The term “absolute idealism” is generally used to characterize the metaphysical view that Hegel presents in his philosophy. Although this phrase does not occur often in Hegel's work, he does use it to describe his own philosophy: “The position taken up by the concept is that of absoulte idealism” [EnL 160 Z; 8, 307]. Since Hegel uses the term “the concept” to signify a set of philosophic categories that contain an accurate description of the real, we can take this statement to indicate that the term “absolute idealism” is an appropriate means of characterizing his philosophy.

But what exactly is absolute idealism? Hegel provides us with some insight into his understanding of this phrase in a passage that describes the ontological status of the concept.

In Hegel's view, Kant made an indispensable contribution to the progress of philosophy by recognizing that the most basic principles of human thought reflect the structure of our own minds. But, like Moses who could see but not enter the Promised Land, he failed to grasp the ultimate truth, understood by Hegel himself, that the nature of our own thought and that of the reality to which Kant always contrasted it are in fact one and the same. As he put it in the discussion of Kant in his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences,

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart on 27 August 1770. He was the eldest son of a senior financial official in the administration of the duchy of Wiirttemberg; the family belonged to the “notables” of the duchy. He was a serious and clever child. His mother (who gave him Latin lessons before he went to school) may have hoped he was destined for the Church; his father probably hoped for a successor in the civil service.

By the time his mother died in September 1783, Hegel was keeping a diary full of academic matters in which he practiced his Latin. He was first in his class every year at the Stuttgart Gymnasium. At about the time that he passed to the upper school (autumn 1784), Hegel began to organize his own private studies “encyclopaedically.” He copied out long excerpts from the books that he read under headings and subheadings, which indicate a Baconian ambition to organize all knowledge under its proper “science. ” He continued this habit until after he entered the Theological Institute at Tubingen in October 1788. He never lost the habit of reading with pen in hand, and we have “excerpts ” from all periods of his life; but at Tubingen he stopped writing his classificatory headings at the top of the page. Since he kept his schoolboy collection all his life, his biographer, Rosenkranz, was able to describe it in some detail. A small part of it survived and was printed by Gustav Thaulow in 1854 (see Dok . . ., pp. 54-166).

BACKGROUND

Shortly after Hegel's death, the influence of his philosophy began to wane. Part of this process involved the division of Hegel's followers into what David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) called “right,” “center,” and “left ” Hegelians. Strauss himself may be regarded as the founder of the “left” Hegelian school with his book The Life of Jesus (1835). At first the battleground was theological. “Right ” Hegelians, such as H. F. W. Hinrichs (1794-1861) and Johann Erdmann (1805- 1892), employed Hegel's philosophy in defense of traditional Christianity, “center” Hegelians, such as Karl Rosenkranz (1805-1879) and Karl Ludwig Michelet (1801-1893), subjected religious dogma to Hegelian reinterpretation; and “left” Hegelians, such as Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), and Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), derived theologically radical (even atheistic and humanistic) conclusions from Hegelianism. Yet Strauss borrowed the terminology of “left” and “right” from French politics, and from the beginning the division was implicitly over social and political as well as theological issues. Left Hegelianism was explicitly linked to political radicalism and the communist worker's movement by Moses Hess (1812-1875) in The European Triarchy (1841).

BACKGROUND

Hegel's philosophy is an attempt to renew classical philosophy, especially the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, within the modern philosophical tradition begun with Kant. Hegel's ethical thought is no different from the rest of his philosophy in this respect. Classical ethical theory, culminating for Hegel in the ethical theory of Aristotle, saw ethics as aiming at a single final end or human good, called “happiness” [eudaimonia). By nature, human beings have a characteristic function; to fulfill that function is to be happy. Aristotle defined happiness as the actualizing of the soul's capacities in accordance with the excellences appropriate to them, and most especially the actualization of its highest capacity, reason. Our rational excellences include both theory and practice; practical excellences include not only the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom but a range of distinct moral virtues of character. Moral virtues dispose the non-rational part of our soul, which includes desires and feelings, to be governed by the rational part, so that our wants, likes and dislikes, pleasures and pains, all harmonize with reason.

HEGEL'S HISTORICAL REVOLUTION

History cannot be consigned to a corner in Hegel's system, relegated to a few paragraphs near the end of the Encyclopedia or confined to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History For, as many scholars have long since recognized, history is central to Hegel's conception of philosophy. One of the most striking and characteristic features of Hegel's thought is that it historicizes philosophy, explaining its purpose, principles, and problems in historical terms. Rather than seeing philosophy as a timeless a priori reflection upon eternal forms, Hegel regards it as the self-consciousness of a specific culture, the articulation, defense, and criticism of its essential values and beliefs. This historical conception of philosophy is epitomized clearly by Hegel himself in the famous lines from the preface to his Philosophy of Right: “Philosophy is its own age comprehended in thought” (VII, 26).

