Hegel’s Encyclopedic System

Sebastian Stein, Joshua Wretzel, Sebastian Stein, Joshua Wretzel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367077495
• eBook ISBN: 9780429663536
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book discusses the most comprehensive of Hegel's works: his long-neglected Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline. It contains original essays by internationally renowned and emerging voices in Hegel scholarship. Their contributions elucidate fundamental aspects of Hegel's encyclopedic system with an eye to its contemporary relevance. The book thus addresses system-level claims about Hegel's unique conceptions of philosophy, philosophical "science" and its method, dialectic, speculative thinking, and the way they relate to both Hegelian and contemporary notions of nature, history, religion, freedom, and cultural praxis.

1 Introduction

Sebastian Stein and Joshua Wretzel

DOI: 10.4324/9780429022555-1

In May of 1817, Hegel published a version of his philosophical system in outline form, as a guide for students to follow his lectures. Titled Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, Hegel thought that this work most fully articulated the methodical system of his thinking, and in the preface, he expressed the hope that its method would eventually ‘be recognized […] as the only genuine one.’ With characteristic boldness, he suggests that his encyclopedic enterprise contains the solution to all major – indeed, all possible – philosophical problems. Thus, he believes one may find within the pages of this text both a ‘knowledge of the unconditioned truth’ and the basis of an outlook on life that ‘alone gives human beings their dignity.’

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hegel’s optimism about his system has not been borne out by those following in his wake. Despite Hegel’s claims about the centrality of the Encyclopedia system to grasping the structure and content of (his) philosophical thought, both critics and supporters of Hegel largely devote their efforts to one of his other main publications: the Jena Phenomenology of Spirit, the Nuremberg Science of Logic, or the Heidelberg/Berlin Philosophy of Right. However, since Hegel argued that these works only become intelligible as introduction to the encyclopedic system or as parts of it, it is questionable whether, in the long history of Hegel commentary, one has understood him on the terms he wishes to be understood.

What is more, even Hegel’s advocates tend to operate under an anti-Hegelian historiographical presupposition. For they believe that both the practice and the context of philosophy has fundamentally changed since Hegel’s time, and so, if Hegel is to be made relevant, he stands in need of an update of sorts: Hegel is often thought of as writing for a 19th-century, European audience, whereas most philosophers today aspire to write for a broader, global audience. Given further advances in politics and the sciences, it might seem naive to think that Hegel, on his own terms, would be relevant for a contemporary audience. What some think we need is, to paraphrase one of Hegel’s more prominent supporters, ‘the best approach to Hegel for us,’ where this means appropriating those parts of Hegel that are relevant for a contemporary audience, while dispensing with the rest.

But it is, at least initially, unclear who this ‘us’ refers to as somehow different from the 19th-century ‘them.’ For all of our scientific and technological progress, ‘we’ are still vulnerable to empirical and philosophical error, corrupt government, vast imbalances of power and the most doltish forms of populist politics. The politicization of the word ‘freedom’ at the turn of the century, together with more recent assertions of individual liberty for what might be the wrong reasons, shows that we may not be as well-situated as we might like to think when it comes to grasping the ultimate reality of things that Hegel set out to describe. It is at least unclear, that is, whether the things that make philosophy relevant ‘for us’ are all that much different than the things that made philosophy relevant for Hegel.

Hegel’s rather eloquent way of putting the point is to say that ‘the content’ of philosophy ‘remains eternally young.’ Philosophers have, as their subject matter, something that is not subject to the change of socio-historical circumstances but greets every new generation of thinkers as the same truth. Thus, while historical circumstances may give certain philosophical questions more or less urgency, they do not change the fundamental nature of the struggle for knowing the truth itself. Every generation faces the same questions about what thought and nature are, and what it means to be human; and each generation grapples with their own ultimate purposes, wonders about the meaning of being in all its shapes. Thus, if the global reach of communication which defines our own age has changed anything for the philosopher, it is only a matter of scope: the kind of metaphysical restlessness, once thought to define only Western European life is visible, today, as a seemingly universal feature of the human condition.

