Heidegger, Hegel, & the Completion of Western Metaphysics
Part 1

4,239 words

Every real philosopher is contemporaneous with every other philosopher, precisely by being, most intrinsically, the word of his time.
-Martin Heidegger[1]

Introducing Hegel

This essay, the first of several on Martin Heidegger and G.W.F. Hegel, constitutes a major milestone in my ongoing series about “Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics.” We began with Platonism, then treated the Middle Ages, the emergence of modernity, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling (with several essays devoted to some of these topics). With Hegel, we reach the end, the climax, or the completion, however one might like to put it, of Western metaphysics itself. This is how Heidegger saw Hegel – and, indeed, it is how Hegel saw himself. There is metaphysics after Hegel, but, as I shall discuss in more detail later on, most of it is either explicitly or implicitly reacting to him.

No list of “great philosophers” would be complete without Hegel’s name. He is seldom read, however, by anyone other than academic philosophers – and only by a minority of them. Unlike Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Descartes, Hume, and Rousseau, most of whose works can be read with profit by educated laypeople, the works of Hegel are forbiddingly obscure and difficult. Unlike Kant and Fichte, Hegel published no “popular works.” This reflects the increasing professionalization of philosophy in Hegel’s time.

Of the six “accessible” philosophers just mentioned – Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Descartes, Hume, and Rousseau – none was a university professor. From Kant onwards, almost everyone publishing philosophical works is a professional academic. Kant is the first important philosopher whose major works are largely indecipherable to non-philosophers. From Kant onwards, things get much worse, especially in Germany. The writings of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel are so difficult that many have accused them of deliberate obscurity. This objection is typically made, however, by readers who have failed to make much headway in understanding them. Only in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is there an elegant and relatively clear prose style – and both men abandoned academic careers.

Nevertheless, though Hegel is dauntingly difficult, one cannot understand the modern world without confronting his ideas. This is the case for several reasons. As my epigraph states, every philosopher is the “word of his time.” Heidegger is speaking, but Hegel would agree. Hegel’s philosophy must be understood as an expression not just of his time but of the high-water mark of modernity itself. Further, Hegel’s influence is extensive and extraordinarily important. He is unique in having influenced both the political Left and Right. Without Hegel there would have been no Marx, but there would also have been no “neo-conservatism.” Positivism and Existentialism too would have been impossible without Hegel.

To appreciate Hegel, one must make a distinction between his ideas and his writings. Both are difficult, but the ideas are genuinely sublime. Hegel is the creator of a philosophical system that is astonishing complex and intricate. Philosophy, as classically understood, is “the love of wisdom” and wisdom is “knowledge of the whole.” Hegel’s system is a complete speech of the whole, and thus presents itself as the completion of the philosophic quest – a matter which, as we will explore later, Hegel makes surprisingly explicit.

Hegel offers us a “theory of everything” that is breathtakingly comprehensive – and highly plausible. Yet this grand theory is expressed in prose that is maddeningly turgid and opaque. As a result of this, most readers first explore Hegel through commentaries that claim to explain his ideas in more accessible language. There are many such commentaries and some of them are excellent. There is no shame for the beginner in consulting such books. Ideally, one should try to read Hegel along with a commentary – and read more than one commentary as, needless to say, the interpretations of scholars differ.

Hegel’s life, in the main, is a typical academic curriculum vitae: his education (at the Tübingen theological seminary, where he was roommates with F.W.J. Schelling and Friedrich Hölderlin), followed by a period of penury and academic nomadism (when Hegel worked as a private tutor, headmaster of a Gymnasium, and even a newspaper editor), then a series of university appointments of increasing prestige, culminating in the call to teach in Berlin, where he died in 1831 at the age of sixty-one (not of cholera, as has been claimed, but of an acute gastrointestinal ailment). There are only a few exciting and colorful episodes in Hegel’s life – such as his completing The Phenomenology of Spirit on the eve of the battle of Jena, and his siring an illegitimate child with his landlady.

One is tempted to sum up Hegel’s life as Heidegger summed up the life of another great philosopher: “Aristotle was born, he worked, he died.”[2] With philosophers, all that really matters are the ideas. In dealing with those ideas, I will not be discussing, except briefly and only in passing, Hegel’s intellectual development. I will also not dwell on the topic of influences on Hegel. Those interested in the relationship of Hegel’s thought to that of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling are invited to read the essays I have already published on those thinkers, and to draw their own conclusions.

