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. (more…)
Portrait of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
4,859 words
Portrait of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Parts 1-3 here
Alpha and Omega
In the last installment, I introduced readers to Hegelian dialectic, to Hegel’s “objective idealism,” and to the major dialectical transitions in The Phenomenology of Spirit. The text consists of three principal divisions, which form a dialectical triad: “Consciousness,” “Self-Consciousness,” and “Reason.” (more…)
4,362 words
Parts 1 and 2 here.
Toward the Sunlight
In our last installment, we learned that The Phenomenology of Spirit is an account of how spirit, or humanity, traverses a highway of despair – a path along which it becomes disillusioned with various of its forms, all of which in one way or another implicitly aim at self-knowledge. In the end, it arrives at what it had sought all along, true self-knowledge or “absolute knowledge.” (more…)
Hegel pays his respects to Napoleon on his entry into Jena, 1807.
4,093 words
Hegel pays his respects to Napoleon on his entry into Jena, 1807.
Part 1 here
Introducing The Phenomenology of Spirit
In the first installment of this series, I introduced readers to Hegel and to Heidegger’s commentaries on him. We found that Hegel is the creator of an all-encompassing system of ideas or a “complete speech of the whole.” He offers his system not as philosophy, the search for wisdom, but as wisdom itself, or, as he puts it, “science” (Wissenschaft). (more…)
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.” (more…)