Finding ourselves as we do in such circumstances, it is a shame that we continue to misunderstand and misuse a thinker with Hegel’s might and vision, and not just because of the way Hegel can help us, but also for the ways that misappropriation of Hegel hurts us. For instance, thinkers have long placed Hegel alongside apologists for European colonialism. But those who do so fail to grasp, also, the notion of absolute knowing with which his most famous book, The Phenomenology of Spirit, culminates. For it claims that that highest form of consciousness consists of the full embrace of the other in their full otherness, unconditioned by any sort of presupposition one might otherwise hold about their otherness. So understood, Hegel’s view of the other is not the demand for conformity, reduction of the other to the same, typical of the colonialist mindset, it is rather the attitude that lets the other be full as the other, and is at home with oneself in the face of the other.

Given the continued misappropriation of Hegel, together with a contemporary socio-political situation that stands to benefit from his insights, the question arises of whether and to what extent Hegel’s hope, that his philosophical method be recognized as the true method, can be realized in our time. These were the topics of stimulating, lunch-hour conversations in Heidelberg that led the editors and Roberto Vinco to organize a conference on Hegel’s work back in 2017. We agreed that the time was right, not only to ask the question of Hegel’s contemporary relevance, but also to shed light on his arguably most neglected work – the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences – which had its bicentennial in that year. We organized an international group of speakers for an intense, three-day conference titled ‘The Enduring Relevance of Hegel’s Encyclopedia.’ This volume offers the papers that were presented at that conference.

Participants were asked to contribute papers on one of two topics: either to show how Hegel’s Encyclopedia-system as a whole remains relevant for contemporary philosophical concerns, or to illuminate the enduring relevance of particular parts of the Encyclopedia project. We shall discuss each of these in turn.

1.1 On the Encyclopedia-System as a Whole

These essays were focused on one of two tasks: either to show how Hegel’s Encyclopedia-system as a whole bears relevance to matters of contemporary interest, or else to contribute to the still-incomplete project of clarifying the Encyclopedia-system so that it may be understood on its own terms.

We begin our collection with Klaus Vieweg’s study, ‘The Conceptual and Biographical Genesis of Hegel’s Encyclopedia.’ He argues against the notion that the Encyclopedia-system was begun and thrown together upon Hegel’s arrival in Heidelberg, but was in fact in development during his time in Nuremberg. Indeed, Vieweg shows that the sections on objective spirit, including subsections on abstract right, morality and ethical life were already outlined and presented to students and fellow philosophers during his Nuremberg years. And while the sections on aesthetics and philosophical psychology may not have been fully developed until his time in Heidelberg and Berlin, we find in his Nuremberg correspondence the main lines of his thoughts on the topic that remain remarkably consistent with both the Heidelberg and Berlin editions.

In ‘Hegel’s Heidelberg Encyclopedia as the Main Work of the Philosophy of Spirit,’ the late Jens Halfwassen discusses the grounding of the Encyclopedia-system within the history of philosophy. While it is common to contextualize the Encyclopedia as a work in the post-Kantian, idealist tradition, Halfwassen shows how the proper structure for the system as a whole dates back to the work of Plotinus and Proklos. It is there, Halfwassen contends, that Hegel finds the notions that the threefold Geist is God in its highest form of self-development, that all reality and thought are to be understood as the self-comprehension of divine Geist, and that the proper method for philosophy as a whole is the speculative one.

Meanwhile, Luca Illetterati’s ‘Philosophy as Science of Freedom’ examines the systematic implications of a particular passage from the Encyclopedia, namely, the Anmerkung to §5. There, Hegel writes that philosophy may be seen (betrachtet) as ‘the science of freedom.’ As Illetterati writes, this is because in philosophy, thought learns to free itself from longing, fear and other ‘external’ impediments to its own self-development. From there, Illetterati proceeds to investigate some of the core theses of Hegel’s Encyclopedia-system: the fundamental connection between system and freedom, the sense in which freedom grounds the necessity for the threefold split of the absolute idea and the fundamental connection between freedom and reason itself.

