophy, and so his attempt to reconstruct Hegel’s practical philosophy without reliance on that theoretical philosophy. This attitude towards Hegel’s Science of Logic – that it involves a ‘‘mystification’’ of essentially practical notions - has been typical of the Critical Theory tradition since Marx, and is disputed here. It also helps to raise the large issue of the proper understanding of the relation between theoretical and practical philosophy. The implications of ignoring the Hegelian understanding of this dependence of the latter on the former are further developed.Less

Life and Spirit

Thora Ilin Bayer

in Cassirer's Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms: A Philosophical Commentary

This chapter discusses the central distinction of Cassirer's metaphysics—life (Leben) and spirit (Geist). Cassirer understands all metaphysical systems of the twentieth century as tending in one or ... More

This chapter discusses the central distinction of Cassirer's metaphysics—life (Leben) and spirit (Geist). Cassirer understands all metaphysical systems of the twentieth century as tending in one or the other of these two directions. A full understanding of what life and spirit mean for Cassirer requires not only the definition of the two concepts but also an understanding of their connections with the key ideas of his philosophy of culture, especially his conceptions of dialectic and symbolic form. Cassirer intends his metaphysics of symbolic forms to pass between the horns of the dilemma of life and spirit. To accomplish this, he wishes to show that each of these attains its reality through the transformation of the other.Less

Hegel’s Construction of the Market: The ‘Relics of the State of Nature’

Lisa Herzog

in Inventing the Market: Smith, Hegel, and Political Theory

This chapter discusses G.W.F. Hegel’s view of the market, which can be found in his Philosophy of Right. After clarifying my interpretative approach to his political philosophy I describe how Hegel ... More

This chapter discusses G.W.F. Hegel’s view of the market, which can be found in his Philosophy of Right. After clarifying my interpretative approach to his political philosophy I describe how Hegel took up the economic theories of his time and integrated them into his account of ‘civil society’. ‘Civil society’ includes the free market as well as the institutions that stabilize it, such as the administration of law, the police, and the corporations. For Hegel, the market is both the sphere of ‘subjective freedom’ and at the same time a chaotic play of forces that threatens to undermine the cohesion and stability of society. Valuable and dangerous at the same time, the market therefore has to be embedded in the larger framework of Sittlichkeit, the most comprehensive institution of which is the political state.Less