Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich - The Philosophy of Hegel

For conversations that enriched this book, I am indebted to many friends and colleagues who share a philosophical interest in Hegel. I am grateful to Steven Gerrard for his encouragement of the project and to two anonymous readers for Acumen Publishing who offered helpful suggestions for improving both the style and content of the manuscript itself. I wish also to thank Margot Stevenson and Sarah Farkas, for their bibliographical and editorial assistance, and Hallie Speight, whose love and support I cannot sufficiently thank in print.

Hegel is the first great philosopher to make modernity - in all its historical, cultural and philosophical complexity - his subject. And on whatever lines that modernity is to be explored by our own present generation - as a project that has failed, is discernible only in traces, or that has come to fruition in some ways crucial for our practices and commitments - the Hegelian construal of it remains essential for coming to terms with how we understand ourselves, as agents in and contemplators of a world with a number of characteristics that Hegel was either the first or the most articulate in calling attention to. The sort of characteristics I have in mind are some rather resilient facets of a world that can be said to embrace both Hegel's day and our own, a world where the self and its awareness of its freedom is construed as an achievement, where the modern religious sense of a "death of God" has left a not entirely complete secularism and a seemingly irreducible plurality of religious perspectives in its wake, where the development of ethical and political institutions that "we" can in some sense be aware of "making" are nonetheless also subject to historical shifts and constraints, and where the realm of artistic expression has taken bold and inherently self-referential turns.

The account of modernity that Hegel opens up in these areas is, so I shall make the case, neither a triumphalist recognition and extension of Enlightenment values into the present time nor a philosophical act of mourning for the contradictions of a world that is in decline. Hegel's perspective whether one looks at his ethics, politics, art, religion or philosophy - is one that is resolutely embracing of modernity in its oppositions, a stance that makes him neither Romantic, Enlightenment rationalist nor (I shall claim) any merely hybrid combination of the two.

To cast an introduction to Hegel's thought in terms of his interest in the problem of modernity is not immediately to take sides on what remains a contentious point at the moment among his most skilled and creative contemporary expositors. As will be discussed below, a long debate about whether Hegel should ultimately be construed as pushing forward an essentially Kantian intervention in modern philosophy or as rather closer in spirit to his earlier and more metaphysically minded predecessors such as Aristotle and Spinoza appears to be still very much alive. By focusing on Hegel as a philosopher of modernity, I do not mean to oppose the view of what I call below "traditionalist" readers, but only to emphasize that, even if Hegel's project is ultimately construed in important ways as metaphysical, this metaphysics cannot simply be a move back to a pre-critical stance, as though the Kantian revolution in thought never occurred. The question of precisely what sort of post-Kantian metaphysics Hegel might be engaged in, if he is, will no doubt be a point of focus in the years to come among Hegelian scholars. But even the most ardent traditionalist readers of Hegel's works will have to acknowledge that the stance Hegel takes more broadly towards the politics and culture of the world between 1807 and 1831 is one that (however metaphysically or non-metaphysically grounded) never allows the possibility that the modern world can look back in ethical and political, aesthetic or religious thought.