Book Description
One of the founders of modern philosophical thought Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) has gained the reputation of being one of the most abstruse and impenetrable of thinkers. This first major biography of Hegel in English offers not only a complete, up-to-date account of the life, but also an overview of the key philosophical concepts in Hegel's work in an accessible style. Terry Pinkard situates Hegel firmly in the historical context of his times. The story of that life is of an ambitious, powerful thinker living in a period of great tumult dominated by the figure of Napolean. Pinkard explores Hegel's interactions with some of the great minds of this period: Hölderlin, Goethe, Humboldt, Schelling, Novalis, the Schlegels, Mendelssohn, and others. Throughout, he avoids Hegal's own famously technical jargon in order to display the full sweep and power of Hegel's thought. Terry Pinkard is professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University and is author/editor of five previous books, the most recent being ^UHegel's Phenomenology (Cambridge, 1996). He is honorary Professor of the Philosophy Faculty of TÜbingen University, Germany and serves on the advisory board for the Zeitschrift fÜr Philosophique Forschung.
Customer Reviews:
Fav bio of fav philo.......2006-12-23
My favorite biography of my favorite philosopher. Previous favorite was the Walter Kaufmann. One can only wonder what intimate details might be uncovered by a Ray Monk treatment but I suspect we aren't likely to get one. Ever. It puzzles me why Peter Singer's little book might be thought of interest to any but those who don't want to read any Hegel.
Two of my favorite Hegel comments are gone thanks to this book. The death bed quote and another item that I can't think of at the moment but I am sure will come to me the next time I go to use it. I suppose another issue is the whole way to approach the dialectic. As many times as the issue comes up it still seems in a short summary class there seems no better way to present it along with the comment that it is a misrepresentation of the process. Which last is always such a marvelously clear thing to point out to people! "Here, let me misrepresent something important for you...."
Can you picture the lightning storm breaking up the birthday party in Tivoli? Ah yes! Just thought of the other thing I have been wrong about - death by stomach complaint and not by plague.
Absolutely good ending.
Outstanding Text!.......2006-05-05
I won't belabor the kudos here. This is an impressive work of scholarship and well worth the read.
A man of contradictions.......2005-03-09
This monumental work has 665 pages of text, followed by 115 pages of notes, sources, and index. Ten of its fifteen chapters deal primarily with Hegel's life and with the social, cultural and political climate within which he worked. These chapters are very accessible, though marred by a style which is sprinkled with colloquialisms and even slang - I have lost count of the number of times Pinkard uses the phrase "a bit", as in "a bit worried" or "a bit of scepticism". The editorial staff ought to have eliminated these; not only that, but the proof-reading of the book is quite the worst I have ever come across and is a disgrace to an academic publisher.
The technical discussion of Hegel's philosophy is mercifully put into five separate chapters, which I have found almost impenetrable. A reader who would like the read an outline of Hegel's philosophy would do much better to read Peter Singer's little book in the Oxford University Press (1983). But Pinkard is scornful of much that has been written about the philosopher previously. In his Preface he leads the reader to expect a demolition of some of the ideas generally held about Hegel's teaching. The notion of thesis - antithesis - synthesis which was attributed to Hegel in a popular book (not listed in Pinkard's bibliography) by one Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus in the middle of the 19th century and was then perpetuated by Marx was never held by Hegel; and it is true that he used these terms only "seldom" (Coplestone. Pinkard says "never".) But even Pinkard shows how often Hegel explained the development of a new idea arising out of the clash between contradictions.
Extraordinarily, Pinkard never mentions the notorious phrases which Hegel applied to the State: "The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth"; "we must therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on Earth"; "the State exists for its own sake" etc. All these are quoted and sourced by Karl Popper in his famous attack on Hegel, The Open Society and its Enemies (Vol.II, pp. 31 and 305); but Popper does not figure in Pinkard's bibliography either. So these quotations are not confronted: instead Pinkard (p.494) simply uses a sentence from Hegel's Philosophy of World History to convey the opposite impression: "The universal spirit or world spirit is not the same thing as God".
