Heidegger, Hegel, & the Completion of Western Metaphysics
Part 5

5,521 words

Parts 1-4 here

Absolute Knowing and History

In our last installment, we completed our brief overview of The Phenomenology of Spirit, and we are now ready to turn to Hegel’s philosophical system proper, for which the Phenomenology provides a kind of introduction. First, however, we must consider some crucial points of interpretation, which have vexed many readers of Hegel.

We have seen that the Phenomenology culminates in a description of absolute knowing. This is the standpoint from which the system will be derived. Absolute knowing is knowing the Absolute, or the whole – but to know the whole is to know that it has its being in and by means of its crowning achievement, the development within it of human subjectivity. We said further that as knowledge of the Absolute, absolute knowing knows the one, true individual (of which all others are mere moments) with perfect completeness in direct, unmediated fashion.

There is one characteristic of absolute knowing, however, that we have so far not discussed. To call this knowing “absolute” would seem to suggest that it is absolutely, timelessly true, or certain. This is quite correct; Hegel does make this claim for absolute knowing – or for his philosophy, since, as we have discussed, Hegel uses “absolute knowing” as a synonym for philosophy. Most people who have little acquaintance with philosophy probably think that all philosophers have declared that they have achieved absolute truth. This is very far from being the case, however. Plato and Aristotle knew what absolute truth would be, if it could be found, but they never declared that their philosophies were absolutely true. One doesn’t find such claims, in fact, until the modern period, where they coincide with the rise of rationalism.

Philosophers like Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz attempted to create philosophies on the model of mathematical systems in which ideas were logically deduced from basic and unchallengeable first principles. The most elaborate example of this is Spinoza, but Descartes is probably more familiar to my readers. He seeks a foundation for philosophy that is indubitable – i.e., absolutely true – and finds it, significantly, in his consciousness that he thinks, which in turn proves that he exists (for there cannot be thinking without a thinker). The rest of his philosophy is “derived” from this basic truth (rather imperfectly, as critics have always noted). Thus, since all claims are derived from one that is one hundred percent certain, Descartes could claim that the entire philosophy is certain, though he does not do so.

So far as I know, Fichte was the first to strongly imply that his philosophical system was absolutely true, and he does so by referring to it as “science” (Wissenschaft) rather than “philosophy,” where science is understood more along the lines of mathematics than the empirical sciences. (Despite their claims to have left rationalism, then often called “dogmatism,” behind, there is a strong rationalist influence in all German idealism from Kant to Hegel.) Hegel follows Fichte in this practice, initially referring to his entire philosophy as The System of Science. (Hegel’s use of the term “science” was discussed extensively in part one of this series.) As we will see, the standpoint of the Hegelian system is fundamentally Cartesian, in that it begins with a suspension of belief in any determinate being whatsoever, and then winds up, in effect, affirming “I think” not only as an indubitable truth and as the foundation for philosophy, but as the foundation or organizing principle for existence itself.

Hegel does indeed make clear, in countless ways, that the truth of absolute knowing is absolute and timeless truth. And this means that Hegel’s system completes the philosophical quest for wisdom – which is precisely the point of calling it “science” rather than philosophy. Heidegger remarks on the significance of this claim as follows:

The singularity of Hegel’s philosophy consists primarily in the fact that there is no longer a higher standpoint of self-consciousness of spirit beyond it. Thus any future, still higher standpoint over against it, which would be superordinate to Hegel’s system – in the manner by which Hegel’s philosophy for its part and in accord with its point of view had to subordinate every previous philosophy – is once and for all impossible.[1]

Yet, simultaneously, Hegel is also famous as the first philosopher to emphasize the historicity of knowledge. As we have discussed previously, all standpoints of spirit in the Phenomenology, prior to absolute knowing, are forms of knowledge or culture that prove to be untenable. Though this material is not presented by Hegel in chronological order, much of what he discusses are recognizable historical phenomena.

At the very end of the Phenomenology, Hegel states that these forms of spirit “regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is history; but regarded from the side of their [philosophically] comprehended organization, it is the science of knowing in the sphere of appearance” (i.e., The Phenomenology of Spirit).[2] Thus, what a written history would present in the form of first this, then this, then this . . . is presented in a systematic order (based on inherent relations of ideas) in the Phenomenology. The Phenomenology is not a history of spirit, but a natural history.

Hegel recognizes that spirit develops, and that certain beliefs or cultural forms, however imperfect, were necessary in their own time. And he recognizes that in those periods, the imperfections of these beliefs or cultural forms were generally not perceived. Indeed, throughout most of its existence, spirit has not recognized its true nature, and has been, in effect, continuously misled. Hegel thus affirms what is a truism in scholarship today, which is the historical and cultural situatedness of knowledge. Heidegger most definitely endorses this view. And for both Hegel and Heidegger, it applies to philosophy as well. In a late work, Hegel writes that,

As far as the individual is concerned, each individual is in any case a child of his time; thus philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts. It is just as foolish to imagine that any philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as that an individual can overleap his own time or leap over [the gigantic statue of] Rhodes.[3]

But if this was his belief, how then can Hegel claim to have presented us with timeless, absolute truth? Some commentators have seen this as a tremendous inconsistency in Hegel, but this is to completely miss one of the most important and unusual claims in his philosophy. The apparent contradiction is resolved as follows. Hegel does see his own system as historically situated, as expressing its own time in thought, but he believes that he lives in what we could call the “absolute time,” when the final truth about human nature has been revealed, for all who have eyes to see.

No, he is not claiming that this “final truth” is his own philosophy, though his philosophy will give expression to it. No, the final truth is the realization, in Hegel’s own time, that human spirit is radically free and self-determining. It is the purpose of the Phenomenology to argue that this final truth has now been revealed to humanity. The Phenomenology, as we have seen, is an account of spirit overcoming its own self-limiting forms and arriving at a standpoint from which true self-awareness is possible. It is easy to see that this is simultaneously the process by which spirit becomes genuinely free. If we lack self-consciousness, if we lack awareness of who we really are and what we are capable of, it is impossible truly to become who we are. Hegel makes this point as follows:

The most important point for the nature of spirit is not only the relation of what it is in itself to what it is actually, but the relation of what it knows itself to be to what it actually is; because spirit is essentially consciousness, this self-knowing is a fundamental determination of its actuality.[4]

Human beings are unique in having history. Bears, giraffes, and rhododendrons have no history: they have lived and behaved exactly the same way for thousands of years. What creates human history and causes continued, significant change in how we live our lives is just the achievement of progressively greater awareness of our capacity for freedom. This consists, essentially, in our capacity to be self-creating. Hegel believes that human beings do have an essence, but that it is only actual in its manifestations – in other words, in what human beings make of themselves. “Spirit’s acts,” he writes, “are of an essential nature; it makes itself in reality what it already is in itself, and is therefore its own deed or creation. In this way, it becomes its own object, and has its own existence before it.”[5]

One commentator explains Hegel’s position as follows:

For Hegel, there is no given, immutable human self, no ‘entity’ called the self which would be available for scientific scrutiny. There is only the human activity of producing our world, of producing or determining different forms of social life from different forms of philosophical, religious, aesthetic or ethical self-understanding. But, for Hegel, that activity of historical self-production, self-construction and self-determination is thus what we are. It is the universal form of all human activity, of all human life. Different cultures differ only in the degree to which they are conscious of themselves as self-productive and self-determining, that is, only in the degree to which they are explicitly, self-consciously and thus freely self-determining.[6]

Hegel believes that he is living in the time in which human beings have come finally to realize that they are self-determining. It is here that we are tempted to declare that Hegel was very clearly a product of his time. Born in 1770, he came of age during the Enlightenment and was, along with his schoolmates, an enthusiastic supporter of the ideals of the French Revolution (which began in May of 1789, when Hegel was eighteen years old). One could arrive at no better encapsulation of the ethos of the Revolution than Hegel’s claim that man’s true nature is to be self-creating. (Incidentally, Hegel inherits this idea from Fichte, who was an enthusiastic Jacobin.) We must reiterate, though, that Hegel believes the Phenomenology conclusively demonstrates that the truth about human freedom is revealed in his own time. It is thus no use to object to this by declaring Hegel a “product of his time.” He would enthusiastically endorse that claim – indeed, that is his whole point!

Nevertheless, Hegel also insists that the modern, Western conviction that all human beings are free and self-determining was first revealed through the Christian teaching that all men are equal in the sight of God. In other words, the Christian teaching about human equality bears within it an implication that is later revealed by philosophy. This is a perfect example of Hegel’s belief (discussed at length in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion) that religion, in addition to philosophy, is another form in which truth is revealed to humanity (though philosophy, for Hegel, is the higher form).

