Hegel

Texts and Commentary

G. W. F. Hegel, Walter Kaufmann

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 1977
• ISBN:
  9780268161200
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

Herbert Marcuse called the preface to Hegel's Phenomenology "one of the greatest philosophical undertakings of all times." This summary of Hegel's system of philosophy is now available in English translation with commentary on facing pages. While remaining faithful to the author's meaning, Walter Kaufmann has removed many encumbrances inherent in Hegel's style.

COMMENTARY

I. Philosophy must become scientific

1. Science is not the naked result

¹ In the first edition of 1807, the table of contents includes nineteen subheads under the preface. They are not numbered as in our text but run on, interrupted only by Roman numeral page numbers. In the text itself no divisions are indicated. These headings afford some insight into Hegel’s intentions and are worth reproducing. In the text they are numbered consecutively and italicized. In Hegel’s table of contents, the first heading is not assigned a page number but immediately followed by the second; yet it surely belongs at the outset.

In the first critical edition of the work (1907), the editor, Georg Lasson, divided the preface into four major parts, and each of these into three sections. In his text these are indicated respectively by Roman and Arabic numerals, and in his table of contents, which does not follow the original one at this point, these four Roman and twelve Arabic numbers are followed by titles he proposed. His disposition is plausible and helpful and therefore reproduced in the commentary, but our titles (in italics) and subtitles (in Roman letters) are not his. In sum, Hegel’s own subheads appear in the texts, ours in the commentary, opposite the places (marked by numerals only) where they belong.

² “Subject matter”: in German, Sache. This word can mean: thing, matter, concern. Zur Sache! can mean: to the subject; and das gehört nicht zur Sache: that is irrelevant. Sachlich can also mean: objective; and bei der Sache sein: to concentrate.

³ “historical and void of Concepts”: in German, historisch und begrifflos. The only previous translation, Baillie’s (1910, revised 1931; reprinted also in Scribner’s Hegel Selections) has: “descriptive and superficial.” Plainly, this is not what Hegel says. The ordinary meaning of Begriff is definitely concept. Because this is one of Hegel’s most characteristic terms, and he associates more than its ordinary meaning with it, some nineteenth-century English translators felt that a less ordinary term was called for and hit on “notion.” This word is utterly misleading as it suggests vagueness and caprice, while Hegel takes pains to attack haziness and subjectivity, opposing to them “the seriousness of the Concept” (cf. ¹¹ below). He upholds rigorous and highly disciplined conceptual analysis. Begriff is closely related to begreifen (to comprehend)—an affinity that unfortunately cannot be recaptured in English—and Hegel considers it the task of philosophy to comprehend and not merely to feel and rhapsodize.

⁴ The oddity here noted is indeed a striking characteristic of the preface that follows. (Cf. H 14, 24 f., and 37.)

⁵ “fluid”: this image is picked up again later in the preface: see II.3, note ³⁵ below.

⁶ This is one of the most interesting and fateful paragraphs in Hegel’s writings. In Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza, in Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, or in Kant we find no comparable conception of philosophical disagreement or “the progressive development of the truth.” Different philosophies, according to Hegel, are not to be viewed as laid out next to each other in a spatial arrangement; they cannot be fully understood as long as their temporal relationship is ignored. Studying a single system is like studying, say, a blossom; the study of the whole plant and of living organisms corresponds to the study of the development of philosophy to the present time. Different philosophies represent different stages of maturity.

Here, then, at the beginning of his first book, Hegel announces the vision that led him about fifteen years later, as a professor at the University of Berlin, to establish the history of philosophy as a subject of central importance for students of philosophy—which it had not been before. (But see H 67, n. ⁴⁰.)

“Necessary” and “necessity” in the last sentence are questionable. Hegel means that philosophies should not be understood as capricious webs spun by wayward thinkers but as significant stages in the development of thought. When a philosopher disagrees with his predecessors, we should not reject the lot because they cannot agree with each other; rather we should ask how the later thinkers correct the partiality of the former, and how each contributes to the gradual refinement of knowledge. Hegel notwithstanding, this does not imply any genuine necessity. Hegel often uses “necessary” quite illicitly as the negation of “utterly arbitrary.”

⁷ Most English-speaking philosophers 150 years after this was written would agree with this paragraph. A student who remembers and reproduces the conclusions of his teacher, or of some great philosopher, but not the way in which things are worked out in detail, has only got hold of something lifeless: the spirit of philosophy has escaped him. What counts in philosophy is not the striking aim or claim, but the detail.

⁸ What is wanted is devotion. The philosopher, like a scientist, should devote himself to, and immerse himself in, his subject instead of trying to be interesting and different. Or as Hegel puts it later, what is wanted is “the seriousness of the Concept.”

⁹ External criticism that simply condemns without any prior effort to comprehend is relatively easy and trivial. To really grasp a position and the arguments involved in it is more difficult. But a philosopher must combine grasp and critical evaluation: for until we rethink every step critically we cannot fully comprehend what led a writer to go on as he did; what problems led him to develop his views; and what prompted later thinkers to differ with him.

¹⁰ “idea”: German, Gedanke; literally, “thought.” Translated as “idea” at this point because this is more idiomatic here.

¹¹ “the seriousness of the Concept”: der Ernst des Begriffs is one of Hegel’s famous phrases. For Begriff see note ³ above. This term is rendered, throughout this translation, as Concept—with a capital C to signal that Hegel uses this word as a technical term. Here, for example, “the seriousness of conceptual analysis” would be a little more idiomatic.

Some of the preceding might strike readers with no predilection for philosophy as an invitation to pedantry. But consider the Philistine who reads the final speech of Goethe’s Faust, in the fifth act of Part Two, and says: “I always knew that nothing good could come of boundless striving; one has to settle down to a job and do it well.” He has got hold of a “naked result” or a “lifeless generality.” Real comprehension depends on a grasp neither of the play without the last act, nor of the speech without the play, but of “the result together with its becoming.” (Cf. Hegel’s Jena aphorism #45 in Dok.) In the case of a philosophic position, too, the “becoming” involves not only the detailed arguments but also “the seriousness of life in its fullness” (Ernst des erfüllten Lebens). Yet this, however necessary, is not enough for philosophy which requires, “in addition to all this, the seriousness of the Concept.”

¹² The page number assigned to this heading in the original edition (vii) is clearly mistaken (vi must be meant); vii would move it down one paragraph.

¹³ Fichte already had spoken of his “exertions to elevate philosophy to a science,” on the second page of his preface to Sun-clear Report to the Public at Large about the True Nature of the Newest Philosophy: An attempt to compel the readers to understand (Berlin, 1801). “The time has come for”: an der Zeit ist; a common idiomatic expression that is ill rendered by Baillie’s “the time process does raise philosophy …”

1.2. Inner necessity that philosophy become scientific

In keeping with the preceding paragraph, Hegel proceeds to discuss, first, the “inner necessity” and then (1.3) the “external necessity.”

¹ “notion”: Vorstellung. This German word is usually rendered, by translators of Kant and Schopenhauer, as either “representation” or “idea.” The former is literally correct but often, as in the present context, exceedingly clumsy. “Idea,” on the other hand, is often needed to render the German Idee. An examination of all occurrences of Vorstellung in this long preface shows that Hegel generally means to suggest something vague and distinctly less scientific than a Concept. “Notion” seems just right.

² “intuition”: Anschauung. This translation seems firmly established in English translations of German philosophy; and according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, “intuition” means in “Mod. Philos. the immediate apprehension of an object by the mind without the intervention of any reasoning process.” This sense, which goes back to 1600, is exactly right here.

³ Mid-twentieth-century readers may associate this view with Paul Tillich, without realizing that Tillich wrote his doctoral dissertation on Schelling and owes much to German romanticism. Lasson, in 1907, associated the views criticized here with “Jacobi, the romantics, Schlegel, and Schleiermacher.”

⁴ “comprehended”: begriffen. “Concept”: Begriff.

⁵ “husks” (Treber) alludes to the parable of the prodigal son, Luke 15:16. Cf. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters (1795) : “Nature (sense) unifies everywhere, the understanding differentiates everywhere, but reason unifies again. Hence man, before he begins to philosophize, is closer to the truth than the philosopher who has not yet concluded his inquiry” (note to the 18th Letter). Hegel scorns those who, at the first differentiation when they find they are far from home, turn back instead of persevering, pushing on the inquiry, and comprehending the truth. In his opposition to Schwärmerei, the cult of feeling, and the inspirational philosophizing of the pious, Hegel does not pit reason against passion, or academic pedantry against deep experience; instead he questions the seriousness of the passion and the depth of the experience of the writers he criticizes: they run back home as soon as the going gets rough and hide their lack of strength in a mist of emotion.

⁶ “the feeling of the essence”: das Gefühl des Wesens. Baillie: “the feeling of existence.”

⁷ It is the beauty of Hegel’s criticisms that, though directed against some of his contemporaries, they are no less applicable to many well-known writers in other ages.

⁸ “sense”: the German in both places is Sinn; but Baillie has “sense” the first time and “mind and interest” the second, thus missing some of the contrast.

Hegel juxtaposes the otherworldliness of the past with the worldliness of the present.

Lasson has a note at the point where our ⁷ appears: “This description of the spiritual situation of the age corresponds to the section on the ‘unhappy consciousness,’” later in the book. But the immediately preceding sentence (split into two sentences in our translation) does not necessarily imply any otherworldliness: it might be applied, for example, to Jaspers and Tillich. Only the passage beginning “Formerly they had …” invites comparison with the “unhappy consciousness” (see H 33). On the whole, Lasson is a very helpful guide.

⁹ Hegel’s polemic against mere “edification” and the wish to...