Pinkard does bring out the development of Hegel's thought: like every great philosopher, he changed some of his ideas in the course of his life. Moreover, he was capable of perplexing his contemporaries by what appeared to them to be contradictions in his behaviour. The strength of this biography is to show how Hegel could combine sympathy for the early phases of the French Revolution and then for Napoleon with acting, at the very end of his life, as a government commissar to supervise the University of Berlin and therefore responsible for seeing that the University did not fall foul of the repressive Carlsbad decrees to which the Prussian government subscribed. He approved of the dismissal of a colleague, de Wette, for radicalism, but then urged that he should continue to receive his salary and, when the university refused, contributed to a secret annual fund to support him. He had great sympathy for those of his students who got into trouble for liberalism, and was yet very hostile to liberalism himself. No wonder that even in his life-time, the Reformers, with whom Hegel identified himself in many respects, thought he had sold out to the conservatives. Pinkard generally defends him against this charge. As Hegel himself pointed out to Heine, his famous sentence that "the Real is the Rational and the Rational is the Real" consisted of two statements; and whilst the first of them has a conservative bend, the second has a radical one: if a situation is not or is no longer rational, it loses the claim to be real. After Hegel's death, the Young Hegelians (also called Left Hegelians) would use the second part of the sentence as their lodestar, and would restore to the Dialectic the dynamism which is built into it and with which conservatism was really very ill-matched.
Certainly Hegel was constantly opposed by the reactionaries in the Prussian government and always felt in danger of being denounced as a "demagogue" (i.e. subversive) or an atheist, either of which would have been a cause for his dismissal. He survived because of the patronage of the Education Minister, von Altenstein.
One of the most interesting themes of the book is the immense importance the reformers attached to the universities as the motor of enlightenment, reform and modernization; and within the universities, the principal task of promoting Bildung (culture based on independent thought) should fall upon the departments of philosophy. Hegel had his first academic appointment at Jena (1801 to 1808). His identification with the ideas of the reformers secured him appointments to professorships, first in Heidelberg (1816 to 1818) and then in Berlin (1818 to his death in 1831). Unfortunately, as Pinkard points out, whenever Hegel took up a university position, the cause for which he stood happened to be in retreat: at Jena the reforming philosophers were leaving just as he arrived and the university was subsequently devastated by the French bombardment during the Battle of Jena (1806); at Heidelberg the traditionalists (who there included most of the students) were fighting back; and at Berlin the Carslbad Decrees of 1819 also put the reformers on the defensive.
Pinkard is also interesting on Hegel's personality. Extremely sociable and convivial in private life, he was dry, ponderous and nervous as a lecturer; and yet he gradually attracted very large and loyal student audiences, who took his pauses, hesitations and repetitions as signs that he was arguing with himself while speaking, appearing, as it were, to put the dialectic into operation even while he was thinking. The contradictions which infuse his theories are also present in his life.
Brilliant!.......2003-08-23
While you are unlikely to approach Hegel aa a novice, all the same, if you were and did, this is a remarkably well written, clear presentation of Hegel's life and thinking, as well as a thoughtful setting of the philosophical questions of his time. It was a time when thinking still mattered to the spirit of a people. Pinkard has written a great account of a life of a man who sought his own voice after so many disappointments. His friendship with Holderlin, his relationship with his illegitamate son, his rancourous rapport with his nephew, the slights suffered working for philistines or in the shadows of lesser minds were the sand in his soul that ground a pearl. Pinkard details them all with a truly 21st Century American voice, and in so doing makes the drama of Hegel's life present to today.
Pinkard is another great Georgetown Hegelian in the line of Wilfrid Desan, and in so doing weaves the dynamics of Hegel's life into the dialectics of his thinking. Pinkard presents a terrifically concise and to the point analysis of the immediate momentums initiated by Kant, Fichte, Schelling and others, casts them in as true a light as possible, and so opens an entire tradition, well regarded for its complexity for consideration by those trained in this tradition as well as by those wondering what all the fuss was about. Hegel was not an Ivory Tower elitist. His life formed the ground of his philosophy, and while he was also not an everyman, he is one in whom thinking took hold at any early age and kept calling him out into its light. Hegel meant that his writings have an impact. He was not interested in building flights of fancy that had no repercussions for culture, politics, spirituality. He distanced himself from traditions that would have ensnared him, compromised his boldness, and left him in a tradition, instead of clearing new ground.
Pinkard clearly shows how and why you have to deal with Hegel in Western Philosophy, just as much as you have to confront Plato, Aristotle, Kant. Nothing was the same after Hegel. History, psychoanalysis, culture, politics were all forever changed. His was an original voice, and the call, once heard, altered everything.
I keep returning to the point that this is a great read. And it is! So novice or enthusiast, you'll find this a book you'll return to often. This should be mandatory reading for anyone pursuing a higher education. The lessons of the life as well as the philosophy produced deserve thoughtful consideration.
brilliant.......2002-03-07
It would be difficult to justify a biography of a philosophy as being essential: if you want to understand a philosopher you should read their works instead. But Pinkard manages to wage an astonishingly battle on two fronts: first, elaborating on his philosophical development with a view towards prominent influences and second, foisting off common misconceptions about Hegel.
So, for part one. Hegel is difficult. It was, as I learned, his distinguishing mark in early years: "more obscure than Fichte!" was something like a slogan. Pinkard does a marvellous job of showing the diversity and complexity of Hegel's experience (the chapters on his university friendship with Schelling and Hoderlin are especially absorbing) and pulling out some of the more unexpected sources of his thought. (Adam Smith and Gibbon and the New Testament, for example.) Ever since Dilthey more attention has been payed to Hegel's early work and for good reason. Moving from this account Pinkard gives excellent insights into the genesis and exposition of Hegel's notoriously difficult "system." Having been absoloutely dumbfounded by Hegel in the past I think this book is the best possible introduction to what Hegel is up to in his Philosophical work. Pinkard in addition to being keen has some serious philosophical chops so he brings out some aspects of Hegel that get overlooked.
As for the second front Pinkard does a great job of countering some of the more cartoonish and absurd pictures of Hegel: the pioneer of German nationalism, the doddering obscurantist, the proto-fascist conservative. Pinkard does a good job showing how the most common images of hegel are thorough characters whose longevity has more to do with the fact that few people actually read or know much about Hegel. I particularly liked the way Hegel's complex political commitments were mapped out and how the more intimate aspects of Hegel the person (his addiction to whist, his love of coffee) were brought out.
I am given to understand that Hegel scholarship is experiencing something of a revival these days, and by my account Pinkard's biography should be at the forefront of any movement. He deserves a great deal of credit for producing a skillfull, well-written and insightful work on an extremely difficult thinker.
Book Description
This brief text assists students in understanding Hegel's philosophy and thinking so they can more fully engage in useful, intelligent class dialogue and improve their understanding of course content. Part of the Wadsworth Notes Series, (which will eventually consist of approximately 100 titles, each focusing on a single "thinker" from ancient times to the present), ON HEGEL is written by a philosopher deeply versed in the philosophy of this key thinker. Like other books in the series, this concise book offers sufficient insight into the thinking of a notable philosopher, better enabling students to engage in reading and to discuss the material in class and on paper.
Book Description
At once an introduction to Hegel and a radically new vision of his thought, this remarkable work penetrates the entirety of the Hegelian field with brevity and precision, while compromising neither rigor nor depth. One of the most original interpreters of Hegel, Jean-Luc Nancy offers a portrait as startlingly unconventional as it is persuasive, and at the same time demonstrates its relevance to a very contemporary understanding of the political. Here Hegel appears not as the quintessential dispassionate synthesizer and totalizer, but as the inaugural thinker of the contemporary world-one whose thought is inseparable from anxiety and desire, as well as the concrete, the inconclusive, the singular. Under Nancy's scrutiny, no facet of Hegel's work remains untouched or unrevised: problems of aesthetics, affect, and history, as well as the implications of freedom, politics, and being-in-common. Engaging eleven judiciously chosen points essential to Hegel's sprawling system of thought-restlessness, becoming, penetration, logic, present, manifestation, trembling, sense, desire, freedom, and "we"-Nancy develops precise arguments for their philosophical importance for us today.
Nancy's Hegel is the thinker who foregrounds the original, irrepressible, and joyous embrace of the inevitable will to philosophize; he is the philosophical guide who negotiates between the two extremes of stupidity and madness along the path to meaning. In the face of the horror of history and despite the temptation of past-based solutions, this Hegel's uncompromising foothold in the real makes him our contemporary, a thinker for our time.
Jean-Luc Nancy is professor of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. Among his many books are The Inoperative Community (1991), and The Sense of the World (1998), both published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Jason Smith and Steven Miller are doctoral candidates in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.
Customer Reviews:
An intro to Hegel for our time.......2005-10-20
Kojeve's "Introduction to the Reading of Hegel" is a great work of philosophical interpretation and a great aid to understanding Hegel, but I believe that this work by Nancy now supersedes Kojeve in terms of unlocking Hegel's relevance for us living at the dawn of the 21st century.
This volume not only illuminates the roots of those such as Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze in Hegel (rewardingly illuminating their own work in turn), but it provides the best recapture of Hegel from his pessimistic right-wing interpreters.