Hegel’s System and Heidegger’s Response

I will take the reader on a tour of Hegel’s philosophical system, exactly as a tour guide might – lingering only briefly on each part of the system, then herding everyone back onto the bus and moving on, lest we get behind schedule and fail to reach our destination (which, as it turns out, will be the point from which we began). As I have said, Hegel’s philosophy is a complete speech of the whole. We cannot cover everything in detail, so I will focus the tour in the following way: we will concentrate on Hegel’s ontology, his theory of what being is. This makes sense, given that my intention is to introduce readers to Hegel as seen through the eyes of Heidegger, whose commentaries on Hegel are insightful but, ultimately, critical.

To treat Hegel’s ontology means, chiefly, dealing with his Logic, in which the topic of being is discussed explicitly. But it also means covering the system as a whole, since it can be argued that the entire Hegelian system constitutes an ontology (as I will explain in detail later). To cover the system as a whole means to give the reader an overall sense of its scope – what, in basic terms, transpires in each division of Hegel’s philosophy, without going into detail about each of those divisions (which would require a substantial book-length treatment). Heidegger states that “a fundamental confrontation with Hegel’s philosophy can be achieved only in a way that follows every step of Hegel’s thinking in every area of his system.”[3] This is correct, but we can only begin to approach such a confrontation here. On our tour of the system, we will explore how Heidegger interprets Hegel. In the final installment, we will deal with Heidegger’s criticisms.

Heidegger lectured a number of times on Hegel but published rather little on him. In 1925-1926, he taught a seminar on Hegel’s Logic. In 1929, he taught a lecture course on German idealism generally, focusing mainly on Fichte. This course was published in 1997, though to my knowledge it has not been translated into English. At the same time, Heidegger taught a seminar on the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. In 1930-1931, he delivered lectures on further parts of the Phenomenology. These lectures have been translated into English as Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

In 1934-1935, Heidegger taught the Philosophy of Right (translated and published as On Hegel’s Philosophy of Right). In 1938-1941 and in 1942 Heidegger produced two fragmentary treatises on Hegel, chiefly dealing with the Phenomenology. These were published posthumously and translated into English under the title Hegel. We should also mention three widely read essays by Heidegger, published during his lifetime, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience” (1950), “The Onto-theological Constitution of Metaphysics” (1957), and “Hegel and the Greeks” (1958). My essays will draw upon a number of these texts.

Having now given a sense of Heidegger’s treatment of Hegel over the years, let us turn to a brief overview of Hegel’s major works, and the chief divisions of his system of philosophy. Hegel’s most famous and most commented upon work is The Phenomenology of Spirit. When that work was published in 1807, its full title was System of Science. Part One. The Phenomenology of Spirit. The second part of the system was to be a single volume containing, as Hegel himself announced, “the system of logic as speculative philosophy, and the remaining two parts of philosophy, the sciences of nature and of spirit.”[4] Instead, in the years 1812-1816, Hegel brought out The Science of Logic in two volumes. The title System of Science does not appear in these.

In 1817, Hegel published The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline. Hegel prepared this work as a textbook for use in his lectures, and he considerably expanded its content in later editions. It consists of relatively short, numbered paragraphs, which are often highly obscure. After Hegel’s death, editors inserted extracts from the notebooks of his students after each paragraph of the text. The students had endeavored to take verbatim notes, and these serve as invaluable explanatory material, without which much of the Encyclopedia would be scarcely intelligible.

The Encyclopedia consists of three divisions. The first is a truncated version of The Science of Logic. The other two divisions are the Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Spirit. The Encyclopedia thus corresponds to what Hegel had intended to be the second volume of the System of Science. However, Hegel does not refer to it as such and, once again, the title System of Science is dropped entirely. In later years, Hegel spoke of his philosophical system as comprising exclusively the divisions Logic-Nature-Spirit. The Phenomenology is then treated merely as “preparatory” for the system (in a manner we will consider later). But it is not even clear if in later years Hegel considered the Phenomenology to be a necessary part of his philosophy at all.