Further, we should be more precise and say that in the modern age Hegel believes we have discovered that all human beings are in principle free and self-determining. Hegel does not mean that all human beings, right now, are aware that they are self-determining. And if awareness that one is self-determining (self-consciousness, in other words) is a necessary condition of being self-determining, then this means that not all, right now, are truly free. Nevertheless, they are free “in themselves” – potentially free, in other words, and they can, in principle, come to realize this. Hegel believes, in fact, that it is only Europeans that have achieved the realization that all men are free, because Europe is Christendom and, as we have said, ultimately this realization was made possible by Christianity.

Despite the claims of some Left-leaning scholars, Hegel never unequivocally states that non-Europeans will somehow inevitably arrive at the realization that they are self-determining. There are notorious discussions of racial and national differences in Hegel’s writings which strongly suggest that he held out little hope that all peoples would ever recognize that “all are free.” (Another Counter-Currents author, Derek Hawthorne, has discussed these matters in his very interesting essay “Nationalism and Racialism in German Philosophy.”)

In sum, Hegel believes that he can deliver the absolute truth of absolute knowing because he is living at a time and place where the absolute truth has been revealed to mankind. Absolute knowing, as an absolute self-consciousness that sees itself as the telos of existence itself, is also an absolute freedom, given that human freedom is nothing other than human self-consciousness. Hegel’s philosophy is thus situated in history, just like all previous philosophy. But it also transcends history because it conveys an absolute truth the revelation of which was the entire purpose or end-goal of history itself.

The End of History?

This position has a very important implication. If the discovery that we are radically free and self-determining was the goal of history, and if we have now achieved that goal, doesn’t this mean that history is done? Yes, it would seem to mean that. Indeed, the conclusion is well-nigh inescapable. The so-called “end of history” thesis in Hegel is notorious for a couple of reasons. First, the claim that history is now “over” is audacious and seems, at first glance, to be absurd. How can history be “over”? Didn’t we just re-elect Donald Trump, and isn’t that a “historical event”? We will see what Hegel’s answer to this would be in a moment.

The second reason for the notoriety of the “end of history” thesis is its association, in the twentieth century, with certain political movements. As I noted in part one of this series, the thesis was popularized in the 1930s by the Russian-born philosopher Alexandre Kojève in a series of highly influential lectures on Hegel delivered in Paris. Kojève formulated Hegel’s position as the thesis that history had ended with the coming into being of liberal, democratic states (which recognize that “all are free”). This claim proved to be extraordinarily influential on globalist, neoliberal, and neoconservative thinkers. Among other things, some of them justified American adventures abroad by claiming that the worldwide establishment of American-style liberal democratic states was historically inevitable (a claim Hegel himself never would have made, and which has more in common with Marx’s understanding of history).

Kojève’s spin on Hegel was popularized in neocon Francis Fukuyama’s bestselling 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. Because of this association, Hegel scholars, most of whom are liberals, tend to resist the claim that Hegel believed in an “end of history.” As one of them put it to me, “there is a consummation of history in Hegel, but not an end.” However, this is nothing but semantics. It is undeniable that Hegel’s position implies that history has achieved its purpose and is therefore in some sense “at an end.”

But, to return to an objection voiced a moment ago, how can history be over if events continue to occur? After all, since Hegel’s time we have had numerous wars, including two world wars, the rise and fall of Communism, the moon landing, and much else. This objection, however, fundamentally misunderstands Hegel’s point. The “end of history” does not mean that nothing is ever going to happen again. Nevertheless, the major goal of history has been accomplished. All our wars and conflicts, including our intellectual conflicts, have resulted in our now possessing the answer to the most important question of human existence: “who are we?” (or “what are we?”).

In comparison, no other issues are really of intrinsic importance. There is thus nothing major left to be settled by us now. There are still going to be holdouts: people who either do not know that they are free or who react against the idea of universal freedom. And we are going to have conflicts with these people, and they will fight amongst themselves. However, these will be conflicts moved by mere ignorance, not conflicts in which anything of importance is actually settled. Because, once again, the truth about ourselves is no longer an issue that needs to be settled. We can also expect that the perennial human dark side will still display itself: individuals, and whole societies, may act out of greed, malice, or jealousy. Murders will be committed. Banks will be robbed. But nothing fundamentally new and important is going to happen. Now that the eternal questions of human existence have been solved, we will simply exist. We will live our lives, in the light of true knowledge about who and what we are. This is the sense in which history has “ended” for Hegel.

Of course, these ideas raise many questions, and in a later installment we will turn to a critical appraisal of Hegel’s ideas (primarily from a Heideggerean perspective). But we can mention a few questions here. Is it really true that human nature is radically free and self-determining? As noted, Hegel was living at a time when Enlightenment optimism was in full career (though it was opposed by a “Counter Enlightenment” with which Hegel was quite familiar). Are Hegel’s views on freedom a naïve product of the Enlightenment? Is it true that nothing fundamental is left to be discovered about ourselves? Is it true that nothing that has happened since the late eighteenth century is fundamentally new and important? But there are even deeper and more basic philosophical questions that must be asked.

Why does Hegel conceive consciousness as “oppositional,” as involving an opposition between a subject and an object? Heidegger would argue that this oppositional paradigm is fundamental to modern (and only modern) conceptions of consciousness – and fundamentally mistaken. Hegel, of course, does try to overcome this opposition dialectically. But it remains the case that the entire philosophy is predicated on the idea that subjectivity seeks to cancel the opposition of the object, a cancellation that only happens when we engage in absolute knowing and see human subjectivity as the being of the object.

But, in the end, is this idea of subjectivity as telos of existence an unacceptable anthropocentrism? Does it wind up disconnecting us from nature, rather than connecting us, as Hegel believed? If I insist on seeing myself in nature, everywhere I look, am I setting myself up to miss what is radically other? Hegel would claim that there is no such thing, and that nature really is “only the mirror of ourselves.”[7] But suppose this isn’t true, and suppose that failing to see this not only makes us blind to certain aspects of nature, but even blind to our own nature. Suppose that the whole drift of the Enlightenment toward seeing ourselves as radically free and self-determining has actually made true human self-knowledge impossible. Let us leave these questions for another time, however, and venture deeper into the Hegelian terrain.

Introducing the Logic

Needless to say, there are many passages in Hegel in which he reflects on the structure of his philosophical system. Most of these are terse and more than a little opaque. Here is a typical one:

Hence, the science falls into three parts:

I. The Logic, the science of the Idea in and for itself.
II. The Philosophy of Nature, as the science of the Idea in its otherness.
III. The Philosophy of Spirit, as the Idea that returns into itself out of its otherness.[8]

The following would be a reasonable gloss on this passage. The Logic presents us with the idea of the whole, with the pure idea of the Absolute alone – or, in the terminology of the Logic, “Absolute Idea” or simply “Idea.”[9] The Philosophy of Nature shows how all of nature is intelligible in terms of Idea. To speak the figurative language of Hegelian philosophy, nature is the “embodiment” of Idea. Philosophy of Spirit shows how spirit (which is us) emerges from nature and comprehends nature and itself – precisely through comprehending both in terms of Idea.[10] Thus, the system is a circle, and the highest level of spirit, absolute spirit, returns to the beginning in knowing the Logic. The reader may rest assured that we will expand upon this short summary in due course.

Hegel presents his Logic in two forms. In the years 1812-1816, Hegel brought out The Science of Logic, in two large volumes. In 1817, he published The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, which contains a greatly compressed version of the content of The Science of Logic. The Encyclopedia presents an outline of Hegel’s philosophical system, and the first third is devoted to Logic. Scholars often refer to these two texts as the “Greater Logic” and “Lesser Logic,” but more often as The Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia Logic (which, like the Encyclopedia material on Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit, has been published in a stand-alone volume incorporating notes taken by Hegel’s students). When I refer to the Logic, I am usually referring to the Greater Logic. In an introduction such as this, I will, however, draw on both, and will not concern myself with differences between the two texts.

If you open a copy of Hegel’s Science of Logic (which runs to more than 800 pages in English translation) you will find little in it that looks like the logic you studied in school. It is not a logic textbook, though it does, in fact, deal with Aristotelian logic in its third and final major division. The vast majority of the Logic, however, looks nothing at all like “logic.” Why, then, did Hegel choose this title? The plausible answer, which can help illuminate the book’s content, has to do with the derivation of “logic” from the Greek logos. The history of this term is very complex. It is associated with the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, with the Stoics, with Christian theology, with Neoplatonism, and with Gnosticism. Its Greek meanings include “word,” “speech,” “reason,” and “account.”

With the Stoics, the logos signified an objective reason inherent in nature. It will immediately be seen that this is rather close to what we have said about the relation of Hegelian logic to nature: nature is an expression of the Idea. We might also think of the opening words of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the word [logos], and the word was with God, and the word was God.” Hegel could not have failed to make this connection himself. In the beginning (of the Hegelian system) is the word –the speech of the Idea that is Idea of nature – and this word, this Idea, is God.

Hegel maintains that “God” is the Absolute or Absolute Idea rendered in the representational, or “picture thinking” language of religion. Famously, Hegel states in The Science of Logic that his subject matter is “truth as it is without veil and in its own absolute nature. It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite spirit.”[11] This is Hegel stating his point in figurative language – in the language of religion and mysticism. The main thing that can lead us astray here, as well as in the parallel we have drawn to John 1:1, is the suggestion that Idea is temporally prior to nature and spirit. In fact, Hegel holds only that Idea is logically prior. In a sense, nature and spirit “presuppose” idea.

Idea is not a disembodied Platonic idea existing in a separate metaphysical realm “prior” to nature. Instead, Hegel takes a position that is, broadly speaking, Aristotelean: Idea is real, but it has no existence apart from its embodiment in nature. Idea can be thought apart from nature, but it cannot exist apart. This might lead us to believe that Idea exists in our minds alone, but Hegel rejects this. When we think the Idea, we are not thinking something that is our creation; it is not a subjective idea, in other words, and it does not exist solely in individual minds. If you find this point difficult to swallow, just consider something we all learned in school: the Pythagorean theorem. The theorem itself is an idea (a concept, a formula) but it was not created by us, it was discovered. Nothing about it is subjective: the Pythagorean theorem is exactly the same for me as it is for you. Because it states a fact of reality (that a² + b² = c²) it was true before anyone knew about it, will be true long after we are dead, and is true in all cultures. It is true on the earth and it is true on Mars. It is eternally and universally true. It is, in short, an objective idea.

The Idea of the Logic is just such an objective idea – as are all the ideas of the Logic, because Absolute Idea is preceded by a vast tapestry of ideas which are its “provisional definitions.” If these ideas are real, objective entities, then the Logic begins to seem an awful lot like a metaphysics – and this is a completely defensible interpretation. In the Preface to the first edition of The Science of Logic, Hegel states, “Now whatever may have been accomplished for the form and content of science in other directions, the science of logic which constitutes genuine metaphysics [eigentliche Metaphysik] or pure speculative philosophy has hitherto still been much neglected.”[12]

The ideas contained in the Logic (which I will also refer to from time to time as “categories”) form an organic system of the kind we have spoken about repeatedly in this series. In the Logic, each category presupposes every other. Each is what it is by means of its relation to the whole, and the whole is defined in terms of the total system of the categories. The reader will recall that this was how we have described the nature of existence itself; the universe is such a whole, not just the Logic. This isomorphism between the structure of the universe and the structure of the Logic is due precisely to the fact that the Logic just is the formal structure of existence itself.

The categories of the Logic are simultaneously ideas in terms of which we think, and determinations of beings. As we might expect, given the nature of the absolute knowing that knows the Logic, these categories transcend the subject-object distinction. They are both subjective and objective, and thus, in a sense, neither. Hegel formulates this point in different ways. Here is one example from the Encyclopedia Logic: “the true objectivity of thinking consists in this: that thoughts are not merely our thoughts, but at the same time the in-itself of things and of whatever else is ob-jective.”[13]

For Hegel, the claim that the categories of thought are simultaneously categories of being is nothing new; instead, it harks back to the very beginning of the metaphysical tradition. Parmenides, the father of metaphysics as we know it (born around 515 BC), said “. . . for the same thing is for thinking and being,” which is often glossed as “thinking and being are one.”[14] Hegel comments on this “identity of thought and being” in ancient metaphysics as follows:

Ancient metaphysics had in this respect a higher conception of thinking than is current today. For it based itself on the fact that the knowledge of things obtained through thinking is alone what is really true in them, that is, things not in their immediacy but as first raised into the form of thought, as things thought. Thus this metaphysics believed that thinking (and its determinations) is not anything alien to the object, but rather is its essential nature, or that things and the thinking of them – our language too expresses their kinship – are explicitly in full agreement, thinking in its immanent determinations and the true nature of things forming one and the same content.[15]

Whether Hegel is right about ancient metaphysics is a point we cannot debate here. What is definitely true is that in this passage he expresses his own philosophical position: thought and the true nature of things are one and the same. We have said that the Logic is metaphysics, but now we can be more specific: the Logic is ontology, an account of the nature of being qua being (in the terminology of the Wolffian school, adopted by Kant, ontology is classified as “general metaphysics”). But how does Hegel propose to think these thoughts, and thus to think the nature of being? How will he develop the content of the Logic?