Even on the basic level of helping clarify and bring to life Hegel's core modes of insight, this book carries the day. For instance, in the chapter called "Becoming", Nancy gives the easiest and yet most satisfying explanation of a particularly controversial moment in Hegel's thought - the presupposition of the absolute. The way Nancy explains this moment helped me to understand how a misunderstanding of this moment can lead to much confusion and difficulties in later moments.
The greatest living philosopher.......2002-08-31
After the death of both Deleuze and Levinas in 1995, the mantle of "greatest living philosopher" presumably went to Jacques Derrida for a while. But Derrida has always refused to be a philosopher other than in the sense of not being a philosopher (which is also being a philosopher). So his cohort and quasi-follower Jean-Luc Nancy had to take the real philosophy from Derrida back to the question underlying all post-modern thought, namely how to deal with the empty space left behind by Heidegger's deconstruction of the tradition. With this little book, Nancy himself has become "the greatest living philosopher" - that is to say he has done to Hegel what Heidegger did to Nietzsche in the 1930s and 1940s: presented him as the key thinker of the break of modernity, and, unnoticeably perhaps, stepped beyond him. This book is indeed a marvel - one gets slightly dizzy reading it. Its intensity is at times (no: always) well-nigh unbearable. Nancy, like Heidegger with Nietzsche, takes a drill to the concepts of Hegel and allows them to shine in ways hitherto unthought(see the editorial review above, no need to repeat the details). In the end, this is the overturning of the boring old French Hegel of Kojeve and Hyppolite and the most exciting discovery in philosophical reading of another in sixty some years. I had always thought of Hegel as the great synthesizer. But Nancy's Hegel "returns" Hegel to pre-Socratic instability and shaky difference, where the restless thought-in-process constitutes the sense of the world, and philosophy is as alive as it ever was. A friend of mine says that Nancy reminds him of the color of the LED on alarm clocks: well, he's right, 'cause Jean-Luc Nancy is very much a phenomenon of a new morning. The owl is disoriented but it is all a marvel. Yes, I guess that is what you could say.
Book Description
The Phenomenology of Spirit was Hegel's grandest experiement, changing our vision of the world and the very nature of philosophical enterprise. In this book, Solomon captures the bold and exhilarating spirit, presenting the Phenomenology as a thoroughly personal as well as philosophical work.
He begins with a historical introduction, which lays the groundwork for a section-by-section analysis of the Phenomenology. Both the initiated as well as readers unacquainted with the intricacies of German idealism will find this to be an accessible and exciting introduction to this great
philosopher's monumental work.
Customer Reviews:
Through the roof........2001-04-27
This book has been rightly praised as a guide to an individual's philosophy, as if we can all accept that Hegel had an individual self entitled to pick and choose among the many reactions to the intellectual currents which had been generated in his time by Kant, Goethe, Schelling, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), who is discussed in a section on pages 85-96 of this book but is not listed in the index. I had intended to count refernces to Fichte in this book before writing my review, so customers would have some idea how often I looked at the pages of this book, but that would have been tedious. Most often Fichte was merely mentioned as another self, whom we are expected to believe was entitled to choose from the intellectual currents of his time much as a chairman at a political convention might officially state, "The chair recognizes the floor." Of course Fichte thought he could do more than that with Kant's philosophy, as Solomon shows in his typical comment: "And it is in this morass of ambitions, hostilities, and mixed interpretations that the seemingly simple progression, from Kant to Fichte to Schelling to Hegel, has to be viewed" (p. 85). Note 41 at that point mentions "one of the best-known post-Kantians, Arthur Schopenhauer," who was omitted in the simple progression because his "notoriety" came later. Those who have criticized Schopenhauer (see Witold Gombrowicz, PHILOSOPHY IN SIX LESSONS AND A QUARTER, for someone who considers a lot of these philosophers Polish, and still criticizes them) are likely to picture Schopenhauer going through the roof as a primary feature of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Hegel, as a professor, does not have quite that much freedom, and involvement in philosophy might be considered his greatness because it is obviously his effort to cling to the floor in the midst of mounting outrageousness. Solomon does a pretty good job of staying on the floor, too. Only a poet would read this stuff and think, "We shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped," as Paul Celan wrote in a famous poem after World War II, only in German.
Fascinating, a dialectic of its own.......1999-01-26
Solomon gives a lucid and clear picture of Hegel's ambitions in his Phenomenology. For ever obtuse, dense, snide paragraph Hegel wrote, Solomon delivers clear, intelligent, and at times funny explanations of Hegel's motivations and plans. An essential companion when burrowing through Hegel's magnum opus.
The most lucid presentation of Hegel available.......1998-09-24
This is the best single volume on Hegel available. In plain, and often sparkling, English, it does a wonderful job of explicating this tremendously difficult thinker. It also provides a convincing argument that Hegel is not merely a historical curiosity but a very contemporary thinker. It includes a valuable intellectual historical summary that places Hegel within the literary, philosophical, and political thought of his day, a remarkably lucid glossary that translates Hegel's notoriously difficult terminology into plain English, and a fabulous chapter-by-chapter explication of what is arguably Hegel's most important work, The Phenomenology of Spirit.
Book Description
In Hegel in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Hegel's life and ideas, and explains their influence on man's struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Hegel's work; a brief list of suggested reading for those who wish to push further; and chronologies that place Hegel within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.
Customer Reviews:
The owl of wisdom flies close to the ground here .......2005-03-18
This work is an amusing cutting down to size of the philosophical system - builder whose castles in the air are more immense if not more illuminating than any other. The irrevent and very funny Strathern here takes solemn old George Frederich Wilhelm to task for not understanding that Hume had already made the philosophical enterprise impossible. He amusingly chronicles the plodding polymath Hegel's conquest of the kingdom of philosophy as he also fumbles forward and upward in his pursuit of academic place. A tragic note is the story of the orphaned Hegel's relationship with his devoted sister who essentially goes mad in the course of a life in which her brother makes a new connection, with his wife. As for Hegel's elaboration of Kant, and provision of thesis- antithesis- synthesis, the famed dialectic method that Marx would turn the world upside down with, Strathern is thin on illustrating and demonstrating it. For devouted Hegelians of which there are still probably two or three in the Western world this book is probably an insult. For most of us, those who do not think that the History came to its climax with the nineteenth - century Prussian nation- state, for those who do not think that Philosophy and Mind came to their ultimate revelation in the writings of Hegel this small work is a sensible and sane brief evaluation .
One more point. Hegel understood that America was the country to watch in the coming century- he aslo understand that Mankind to be understood has to be understood historically- he probably understood a lot else which I, and possibly even Strahern don't. Perhaps Strahern might have done a bit better had he more emphasized what there is of real value in Hegel.
Dreadful!.......1999-11-01
Strathern's book simply reproduces the ignorant prejudices against Hegel that have bedevilled Anglo-American philosophy. Who should read this book- anyone who wants to make a few dismissive remarks about Hegel in order to give the appearance of learning at a cocktail party. Who should not read this book- anyone who might want to learn something from Hegel.
Strathern hits the mark again!.......1999-08-31
Strathern is a master at this kind of work, which mixes biography, critical analysis, historical context and humor all in a concise, informative & entertaining package. He lists a time line for the philosopher, his place in world/philosophic history & a selection of works for furthur reading. This series of books by Strathern is a wonderful course in Philosophy 101 without ever having to go to college, all presented in plain, easy to understand English without being bogged down with philosophy's often confusing vernacular.
Customer Reviews:
Readable, Understandable Analysis of Great Minds.......2003-12-17
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Is it fair to rate such persons by other authors who analyze them? I think so. In the case of Goethe, I highly recommend reading some of his works and the conversations with Peter Eckermann. What's crucial is understanding Goethe's main thesis and outlook in comparison to his contemporary Kant and how he influenced subsequent philosophers such as Hegel, who tried to bridge Kant and Goethe, unsuccessfully and Shiller, the poet, who unsuccessfully tried the same.
On Kant: you can spend a year or more reading his verbose and heavily obscure style which one must read each sentence twice before digesting, or one can read Kaufmann's book and another great book on Kant - Karl Jaspers, Philosophy Volume 1. You really do walk away from this book with a basic understanding of Kant and how he both differs from Goethe - allot, and how he influenced philosophy as we know it. He was a Platonist, Goethe was not. Kant equated life a series of maxims all based on reason, part of a universal, while Goethe saw humanity always in developmental stages, living in uncertainty.
This goes with Hegel too. Read some amazon.com reviews on his Phenomenology of the Spirit and you can see, there are those that love to read philosophy but recommend not investing a great deal of time and effort on Hegel. Although one must read Hegel to fully know Hegel. I think Kaufmann does justice. It's nice to have at least a basic grip on both who these men were, what they taught and a limited degree on their background and minds - psychology.