Heidegger makes a lot of hay out of these changes in plan. He refers, justifiably, to two Hegelian systems, what he calls the “Phenomenology-system,” which incorporates the Phenomenology as its first part, and the “Encyclopedia-system,” in which the Phenomenology is effectively excluded from the system proper.[5] However, it must be emphasized that the only significant difference between the “two systems” is the presence, or absence of the Phenomenology. Later editions of the Phenomenology would drop the designation System of Science. First Part.

In addition to the Phenomenology, Science of Logic, and Encyclopedia, the only other book-length work Hegel published during his lifetime was The Philosophy of Right (1820), which contains his mature moral and political philosophy. After Hegel’s death, a number of his lecture courses were published. These include the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Lectures on Aesthetics, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, and Lectures on the History of Philosophy. These are quite substantial texts. Because they were intended to be delivered to an audience, Hegel’s prose style in these lectures is much more accessible than that of the works he prepared for publication. This makes the lectures the best place to begin in trying to read Hegel. He also produced article-length works throughout his lifetime, which are of varying degrees of difficulty.

Trust the Science

Though Hegel changed the structure of his system, he did not abandon the idea that what he was presenting was “science.” To our ears, it certainly sounds strange to designate philosophy as “science,” but there are good reasons for this – reasons both cultural and philosophical. The German Wissenschaft has a broader connotation than English “science.” Wissenschaft essentially refers to any kind of academic study that is rigorous and systematic. By contrast, when English speakers refer to “science” they are often thinking exclusively of the natural sciences – which is exactly why it sounds strange to us to refer to a philosophy as “scientific”.

We tend to think, in fact, that it is only the natural sciences that are truly “scientific,” because we think it is only the natural sciences that are “objective.” In response to this, we can make the obvious point that mathematics is not a natural science, but it is far more rigorous and far less vulnerable to infection by “the subjective” than are the natural sciences. To understand Hegel – and, indeed, the discipline of philosophy as a whole – we need to be open to the possibility that philosophy can be rigorous and objective as well.

Hegel takes over the idea of philosophy as science from J.G. Fichte, who titled his major work The Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre). Or, more accurately, he took over the idea of philosophy becoming science. Hegel announces this agenda in the famous “Preface” to the Phenomenology, when he writes, “The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of such truth. To help bring philosophy closer to the form of science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual knowing – that is what I have set myself to do.”[6]

Heidegger sees this “scientization” of philosophy as the outcome of a major cultural shift. From the ancient world to the Renaissance, there had been no sharp distinction made between philosophy and science (consider, for example, the older term for physics, still sometimes used at the beginning of the twentieth century: “natural philosophy”). Frequently, philosophers were also scientists, or vice versa. An obvious example of this would be Aristotle, who produced both philosophical works, and works we would recognize as belonging to the natural sciences. All of this, you see, was “the love of wisdom,” and lovers of wisdom were expected to be polymaths.

In the modern period, however, philosophy and science began to diverge. This is due in large measure to the fact that the individual disciplines within the natural scientific part of philosophy greatly expanded in scope and complexity due to the successes of the empirical method. At a certain point, the sciences became so complex and required so much preparation in order to master, it became impossible for one individual to become thoroughly conversant with every area. Thus, one by one, the sciences established themselves as disciplines independent of philosophy. With seemingly every area of the universe now being studied by the individual sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology, etc.) philosophy underwent an identity crisis.

Gradually, the idea developed that philosophy could be, in effect, a science of science – a kind of “super science” or, as Heidegger puts it, “the science.” Heidegger writes as follows,

This concept of philosophy as the science became increasingly dominant from the nineteenth century to the present. This took place, not on the basis of the inner wealth and original impulses of philosophizing, but rather . . . out of perplexity over the proper task of philosophy. It appears to have been deprived of this perplexity because the sciences have occupied all fields of reality. Thus nothing was left for philosophy except to become the science of these sciences, a task which was taken up with increasing confidence, since it seemed to have the support of Kant, Descartes, and even Plato.[7]

What does it mean for philosophy to become “the science of these sciences”? In the hands of different modern philosophers, it means different things – but this conception of philosophy as a super science is nevertheless to be found in all quarters: in the idealism of the nineteenth century, and even in the logical positivism of the twentieth, which was a reaction against idealism. In Hegel, philosophy is a super science because it provides a rigorous framework of ideas in terms of which the findings of the sciences can be interpreted and integrated. It provides, in other words, a complete perspective on reality that unifies the sciences in terms of certain key ideas, and shows how their findings are intelligible in terms of their place within a theory of the whole.