‘Hegel’s System and the Negativity of the Dialectic,’ the piece by Anton Friedrich Koch, examines Adorno’s famous claim that the negativity of the dialectic is in principle untamable. He examines Hegel’s logic of the concept as the site of Hegel’s ‘response’ to this notion, where negativity is brought to heel by the development of the concept into the absolute idea, and ultimately into nature and Geist. Koch argues that, while Hegel provides the case for the ultimate reconciliation between thought and being, it is hard to reject Adorno’s emphases on the place of the finite individual within thought.

Roberto Vinco defends a theological conception of the idea in ‘The Encyclopedia-System as a Form of Worship.’ He understands both ‘the idea’ and ‘worship’ in a unique sense. As regards the former, Vinco treats the idea as the Platonic ‘Veritative Being.’ As regards the latter, Vinco takes worship to be the highest expression of leisure and contemplative life. So understood, philosophy is a form of worship in case its object is a form of divinity. Vinco thus undertakes to show that the idea, in its complete self-expression, is itself divine: it describes a universe in which every single element is an immediate expression of the divine origin, or a world in which God is all in all.

Hegel’s metaphilosophy is the topic of Friedrike Schick’s contribution, ‘Between Religion and the Empirical Sciences: Hegel’s Concept of Philosophy. While much has been written about Hegel’s conceptions of philosophy and religion, and an increasing number of scholars have begun to study Hegel’s conception of philosophy alongside that of the empirical sciences, Schick aptly observes that no one has, as of yet, viewed Hegel’s conception of philosophy as standing between religion and the empirical sciences. Schick’s point is that Hegel’s conception of philosophy both points out, and helps to overcome, a false dilemma of Enlightenment-era thinking. While Enlightenment thinkers turned to empirical science to overcome the superstitions of dogmatic religion, Hegelian philosophy operates in a space that is neither dogmatic nor subject to the relativistic shortcomings of the empirical science as Hegel conceived them.

In his ‘Temporal Strata of Historical Experience,’ Chirstopher Yeomans defends an analogy he finds between Koselleck’s thought and the structure of the Encyclopedia-system. Of particular interest, for Yeomans, is Koselleck’s notion of Zeitschichten, or temporal strata, which he develops to account for both cyclical and linear elements of historical experience. Yeomans understands the ‘circle-of-circles’ structure of the Encyclopedia as similarly constructed out of Zeitschichten. In particular, he sees the split of the Encyclopedia-system into logic, philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit as mimicking the actual structure of our historical experience. On this view, history is structured, first, as pure conceptual form (logic); second, as temporality as such (nature); and third, as social institutions (spirit).

1.2 On Parts of the Encyclopedia-System

These essays aim to illuminate those parts of the Encyclopedia that bear relevance to matters of contemporary interest. The first of these is Michaela Bordignon’s ‘Hegel’s Logic as a System of Illegitimate Totalities.’ An illegitimate totality is, as she defines it, a set of all the elements that satisfy a determinate condition, while also containing itself as an element. In this sense, Russell’s set of all sets that contain themselves is the paradigm case of an illegitimate totality. Bordignon’s claim is that each of the determinations of the Logic – being, existence, appearance, etc. – constitutes an illegitimate totality. She uses this as a starting point from which to argue that Hegel defends a view of illegitimate totalities that is different – and ultimately superior – to Bertrand Russell’s.

Hans-Georg Schülein sheds some much-needed light on a dark corner of Hegel’s work: his Philosophy of Nature. Of particular interest to Schülein is how nature presents itself as a ‘sphere of otherness’ that simultaneously repels and attracts us. He argues that this ‘otherness’ of nature is, for Hegel, only nature’s initial appearance; that Hegel’s nature is a system of stages that continuously reduces nature’s ‘otherness’ and that Hegel’s philosophy of nature offers a teleological argument for the integration of nature in spirit. Schülein’s paper thus provides a counterweight to prevailing, so-called ‘anti-naturalist’ interpretations of Geist in Hegel.

In ‘The Two Souls: On the Difference Between Human and Animal Cognition in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit and Philosophy of Nature,’ Luca Corti addresses the double-usage of ‘soul’ (‘Seele’) in the Encyclopedia: once to describe animal subjectivity, once to describe human subjectivity. He argues that these two souls are different in kind so that the animal, for Hegel, is not ‘ensouled’ in the same way as a human. This is principally the case because, as Corti argues, the sensation of the human soul is always already informed by higher faculties.

In ‘Truth and Method in Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit,’ Joshua Wretzel argues that there is a distinctive kind of transcendental methodology at work in Hegel’s philosophy of mind. He shows that Hegel employs a ‘circular’ or ‘organic’ transcendental methodology in order to ‘deduce’ the structure of mind. To Wretzel, this approach has a twofold advantage over those approaches to mind that were favored by Hegel’s contemporaries. For one, while other transcendental approaches were either regressive – reasoning from things conditioned to underlying conditions, or progressive – reasoning from basic conditions to things conditioned by them, Hegel’s circular approach has it that each moment stands in a reciprocal relation of both being condition and conditioned with respect to the other moments. And for another, while at least some other forms of transcendental argument seek to reason from conditioning parts to unconditioned whole, Hegel holds that the whole is present in each of the parts. That is, Hegel does not think that the various faculties of mind somehow interact to constitute the whole, but are simply different, variously complex manifestations of the mind’s activity itself.

In ‘Objective Spirit, Today,’ Jean-François Kervégan examines two contemporary appropriations of objective spirit in Hegel. First, he examines Charles Taylor’s interpretation and application of objective spirit in his philosophy of the social sciences. He then examines Vincent Descombes’s holism in The Institutions of Meaning, which makes use of the concept of objective spirit. Kervégan holds that both examples underline the importance for contemporary philosophy to uphold what he calls a ‘non-subjectivist view of subjectivity.’

We are happy to include, in our collection, three essays that focus on the difficult sections on absolute spirit in the Encyclopedia. The first of these is Tobias Dangel’s piece on ‘Hegel’s Concept of Absolute Spirit as Absolute Truth.’ He notes that Hegel operates with an ontological conception of truth when he characterizes ‘God as the truth and only God.’ Dangel compares this kind of ontological truth with what he calls ‘formal truth,’ or in Hegel’s words, ‘correctness.’ He then develops a threefold thesis defending the ontological understanding of truth in Hegel: (a) that truth, for Hegel, is a property of objects in themselves; (b) that there are different grades of how an object can have true existence; and (c) that the concept of truth has its ultimate satisfaction in absolute spirit, from which it follows that H...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Hegel’s Science of Reason as a Science of Freedom: From Nuremberg to Heidelberg
• 3 Hegel’s Heidelberg Encyclopedia as the Principal Work of a Metaphysics of Geist
• 4 Philosophy as the Science of Freedom
• 5 Hegel’s System and the Negativity of Dialectics
• 6 The Encyclopedia System as a Form of Worship
• 7 Between Religion and the Empirical Sciences: Hegel’s Concept of Philosophical Science According to the Introduction to the Encyclopedia
• 8 Temporal Strata of Historical Experience in Hegel’s Encyclopedia
• 9 Hegel’s Logic as a System of Illegitimate Totalities
• 10 Nature’s Otherness: On the Status of Nature in Hegel’s Encyclopedic System
• 11 The Two Souls: Some Remarks on Hegel’s Investigation of ‘Soul’ in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and Philosophy of Nature
• 12 Truth and Method in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences
• 13 Objective Geist Today
• 14 The Absolute Spirit as the Consummation of Hegel’s Concept of Truth
• 15 The Proximity of Philosophy to Religion: Hegel’s Evaluative Reason
• 16 Hegel’s Notion of Philosophy: The Concept-Based Unity of Self-Referential Universality and Differentiated Particularity
• Index