Hegel regards the starting point of the Logic as a very weighty matter indeed. In The Science of Logic, he devotes an entire section to this topic, titled “With What Must the Science Begin?” The difficulty of a beginning has to do with the fact that we want the Logic to give an account of ideas that truly are both the fundamental categories of thought and of being. And “being” covers much – indeed, anything that is. Therefore, in beginning the Logic we cannot uncritically presuppose some specific conception of being. We cannot, for example, presuppose that what is must be material – or immaterial, for that matter. Any such presuppositions would skew the Logic and render it worthless. No, when we begin the Logic we do not yet know what being is. This is precisely what we are trying to discover.

Hegel is insistent that we cannot presuppose anything in beginning the Logic, not just specific conceptions of being. We also cannot presuppose any of the forms of thought, or logical concepts that we think we already know. When Kant, in The Critique of Pure Reason, attempts to deal with the forms of judgment employed by the understanding, he simply takes over uncritically the standard judgment forms discussed in the logic textbooks of his time. The post-Kantian idealists, including Hegel, were highly critical of this move. Hegel is not about to repeat Kant’s mistake. In his Logic, all forms of thought will be derived, and none will be presupposed. Again, we cannot proceed as if we already know that which we are seeking to know. Thus, Hegel even goes so far as to say that “what logic is cannot be stated beforehand, rather does this knowledge of what it is first emerge as the final outcome and consummation of the whole exposition.”[16]

In sum, Hegel is adamant that the Logic can have no determinate presuppositions whatsoever. We have to suspend belief in everything. We cannot begin by assuming that this and that is true, or that this and that exists. Hegel’s standpoint at the beginning of the Logic is thus fundamentally Cartesian. Descartes begins his Meditations by doubting literally everything; he suspends belief in everything he had ever thought was true. The starting point of his philosophy is thus an absolute beginning, not relative one. The Logic will be a literal creation ex nihilo. For if the Logic can have no determinate presuppositions whatsoever, then wouldn’t it have to begin literally with nothing? Incredibly, this is just what Hegel proposes – as we will see in our next installment.

***

To my readers: Unfortunately, I am going to have to take a break from writing this series in order to concentrate on a project that has a firm deadline. Rest assured that there will be more to come on Heidegger and Hegel – but, in all likelihood, not for several weeks. Thank you for your patience.

Notes

[1] Martin Heidegger, Hegel, trans. Joseph Arel and Niels Feuerhahn (Bloomington, IN: Indian University Press, 2015), 3-4.

[2] G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A.V. Miller, 1977), 493.

[3] Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21-22.

[4] Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1989), 37. (Henceforth, SL.)

[5] Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 58. Italics added.

[6] Stephen Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History: An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1991), 20-21.

[7] Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 445.

[8] Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, Translated by T.F. Geraets et al. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 42. (Henceforth, EL.)

[9] In German, all nouns are spelled with an initial capital. Thus, there is no real justification for capitalizing terms like “Idea.” However, it has long been the custom in Anglophone scholarship to capitalize terms that Hegel uses in a special technical sense. Scholars and translators used to overdo this considerably, however, and the practice has fallen out of fashion. I use it very sparingly.

[10] I do not usually italicize Philosophy of Nature or Philosophy of Spirit because, unlike The Science of Logic (the Logic for short) these are not book titles but are instead titles of divisions within Hegel’s philosophy. Strictly speaking, Logic should not be italicized either as it refers, primarily, not to a book but to a science – which, as we will see, Hegel expressed in two separate books.

[11] Hegel, SL, 50.

[12] Hegel, SL, 27.

[13] Hegel, EL, 83.

[14] Patricia Curd, Ed., A Presocratics Reader, 2^nd edition (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2011), 58. On the use Hegel makes of Parmenides, see Heidegger “Hegel and the Greeks,” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 329. Essay translated by Robert Metcalf.

[15] Hegel, SL, 45.

[16] Hegel, SL, 43.