No one of the sciences provides such an all-encompassing perspective on science. Indeed, none of the sciences even studies what science is. Biology and astronomy, for example, do not study science as such; instead, they study, respectively, life forms and the heavenly bodies. Each of the sciences proceeds from certain given theoretical and methodological assumptions that are usually never called into question by the science itself. In today’s Anglo-American philosophy, examining those assumptions is usually understood to be the task of “philosophy of science.” But, in a certain way, Hegel’s entire philosophy can be understood as “philosophy of science,” for the simple reason that it provides an interpretation and synthesis of all areas of human knowledge. This includes areas that cannot, in principle, be treated by the natural sciences and thus are usually understood today to be the “branches of philosophy”: logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics.

The “method” Hegel uses to arrive at his theory of everything is not empirical – nevertheless it is, he claims, rigorous and deductive. Indeed, he claims that his philosophy delivers “Absolute Knowledge” (absolute Wissen). Contrary to the assertions of his critics, however, there is no disconnect in Hegel between philosophy and the empirical sciences. As I have said, his philosophy provides a framework in which scientific findings are intelligible and take on a larger significance. Further, in developing that framework, Hegel very frequently draws upon the science of his time, in which he was extremely well versed. Hegel is one of the last of the true polymaths.

The claim of Hegelianism to be a science of the sciences should not be taken lightly or dismissed out of hand. In the last century, the neo-Hegelian Errol E. Harris, produced several works arguing, with great plausibility, that it was only a Hegelian metaphysics that could make sense out of relativity theory and quantum theory – as well as modern biology and cognitive science.[8]

Hegel’s Legacy

After Hegel’s death, his followers seemed to divide into two political camps, referred to by many as the “Right Hegelians” and “Left Hegelians.” Whether Hegel was a man of the Right or the Left is a difficult question to answer, in part because the meaning of these terms has changed over time. For example, it is unheard of today for a man of the Left to be a nationalist, but in the nineteenth century this was very common (Wagner is a notable example). The truth is that, in the main, Hegel looks to us today primarily like a man of the Right, and it does appear that his outlook became more conservative over time. As a young man, he was an enthusiastic admirer of the French Revolution, and though he never really lost his romantic attachment to its ideals, no one could possibly misread the standpoint of The Philosophy of Right as radicalism.

We can pass over the Right Hegelians in silence, as they are hardly remembered today. It was the Left Hegelians, better known as the “Young Hegelians,” who made a lasting impact. They included Ludwig Feuerbach and, most notoriously, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Some of today’s anglophone conservatives ignorantly dismiss Hegel because of his association with Marx. Undeniably, Marx was influenced by Hegel. But Marx was a vulgar interpreter of Hegel’s ideas, and his own philosophy bears little resemblance to the master’s. Indeed, the contrast between Marx’s ideas and the standpoint of Hegel’s mature political thought could not be greater.

In Britain in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Hegel’s influence gave rise to a philosophical school that came to be known as “British Idealism.” The major thinkers in this camp include F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, T.H. Green, and J. M. E. McTaggart. In the following century, this movement inspired a reaction against idealism on the part of thinkers like Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (who was born in Austria, but settled in the UK). It was principally these men who gave rise to the movement known as “analytic philosophy,” which aimed to solve philosophical problems through an analysis of language and eschewed grand systematic philosophizing.

On the Continent, a similar reaction was brewing against Hegelianism in the form of the so-called Vienna Circle, which included figures like Moritz Schlick, Hans Reichenbach, Carl Hempel, Rudolf Carnap, and Otto Neurath. These men gave us “logical positivism.” In a move to forever exorcise the spirit of Hegel, the positivists established the “verification criterion of meaning,” which declares that a statement is meaningful if and only if it is empirically verifiable or expresses a logical or mathematical truth (such as “~~ P = P” or “2 + 2 = 4”). All statements that do not satisfy these requirements the positivists declared meaningless. This included, or so they thought, almost every statement ever made by Hegel.