When Hegel presented his lectures on aesthetics in the 1820s, he probably believed that his system of beauty and the fine arts was the most up-to-date and comprehensive of its time. And perhaps he was right. But Hegel himself would have been the first to admit that only in retrospect would a proper assessment of his theory emerge. As we now look back, Hegel's aesthetic theory stands as the product of mutually influencing currents of inquiry within German intellectual life of the early 1800s, the most salient of which was the philosophical effort to comprehend the universe within the contours of an encyclopedic, organically structured thought-system. Under the spell of this hopeful enterprise, Hegel composed his theory of art and beauty as a movement within his comprehensive metaphysical theory. Following the interpretative conventions of the time, he tacitly assumed that his readers would view his aesthetic theory as part of this greater metaphysical symphony - as a reflection and extension of his conception of a dynamic but essentially rational and harmonious universe. Although systematic, Hegel's aesthetics is not self-contained, and it solidly depends upon the presuppositions of his idealistic outlook.

My aim in this essay is to sketch the political and philosophical context of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and to reconstruct the basic aim and structure of its main argument. I argue that Hegel is a reform-minded liberal who based his political philosophy on the analysis and fulfillment of individual human freedom. Hegel gave this theme a profound twist through his social conception of human individuals. He argued that individual autonomy can be achieved only within a communal context.

To understand Hegel's political views, it is helpful to see how they stand with regard to conservatism, romanticism, and liberalism. Hegel has been accused of conservatism or worse. The most common basis for this charge is Hegel's claim that what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational (Preface 24/20). This claim has been taken as a blanket endorsement of the status quo, but in the paragraph headed by this statement, Hegel distinguished between phenomena that embody a rational structure and those that do not. The mere fact that a state exists, on Hegel's view, does not entail that it is either rational or, in Hegel's technical sense, “actual. ” Hegel's distinction between existence and actuality is tied to his metaphysics, according to which the universe's rational structure progressively actualizes itself. In the political sphere, this means that social institutions aspire and tend to achieve a fundamentally rational form. The basis of this view cannot be explored here. For present purposes it suffices to note that Hegel's slogan is not a blanket endorsement of extant institutions. This does not, however, determine where Hegel's politics lie in the political spectrum. That requires determining what political institutions Hegel thought were rational and why.

WHAT IS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT?

Beginning around the summer of 1802, Hegel began to prepare his friends and students for the immanent publication of his own “system” or at least a part of it. For a young professor out to make his mark, this was apparently the thing to do in those heady days in the university city of Jena, which had already seen several of Fichte's “Doctrines of Knowledge” and Schelling's influential “System of Transcendental Idealism.” But no such work appeared, since Hegel began to change his mind rapidly about a number of important elements in such a system, especially, after the lectures given in the 1803-4 academic year, about the relation between his category theory, or logic, and his metaphysics, and even more deeply, about many of Schelling's ideas. These changes also prompted an interest, sometime around 1805, in a proper “Introduction” to such a system, a work that was to be a “Science of the Experience of Consciousness,” and that would be published, together with his “Logic,” in a single volume at Eastertime 1806.

The dialectical method is pervasive in Hegel's mature philosophy. It governs all three parts of his system proper: the Logic, the Philosophy of Nature, and the Philosophy of Spirit. And it also governs the discipline that he developed as an introduction to this system, the Phenomenology of Spirit (expounded in the book of that name).

Few aspects of Hegel's thought have exerted as much influence or occasioned as much controversy as this method. Yet, paradoxically, it remains one of his least well understood philosophical contributions. The aim of this essay is to cast a little light where there remains much darkness.

It seems to me that three main shortcomings in the secondary literature have hindered a clear understanding of the method. First, most interpreters, if not actually denying that there is such a thing as the dialectical method, have at least characterized it in terms that remain too vague. Second, interpreters have generally made too little effort to explain the method's philosophical motivation. Third, many critics have been too hasty in dismissing the method as guilty of one or more of a variety of original sins that would render it useless in principle, such as violating the law of contradiction.

Few thinkers in the history of philosophy are more controversial than Hegel. Philosophers are either for or against him. Rarely do they regard him with cool detachment, weighing his merits and faults with strict impartiality. Hegel has been dismissed as a charlatan and obscurantist, but he has also been praised as one of the greatest thinkers of modern philosophy. As a result of these extreme views, Hegel has been either completely neglected or closely studied for decades.

