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Hegel Writes the Propaedeutic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Leo Rauch*
Affiliation:
Babson College, Wellesley, Massachusetts
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Abstract

What is remarkable about Hegel's creative activity (in the period 1808-12) is the diversity of its contrasts: his thinking and writing of The Science of Logic was going on while he was caught up in the daily tasks of newspaper editorship and then of school-teaching and administration. The contrast is enhanced if we include his Philosophical Propaedeutic here, and place it against The Science of Logic. (We can regard them as having been written almost simultaneously.) The latter book is intended for the learned specialist, and is concerned with elucidating the ultimate structure of reality in the most abstract terms. As a work of philosophy it is technical to an extreme; it is his most recondite work, making no concessions to the difficulties a reader might encounter. The Philosophical Propaedeutic, on the other hand, is intended for the student at secondary school and junior college, and is concerned in part with the concrete social values embedded in social morality and religion. As a work, it is entirely accessible and “open”, and it represents Hegel's attempt to lead his students from their view of the immediate social reality up to an all-encompassing world-vision. (There is a further contrast in the fact that it was not written as a book at all, but as a series of lecture-notes, and was put together as a book by Karl Rosenkranz, nine years after Hegel's death.)

Obviously it was because there was no university post for him that he accepted the position of Rector and Professor of Philosophy at the Aegidien Gymnasium in Nuremberg, in 1808. Yet his acceptance was not accompanied by the attitude of faute de mieux -- as though “the speculative Pegasus were being harnessed to the wagon of schoolwork.”

Type
Review Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1988

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References

1 Letter of 23 Oct 1812. See Hegel: The Letters, translated by Butler, Clark and Seiler, Christiane Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984 p 275 Google Scholar. Subsequent references to the letters will be to this edition, by date and page number.

2 Rosenkranz, Karl, G W F Hegels Leben (1844) Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971 p. 247 Google Scholar.

3 Ibid. 246

4 Letter of 14 Dec 1808, p. 188. Also: 16 April 1822, p. 391.

5 Hegel's reply in letter of 8 July 1807, p. 133

6 Letter of 23 Oct 1812, p. 277

7 Letter of 20 May 1808, p. 173

8 Ibid, p. 175

9 Ibid, p. 175. Brackets Butler's.

10 Letter of 8 July 1807, p. 134

11 Rosenkranz, , Hegels Leben, p. 248 Google Scholar. Translation mine, italics his.

12 Ibid. See also Rosenkranz' 1840 Foreword to hegel's Philosophische Propädeutik, translated by me in The Owl of Minerva, Vol 17 No 1 Villanova University, Fall 1985 Google Scholar. References to this translation will be cited as Owl.

13 Owl, p. 23

14 Letter of 14 Dec 1808, p. 188.

15 Rosenkranz, , Hegels Leben, p. 254 fGoogle Scholar. Italics of Rosenkranz.

16 Letter of 10 Oct 1811, p. 258

17 Letter of 24 March,, 1812, p. 263

18 Ibid p. 264

19 Owl p. 23

20 Ibid

21 Letter of 24 March 1812, p. 264

22 Ibid

23 Owl p. 22

24 Ibid, p. 27

25 Letter of 23 Oct 1812, pp. 275-282

26 Ibid, pp. 282-284

27 Letter of March 1805, p. 107

28 Hegel, G W F, The Philosophical Propaedeutic, translated by Miller, A V. Introduction by M George and A Vincent. Oxford and New York, Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. xxxv, 175 Google Scholar.