Definitely worth the read.
Kaufmann's mediocre Nietzcheanism.......2001-12-29
This is quite possibly the poorest exposition of these people ever written- and the rest of the series is the same. His translations of Nietzche are excellent and beautiful but as a philosopher Kaufmann is trying to speak with the mouth of Nietzche, but a rather poor Nietzche at best. The angry style is sad for an academician unless he or she is a genius of Nietzche's calibre.
Lost in the Past.......2000-03-25
I read this book in its early years, and the subjects of the book hardly excited me, but it was the first volume of a trilogy, and I was ready to try to prove that figures in a modern America rich with electronic soundtracking of music for every form of public activity (and for more private activities than were written about in his philosophy) was a much richer form of emotional communication than any that Goethe was able to write down on a page. On the topic of sex alone, I could hum more tunes than he knew, maybe. But the funny thing was that he considered "Kant's immense influence has proved catastrophic." Among the recently departed, Isaiah Berlin is quoted on the back of this book praising Kaufmann for making people see that Hegel "was a most audacious, profound and devastating, at times wildly turbulent, thinker." I wish I could ask everybody, aren't we all? Page 288 raised the question "how I would feel if someone sent me an essay of such length in which he tried to show how Nietzsche had been 'a disaster.'" I think he would feel even worse, or possibly more joyous in another's misfortune, if he could read all the web pages that show what people, now, are saying about Martin Heidegger, who is merely accused of "Dogmatic Anthropology" in the Trilogy outline which appeared in this volume.
Average customer rating:
- A must read for anyone trying to understand Hegelian Thoery
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Three Essays, 1793-1795: The Tubingen Essay, Berne Fragments, the Life of Jesus
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Manufacturer: University of Notre Dame Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0268018545 |
Customer Reviews:
A must read for anyone trying to understand Hegelian Thoery.......1997-02-14
This is a widely underrated text due to Hegel's later recanting most of his points. But this is essential to anyone understanding the development of the Hegelian Model of thought
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Trotsky's Notebooks, 1933-1935: Writings on Lenin, Dialectics, and Evolutionism
Leon Trotsky
Manufacturer: Columbia University Press
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ASIN: 0231063024 |
Book Description
These two notebooks were discovered while Philip Pomper was doing research at Harvard’s Russian Research Center for a book on Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin after the Russian Revolution and were published by Columbia University for the first time in 1986.
They present fascinating new insights into Trotsky’s philosophy, politics, and psychology and this volume is a significant addition to an understanding of his revolutionary career. They shed new light on his relationship to Lenin and Bolshevism, his criticism of dialectics and Darwin evolutionism, and his reflections of Freudian psychology as he ponders the relationship of the unconscious mind to the philosophical issues surrounding dialectics.
The original Russian text of the notebooks, prepared and annotated by Felshtinsky, is also presented here to make the material available to readers of Russian.
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- The wisdom of a young man: the folly of an old man
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Hegel: An Intellectual Biography
Horst Althaus
Manufacturer: Polity Press
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Book Description
This accessible and highly readable book is the first full-length biography of Hegel to be published since the largely outdated treatments of the nineteenth century. Althaus draws on new historical material and scholarly sources about the life and times of this most enigmatic and influential of modern philosophers. He paints a living portrait of a thinker whose personality was more complex than is often imagined, and shows that Hegel's relation to his revolutionary times was also more ambiguous than is usually accepted.Althaus presents a broad chronological narrative of Hegel's development from his early theological studies in Tübingen and the associated unpublished writings, profoundly critical of the established religious orthodoxies. He traces Hegel's years of philosophical apprenticeship with Schelling in Jena as he struggled for an independent intellectual position, up to the crowning period of influence and success in Berlin where Hegel appeared as the advocate of the modern Prussian state. Althaus tells a vivid story of Hegel's life and his intellectual and personal crises, drawing generously on the philosopher's own words from his extensive correspondence. His central role in the cultural and political life of the time is illuminated by the impressions and responses of his contemporaries, such as Schelling, Schleiermacher and Goethe.This panoramic introduction to Hegel's life, work and times will be a valuable resource for scholars, students and anyone interested in this towering figure of philosophy.
Customer Reviews:
The wisdom of a young man: the folly of an old man.......2003-02-04
Horst Altaus has done here an excellent job. We are curious about philosophers as men and women because philosophy is somewhat more intimate than science, and Hegel was present at a time of rapid change: during the Napoleonic wars, he saw first hand his "dialectic" in which the German states were turned topsy-turvy by world souls on horseback.
