The best books on Hegel: recommended by Stephen Houlgate
G W F Hegel is one of
the most divisive figures in western philosophy. He influenced Marx,
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Adorno and countless others. And yet, he is
seen as perhaps the most obscure and inaccessible philosopher to read. Is he
worth engaging with? How should we read him? Stephen Houlgate, a
philosopher at Warwick University, gives us an in-depth look at Hegel.
Who was Hegel? What
sort of philosophical context should we place him in?
Hegel was born in
Stuttgart in 1770, an exact contemporary of Beethoven and Wordsworth. He was
almost nineteen when the French Revolution broke out and this had a great
impact on him. There’s a story that he and Schelling and Hölderlin, who were
contemporaries of his, went out and planted a ‘freedom tree’ on 14 July, 1793
and danced a revolutionary French dance around it. Even if this story is not
true in all its details, it indicates that they responded enthusiastically to
the French
Revolution.
“People often
describe Hegel as a kind of Aristotle of the modern age. ”
Hegel lived through
the Napoleonic wars and took quite a long time to get a job. From the age of
about thirty to thirty-six, he worked as an unsalaried lecturer in Jena. Then
he was the head of a gymnasium – a secondary school – from 1808 to
1816, during which time he wrote theScience of Logic. And then in Berlin
he flourished, becoming a very prominent figure. He knew Goethe and a number of
the Romantics, and both Felix Mendelssohn and Ludwig Feuerbach went to his
lectures.
Hegel got married in 1811, which needs to be pointed out because Kant
wasn’t married, Nietzsche
wasn’t
married, and Kierkegaard wasn’t married. In that sense, he was quite bourgeois
in the life that he led and this is reflected in the institutions of the state
he describes in his Philosophy of Right.
People often describe
Hegel as a kind of Aristotle of the modern age. He had an insatiable desire to
learn and understand things. So he was interested in mathematics, science and
politics. He was also interested in art, and he would travel far in order to
see it. He went on long coach journeys to Vienna and Paris and Leipzig to see
people but also to go to art galleries.
He was very
gregarious, and when travelling he would tell engaging stories in the letters
he wrote to his wife about the people he’d met and conversed with. So he was
quite personable, though he could also be fairly irascible and was not averse
to picking fights with people. He was steeped in history, and very aware of the
constitutional developments that were going on at the time and, of course, the
expansion of Napoleon’s influence.
In terms of the philosophical background
to Hegel’s thought, most immediately we have Kant. But initially it’s not
so much Kant’s theoretical philosophy, but rather his practical, moral
philosophy, that engages Hegel. As a young man he is interested especially in
how we can reconcile the demands of Christianity with Kantian morality. How do
you make a rational religion that people can still participate in? And religion
remains an enduring interest throughout his life. So Kant and followers of Kant
like Fichte and Schelling were very important to his development. But so were
the Greeks.
You’ve got to remember, Hegel could write his diary in Latin when
he was fourteen and he could read Greek as a young man. So he read Plato,
Aristotle, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. He was steeped in all of this. There’s the Greek
influence, the influence of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, and there is also the
political influence of the French Revolution. Hegel is also acutely aware of
his position in modernity, of the fact that he lived at a time after the Reformation. It’s no
longer the medieval world. He has quite a developed sense of what makes the
medieval world different from modernity, not only in terms of ideas but also
political structures. I would say Hegel was very much the opposite of the
classic existentialist struggling alone to make sense of the world. He was very
involved with people and that’s reflected in his philosophy. I think that will
set the scene.
With Hegel’s
status, I see two elements that seem hard to reconcile. On the one hand, we
have the fact that he was enormously significant, influencing
thinkers like Marx,
Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Adorno and countless others. But at the same
time, Hegel is considered the most inaccessible and obscure philosopher to read
and understand. How can he be both? What was his reception at the time?
You’re absolutely
right, there is that difficulty. Of course, one has got to remember that some
of the people who were strongly influenced by Hegel are also not that easy to
read. Kierkegaard and Schelling studied Hegel closely and neither of them is
particularly easy to read. Marx worked on parts of Hegel’s Logic which
then went into his doctoral dissertation and into Das Kapital,
which isn’t an easy read. Heidegger read parts of Hegel, Gadamer did, Derrida
did, Hyppolite did. None of these people are easy.
“So disagreement
about whether it is highly poetic and literary, and of enormous value, or just
a lot of obscure incomprehensible balderdash is found at the time.”
When teaching at Jena,
Hegel was famous for not having a very clear delivery. He stuttered and had a
thick Swabian accent. The delivery style was not geared to the needs of
students. When the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) came out, it
got very mixed responses. Some people thought it was very difficult and
impenetrable, but others like Jean-Paul Richter praised its style. So
disagreement about whether it is highly poetic and literary, and of enormous
value, or just a lot of obscure incomprehensible balderdash is found at the
time.
Schopenhauer had a
gripe against Hegel and accused him of an almost deliberate lack of clarity. He
believed Hegel was poisoning young minds. Schopenhauer famously scheduled his
lectures at the same time as Hegel’s and, of course, nobody turned up to his
and he got very angry. He makes an amusing distinction between ‘the windbag’
who is Fichte and ‘the charlatan’ who is Hegel. Others, by contrast,
thought Hegel to be a most profound philosopher. So, yes, there was
disagreement at the time about the quality of Hegel’s writing and teaching.
But he gets better. I
think the delivery gets better. He spent eight years as a headmaster at a gymnasium during
which time he taught logic and various other topics to schoolboys. That must
have improved matters. We can tell from the later lecture transcripts, some of
which were taken down verbatim, that the sentences get a bit shorter and the
ideas get clearer. But there’s another
way of looking at all of this. And that is that what some people regard as
obscure isn’t necessarily so, if you read it in the right way. I think that has
got to be said. The difficulty with Hegel is twofold. It’s partly just the
difficulty of the thoughts. Hegel embraces contradictions and paradoxes; you
get sentences in which the subject matter you’re discussing mutates in the very
thinking of it. But that’s part of his way of thinking.
He also coins verbal
nouns and will create new words out of everyday expressions. If you take the
idea of something becoming different from itself – in Hegel’s language,
something becoming ‘other’ than itself – Hegel will create a noun: Sichanderswerden (becoming
other than oneself). Well, we’re not used to that. That’s difficult. But from
teaching Hegel, my feeling is that if you can penetrate through to the ideas
and get students to see them, and then you look back at his sentences and say
to students ‘how would you have expressed that?’, you find that it’s often not
that easy to say it in any other way than Hegel said it.
So one has got to be a
little bit careful. Sometimes the obscurity is there, absolutely, I cannot deny
that; but it’s sometimes in the mind of the reader who is just not able to be
flexible enough to think in the way that Hegel wants. And there are parts of
Hegel that really leap off the page. For instance, in the Phenomenology,
you have the ‘master-slave dialectic’ which really comes alive. There are
sentences in there that are difficult, but there’s a story being told there
that you can get your head around... read more:
