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Hegel, Nature and the Rationalization of Experience: On Allen Wood's Hegel's Ethical Thought*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
Extract
It is a curious feature of Hegelian studies in English that its practitioners seem incapable of tackling their subject without first disclaiming any adherence to the more metaphysical side of Hegel's thought, be it called “speculative metaphysics,” “dialectical logic” or whatever. I say “curious” because I doubt that the same scholars would feel obliged to enter an equivalent disclaimer at the head of a study on, say, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza or even Newton—even though all of these classics have a metaphysical side at least as abstruse as any of Hegel's worse romantic excesses. Hegel himself, if he could witness the practice, would be flattered by it. He would not see it as an indication that “the problems of [his] logic remain alien and artificial to us in ways that the problems of Cartesian and Kantian philosophy do not” (p. 5) but, on the contrary, as a hidden acknowledgement that, whether for good or bad, his philosophy is still alive, still so close to our culture that we instinctively feel the need of exorcizing it ritually, like a demon capable of frightening us.
- Type
- Critical Notices/Études critiques
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , Fall 1993 , pp. 783 - 794
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1993
References
Notes
1 Cf. Rosen, Michael, Hegel's Dialectic and Its Criticism (Cambridge: University Press, 1982), p. 179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Hegel, Friedrich, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, translated with notes by Knox, T. M. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1942)Google Scholar. “R” refers to Hegel's Remark in any given paragraph.
3 Foucault, Michel, La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).Google Scholar
4 Hegel, Friedrich, Phenomonology of Spirit, translated by Miller, A. V. with analysis of the text and foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977).Google Scholar
5 Ibid., §§484, 492.
6 Nor, do I believe, was the Philosophy of Right intended as such a treatise.
7 Cf. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §§4, 33.
8 Cf. ibid., §132R.
9 Ibid., §348.
10 Ibid., §352.
11 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §464. Miller's translation should be corrected to read “singular” instead of “particular”: “… Self-consciousness has not yet received its due as a singular individuality.… This singular individual counts only as a shadowy unreality.…” Cf. also §468, pp. 282–83.
12 Ibid., §469.
13 Cf. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, § 117, Addition, p. 250.
14 I am referring, of course, to an Oedipus such as would be required by the development of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Sophocles' Oedipus certainly understood moral guilt, as Oedipus at Colonas clearly shows. Historically speaking there is a problem in identifying classical Greek antiquity with a state of pre-reflective Sittlichkeit.
15 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §470.
16 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §270, the long Remark.
17 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §§508–12, 520–23; especially §511.
18 Ibid., §652, p. 396.
19 “… ‘Absolutely not!’ Woldemar replied. ‘Only doing away with the exercise of conscience is pernicious.… The letter of reason, of religion, of civil and state law, are all alike; they are all equally capable of little. No man has ever obeyed a law simply as law, but always only the authority that flows from it and accompanies it, always only the vitality that drive, inclination, and habit give to it. Only man's heart says directly to him what is good; only his heart, his drive, tell him directly that to love the good is his life …” (Jacobi, F. H., Woldemar, Werke, edited by Roth, F. and Köppen, F. [Leipzig, 1812–25], Vol. 5, pp. 114–15Google Scholar; my translation). This passage comes from a long addition first interpolated into the text in the 1796 edition. It expresses, however, what the character of Woldemar stood for since his first appearance in the literature in 1777.
20 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §§652–53.
21 “‘Dear Henriette,’ [Woldemar] said, ‘no word can say how I feel! Loudly could I and would I confess before the whole world that I am the guiltiest among all men …’” (Jacobi, Woldemar, Werke, p. 461; my translation). “… ‘I will learn humility,’ he said. ‘You bring me back to myself! What in me now [lies] so dead against my own self.… That too is pride! Always the same hard, unbending, pride.… I was not good, Henriette! But I shall become it—I will learn humility; I will be yours.… Oh, do accept me!’” (ibid., p. 476). Cf. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §669. Jacobi]s presence in Chapter VI of the Phenomenology, though not pervasive, is certainly conspicuous. Another page that Hegel took from him can be found in the section on “The Struggle of the Enlightenment with Superstition” (§§541ff.). This time the relevant text of Jacobi is Einige Betrachtungen tiber denfrommen Betrug und über eine Vernunft, welche nicht die Vernunft ist (A Few Comments concerning Pious Fraud and a Reason which is No Reason), Deutsches Museum, Vol. 1.2 (1788), pp. 153–84; cf. Jacobi, Woldernar, Werke, Vol. 2, pp. 457–59.
22 “The reconciling Yea, in which the two ‘I’s let go their antithetical existence, is the existence of the ‘I’ which has expanded into a duality, and therein remains identical with itself, and, in its complete externalization and opposite, possesses the certainty of itself: it is God manifested in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge” (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §671, p. 409).