Altaus intersperses his chapters with readable digests of Hegel's major works.
There is the obligatory comment about Hegel's complex style, combined with rather patronizing praise of the simplicity and elegance of a minor work on the Württemburg constitution: for we often find that to ascribe the label "difficult" to the style or the man committs what psychologists call a fundamental attribution error.
For we find that Hegel could use, in his minor work, a style appropriate to the theme. It is said that the style should be appropriate to the audience as if that was something we could control, but Hegel's troubles with getting enough students to attend his lectures, documented by Altaus, show both that operationalism of this sort was not his cup of tea, and that it is less fundamental than the duty of the author towards reality.
People are difficult and their style is difficult when they try to impress (although anyone who today uses a difficult style merely to impress aliterate administrators and deans needs his head examined), but perhaps more often when they find themselves wrestling, like Jacob, with angels.
Hegel wrote simply when writing on mere constitutions, as did John Adams. But his larger theme required on his part a couple of barrels of books, dragged about Germany by primitive transportation, and while his ethnocentrism is obvious, Hegel's philosophy of history remains in some ways up to date.
Hegel's texts have the curious property that they share with Kant that unlike mathematical or scientific works, one gets the impression that "if this stuff is true, not only could it not be otherwise, its-being-put-otherwise would not make any sense at all. On the other hand, however, if this stuff is false, it is not false, but without any sensible meaning, whatsoever."
IF the struggle for recognition is the motor of consciousness and of history, then any alternative story is gibberish, which is interesting, for Hegel's story is confusing enough.
And, it's gibberish precisely because of its proposed theme, which is everything.
Science considers the alternate worlds and chooses the true world, but the alternate worlds can be pictured. True philosophy on the other hand, is concerned with the only world, whether we interpret that as the set or join of all possible worlds, or a world in which all possibilities will come to pass.
This alone I think generates the "complex bad" style of Kant and of Hegel.
Hegel should be read by philosophers of consciousness, and Althaus is a good introduction: for contemporary theorists may be making fundamental mistakes.
IF our consciousness is formed by the Other from day one, then this would predict that fetal alcohol syndrome victims and children deprived of contact with their others have no consciousness as we experience it from the inside.
It means that "scientific" explanations of consciousness that hypostatize individual minds are doomed. No model of consciousness makes sense if it "works" in a world populated by only one consciousness. Just as mathematics requires existence assertions, consciousness requires a stronger assertion: in the beginning there is neither zero nor one but two (Madonna and child.)
Horst includes more patronizing material on Hegel's scientific views which he shared with Goethe. They may seem to Altaus to be a dead end but forms of them survive in deep ecology. They were replaced by reductionism which, paradoxically, points of Thomas Kuhn's Oedipal destruction of old paradigms and technical whizbang as its own ultimate ratio regium. It is a reductionism which is unable to master complexity because its gesture is a hand-wave, from simple initial conditions to complex results, that in an idealist gesture ignores labor.
It is clear that like many intellectuals, Hegel compromised himself later in life by becoming an ideologue for the Prussian state. But while the dialectic is not a license for easy self-contradiction (as Hegel's friend Goethe feared) there is a genuine dialectic between the hero of the chapter on lordship and bondage in the Phenomenology of Mind, and the apologist for a state church.
For all other things being equal, we would like to live in a society that reflected our deepest needs and one that did not demand principled retirement. But history, as I write, staggers on.
Althaus shows that Hegel, as many attackers have said, may have compromised himself by at the end of his life, identifying the World Spirit with the Prussian state.
This is, of course, ethnocentrism run amuck. But Hegel's views were not evaluative. As Altaus shows, he was concerned with description of a sort that would sensibly relate individual psychology to history.
Hegel's poltical philosophy gives no basis whatsoever for resistance to a state, or paradoxically it can be reread as revolutionary counsel.
For if one lives in the best state, or even one that merely is the state in which the world spirit has set up shop for good or ill, revolution is either evil or futile, or both. If the state is the home of a benign world spirit, Casper the Friendly Weltgeist, then resistance is evil.
But if (as commentators after Hegel have noted, especially Adorno) Hegel provides no reason why the world spirit may not be perceived as bad or evil in its effects on our lives, revolution is futile and evil, being futile, everything else being considered.