Whether we love or hate Hegel, it is difficult to ignore him. We cannot neglect him if only because of his enormous historical significance. Most forms of modern philosophy have either been influenced by Hegel or reacted against him.

This essay addresses some of the themes that modern scholarship has identified as central to an understanding of Hegel's thoughts on religion. For a variety of pedagogic reasons, which will become evident over the course of this essay, I have chosen to approach these themes historically and contextually rather than philosophically and abstractly. To that end, my discussion of Hegel's thoughts on religion focuses primarily on the religious, philosophical, and political circumstances that conditioned, and were conditioned by, his writings during his so-called Berlin period (1818-1831).

During these years - from his appointment to the prestigious chair in philosophy at the University of Berlin in 1818 until his death in 1831 - Hegel's philosophy came to public prominence. Indeed, it was in Berlin that Hegel's philosophy became an ideological factor in public debate. As we shall see, that was especially true in the realm of religion, for from about 1821 on Hegel's views on Christianity in general and on Protestantism in particular were not only publicly debated but fiercely contested as well. Thus, Hegel's Berlin period provides an important context both for measuring the ideological impact his views on religion had on public consciousness and for determining the ways in which the public opposition to his views shaped his private as well as public pronouncements on religion.

The relationship between Hegel and Hegelianism will be approached in this essay in terms of the creative appropriation, reproduction, and transformation of the philosophical position articulated in Hegel's lectures and published texts. The term “Hegelianism” is not meant to designate appropriation or use of specific Hegelian arguments or judgments, but commitment to a general theoretical perspective or framework, to a specific way of prefiguring the field of knowledge and construing the relations of elements within that field. Switching to a linguistic metaphor, one could describe “Hegelianism” as a semiotic system, a distinctive “language” that defined the meaning of individual “signs” and within which all specific questions were addressed and problems resolved. For the intellectual historian, the history of Hegelianism is the story of the temporal connections between texts that define and order the totality of beings in the world told in Hegelian language.

Hegel has two books that are called Science of Logic, but neither of them resembles what normally serves as a logic text. Instead of beginning with symbols and rules, they start by talking about “being,” “nothing,” and “becoming.” And the structures of formal inference appear only well into the third and final part, called the “Doctrine of Conceiving.”

Because of this discrepancy between expectation and actuality, many interpreters discount the term “logic” in the title of the two works and discuss their content in terms of metaphysics or, if they are of a Kantian frame of mind, in terms of a transcendental system of categories. Yet Hegel seemed to be serious when he placed them under the rubric of the traditional discipline. The smaller of the two versions, the first part of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817), continued to develop through the two subsequent editions of that work in 1827 and 1830. And the larger version was being extensively revised when Hegel died in 1831. The question to be asked, then, is: What did Hegel mean by “logic”?

It is often thought that analytic philosophy arises, at least in part, from a reaction against Hegel, or against philosophy inspired by Hegel. To some extent this is correct. The philosophy of Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore in the first decade or so of this century, which was enormously influential for subsequent analytic philosophy, was developed in conscious reaction to idealist views that owed much to Hegel. This fact, however, does not settle the question of the influence of Hegel, either on Russell and Moore or on analytic philosophy more generally; all that it does is to give us a way of posing the question. And the question is a complex one. Besides the general difficulties involved in tracing the influence of a view as complex as Hegel's, there is also a particular problem arising from the relation between Kant and Hegel.

No other musical instrument has until recent years been so widely used among all classes throughout the world as the violin. One reason, of course, is quite simply the musical perfection of the instrument – its sonority and flexibility in the hands of musicians anywhere, especially, with its capacity for clean and strongly rhythmic articulation and its penetrating tone, its suitability for the performance of dance music of all styles. At the time of its invention dance musicians throughout Europe were playing a variety of bowed string instruments from the gue (probably a type of rectangular box zither) in Britain's northernmost islands, to the rebec-like lira of Greece. Such musicians, professional and amateur, looked favourably on the newcomer: first, they must have found the violin an improvement on their own instruments and, for the most part, they could readily transfer their bowing and fingering techniques to the violin. Secondly, there must have been some status attached to an instrument which found favour in courts and homes of the wealthy, even though in those milieux the violinist was often considered to be a professional musician of rather low rank.

Outside Europe the adoption of the violin can further be seen as an index to the expansion of European influence over the centuries. Wherever they went colonists and traders took violins with them and, as often as not, encouraged indigenous musicians to learn to make and play them. Because we know that professional violinists were seen as low-class providers of dance music compared with the more genteel amateur players of the viol family, we are not surprised to learn, for example, that the early white settlers in North America preferred to teach their musically talented black slaves to play the violin for them so that they themselves were spared the task and were free to indulge in what became at times a passion for social dancing.