Unfortunately, as the American idealist Brand Blanshard pointed out, the positivists failed to notice that their own criterion is neither empirically verifiable nor is it a logical or mathematical truth. Thus, according to the criterion itself, as a statement the criterion is meaningless. Logical positivism was dead by the 1960s, but by the time it breathed its last positivism and analytic philosophy had coalesced to form the particular “style” of philosophy that is still loosely called “analytic philosophy” today. This approach subsequently came to dominate both British and American universities. Because it almost immediately devolved into dry-as-dust nitpicking over artificial problems with no relevance to human life, analytic philosophy has succeeded in putting off several generations of British and American undergraduates from studying the discipline entirely.

A very different reaction against Hegelianism was the movement that came to be known as “Existentialism.” The Dane Søren Kierkegaard was the pioneering figure here. His 1846 work Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments argued that the Hegelian system rides roughshod over the individual. In opposition to Hegelian Absolute Knowledge, Kierkegaard championed the subjectivity of truth. The leading exponent of Existentialism in the twentieth century was Jean-Paul Sartre, who was strongly influenced by both Hegel and Heidegger.

Even Hegel’s erstwhile friend and former mentor F.W.J. Schelling can be counted as part of the reaction against him. Five years younger than his former schoolmate, Schelling outlived him by twenty-three years, dying in 1854. After Hegel’s demise, Schelling was invited to lecture in Berlin, reputedly at the behest of government officials anxious to counteract the influence of Hegelianism. In Berlin, Schelling presented his new and improved system of philosophy in opposition to Hegel’s and engaged in a bitter polemic against him. Kierkegaard attended Schelling’s lectures but does not seem to have been much influenced by them in his own position.

In the 1930s, the Russian-born philosopher Alexandre Kojève delivered a series of highly influential lectures on Hegel in Paris. These were attended by a veritable who’s-who of French intellectuals, including Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, André Breton, Jacques Lacan, Raymond Aron, and Raymond Queneau. Kojève’s lectures (portions of which were later published) are notorious for attributing to Hegel the position that history ended with the coming into being of the liberal democratic state.

This thesis, which has been hotly contested by other Hegel scholars, was primarily responsible for the birth of the neoconservative movement. It is now most closely associated with Francis Fukuyama, whose bestselling 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man was heavily influenced by Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel. Along with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dan Quayle and others, Fukuyama was one of the signatories of the “Statement of Principles” of the neoconservative thinktank Project for the New American Century. As my readers may know, this group helped mastermind the Iraq War, which they justified by appeal to the supposed historical inevitability of the spread of American-style democracy. For better or for worse, Hegel’s influence continues to directly impact our lives.

Indeed, virtually every major intellectual movement since Hegel has been reacting to him, in one way or another. Most have reacted negatively. They have tried to “correct” him or, more often, to overthrow his philosophy entirely. As Heidegger notes, however, this is not due to some kind of failing on Hegel’s part. Heidegger writes that “it is not that Hegel’s philosophy has broken down. Rather, his contemporaries and successors have not ever yet stood up so that they could be measured against his greatness. People managed to ‘stand up’ to him only by staging a mutiny.”[9] And, in another text, Heidegger states that it is the task of philosophy “to confront Hegel.”[10]

The reason Heidegger makes these claims is that, as noted earlier, he believes that Hegel’s philosophy constitutes the completion of Western metaphysics. Specifically in the area of metaphysics, the fundamental branch of philosophy, there may be nothing left to do except to either run with Hegel’s ideas, or react against them. This is not the same thing as saying, however, that Hegel completes philosophy as such.

Exactly why does Heidegger think that Hegel brings an end to Western metaphysics? We will begin to answer that question in our next installment.

Notes

[1] Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 32. (Henceforth, HPOS.)

[2] Quoted in Heidegger, HPOS, x.

[3] Heidegger, Hegel, trans. Joseph Arel and Niels Feuerhahn (Bloomington, IN: Indian University Press, 2015), 5.

[4] Quoted in Heidegger, Hegel, 52.

[5] See especially Heidegger, HPOS, 2-9. See also Heidegger, Hegel, 51-55.

[6] G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A.V. Miller, 1977), 3.

[7] Heidegger, HPOS, 10.

[8] See Errol E. Harris, The Foundations of Metaphysics in Science (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993; originally published 1965). See also Harris, Cosmos and Anthropos (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1991); and Harris, Cosmos and Theos (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992).

[9] Heidegger, HPOS, 40.

[10] Quoted in Heidegger, Hegel, ix.