In short, reading the biography of the later Hegel illustrates how old age can be lethal for philosophy. The later Marx showed some of the same intellectual decay as his carbuncles got the better of him. As T. S. Eliot wrote, "do not tell us of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly."
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- final work of a great humanist
- An examination of the human qualities worth cultivating
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Goethe, Kant, and Hegel: Discovering the Mind
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Customer Reviews:
final work of a great humanist.......2004-10-24
Ever since I tried to read it in college, philosophy has repelled me, or rather, I was unwilling to make the effort to get through the classic texts because they were so poorly written and abstruce. Nonetheless, I always felt that this area was a hole in my learning and that I should have made more effort in it. As such, it was an enormous pleasure to find Kaufmann: he writes with an enormous clarity and grace, and to my delight, he is as disgusted with the poor writing style of modern philosphers as was I. And he had the authority to say it, which I could never claim!
This volume introduces the reader to three great minds, which Kaufmann sees as leading to the great psychologists if the 20C. First, with Goethe, we find a man who broke new ground in the investigation of human psychology, bringing a poets depth and eloquence to bear. It is so exciting and well written that Kaufmann makes the reader want to learn German and then specialize in Goethe. He is seen as an ideal of bringing poetry to the study of the mind, a tradition that waited until Freud to be renewed. Second, he examines Kant, whom he respects but sees as a rather dry intellect, and alas, as the one who began the tradition of sloppily and hastily written modern philosophy. But his critique goes much farther than that as we see Kant turn the mind into something abstract, immutable, and that neither evolves nor reflects the context into which it is born. This sets philoophical inquiry into psychology, in my interpretation, on a long and infertile road that took the poetry out of the study of the mind. Finally, with Hegel, Kaufmann sees the reintroduction of certain notions of evolution and context, but still in a way that lacks poetry.
This is a fascinating interpretation and it is so beautifully written that many will enjoy as did I. Warmly recommended.
An examination of the human qualities worth cultivating.......1999-11-13
Goethe, Kant, Hegel is the first book of the Discovering the mind trilogy. This trilogy was Kaufmann's final work. The ideas discussed in this book are not new to his work but rather make it more complete. All of Kaufmann's work taken together forms an organic seamless whole.
In this book as with his others Kaufmann is interested in uncovering, exploring, defining and evaluating what is the essence of being human. He also extends this search beyond mere identifying to an exploration of what he considers are the human qualities worthy of cultivation and represent the best of humanity. To my knowledge his approach of a philosophical study of individuals breaks some original ground and because Kaufmann is building on previous work he is hugely successful in this task. This book should be a classic, recognized for its pioneering effort toward discovery of the mind (Kaufmann's definition of mind here is a "term for feeling and intelligence, reason and emotion, perception and will). Not only is it scholarly (in the best sense of the word) but it has a clear vision that Kaufmann is able to communicate clearly.
It is not enough for Kaufmann to present compelling reasons why life is most meaningful when meaning and purpose come from within, nor that the autonomous life (he discusses autonomy at length in Without guilt or Justice) is the key to finding that meaning. Kaufmann knows that even a dictator and tyrant can become such a person. Kaufmann goes on to articulate his vision of morality (a theme developed in his earlier work- The Faith of a Heretic). In this and the two subsequent volumes he shows us what attributes of these various men of varying greatness he sees as most representative of both qualities which give personal meaning to that individual but also elevate for us all the human spirit, as well as those qualities that do not. In Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Kaufmann rigourously illuminates that interior terrain into the minds of each of these men taking us on a journey of understanding. While it's clear that Kaufmann's vision (what is it to be human) is his own, the seeds of that vision can be found in his profound empathy of Goethe , Nietzsche(vol.ll), and Freud(vol.lll). In fact, implicit to reading this work is that we come to understand Kaufmann's mind as well. The book also provides us with the tools to be our own explorers and thus continue the contribution. In Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Kaufmann quotes from a letter written by someone who knew Goethe. In reading the attributes ascribed to Goethe one cannot help but feel that the description is just as apt of Kaufmann.
"He is violent in all of his emotions but often has a great deal of self-control. His way of thinking is noble; free of prejudices, he acts as he feels without caring whether others like it, whether it is the fashion, whether the way one lives permits it. All compulsion is hateful to him... He is not what one calls orthodox. But not from pride or caprice or to make an impression. About certain very important issues he speaks to few and does not like to disturb others in their calm ideas...I wanted to describe him, but it would become too lengthy, for there is much that could be said about him. He is, in one word, a very remarkable human being."
This book is well worth reading.
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