Hegel E-Book

J. M. Fritzman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Classic Thinkers series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 364

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

GWF Hegel has long been considered one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the nineteenth century, and his work continues to provoke debate in contemporary philosophy. This new book provides readers with an accessible introduction to Hegel’s thought, offering a lucid and highly readable account of his Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic, Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy of History, and Philosophy of Right. It provides a cogent and careful analysis of Hegel’s main arguments, considers critical responses, evaluates competing interpretations, and assesses the legacy of Hegel’s work for philosophy in the present day.

In a comprehensive discussion of the major works, J.M Fritzman considers crucial questions of authorial intent raised by the Phenomenology of Spirit, and discusses Hegel’s conceptions of necessity and of philosophical method. In his presentation of Hegel’s Logic, Fritzman evaluates the claim that logic has no presuppositions and examines whether this endorses a foundationalist or coherentist epistemology. Fritzman goes on to scrutinize Hegel’s claims that history represents the progressive realization of human freedom, and details how Hegel believes that this is also expressed in art and religion.

This book serves as both an excellent introduction to Hegel’s wide-ranging philosophy for students, as well as an innovative critique which will contribute to ongoing debates in the field.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Series page

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

1: Introduction

2: Hegel's Life and Influences

3: Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

The preface: some basic hegelian concepts

Introduction

Consciousness: Sense-Certainty

Consciousness: Perception

Consciousness: Force and Understanding

Self-consciousness: Lordship and Bondage

Self-consciousness: Stoicism, Skepticism, Unhappy Consciousness

Reason: Observing Reason

Reason: rational self-consciousness makes itself actual

Reason: individuality

Spirit: ethical order

Spirit: self-alienated and culture

Spirit: Enlightenment

Spirit: absolute freedom and terror

Spirit: morality

Religion

Absolute Knowing

4: Hegel's Logic

5: Hegel's Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit

Nature

Spirit

6: Hegel's Philosophy of Right

7: Hegel's Philosophy of History

8: Hegel's Lectures on Philosophy and Religion

Aesthetics

Religion

9: After Hegel

Suggestions for Further Reading

Index

Classic Thinkers Series

Daniel E. Flage, Berkeley

Bernard Gert, Hobbes

Dale E. Miller, J. S. Mill

A. J. Pyle, Locke

Andrew Ward, Kant

Copyright © J. M. Fritzman 2014

The right of J. M. Fritzman to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2014 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4724-1

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4725-8 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5652-6 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5653-3 (mobi)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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For Gwendolyn Kelly Garrison, the avatar of India, “the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.”

Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey around the World, Vol. 2

(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1906), p. 26.

Acknowledgements

I owe unrepayable debts of gratitude to:

Emma Hutchinson, my editor at Polity Press, who has the patience of Sītā.

Caroline Richmond, my copy editor at Polity Press, who has the writing style of Gaeśa.

The anonymous reviewers for Polity Press, who have the wisdom of Sarasvatī. This book is a book because of them.

Alison Stone, who believed that I could write this book and recommended me to Polity Press.

My teachers: the late Clarence Bauman, Thomas N. Finger, the late Albert N. Keim, Manfred Kuehn, Kem Luther, William L. McBride, Calvin O. Schrag, Willard M. Swartley, et alia.

My students; they're my best teachers.

William A. Rottschaefer, who read the entire manuscript of this book, thereby preventing many errors and several stupidities.

My colleagues, for whom, if I couldn't reflect their light, I'd be filled with envious hatred: Randall E. Auxier, Sepideh Bajracharya, Aaron Bunch, David Campion, Rebecca Copenhaver, Edward Cushman, Andrew Cutrofello, Robert A. Kugler, Joel Martinez, John McCumber, Clayton Morgareidge, Jay Odenbaugh, William A. Rottschaefer, Nicholas D. Smith, Richard Dien Winfield, Emily Zakin, Rishona Zimring.

My co-authors, who allowed me to join them in the sun: Samantha Park Alibrando, Gina Altamura, Katherine Elise Barhydt, Nathan Baty, Wendy Lynn Clark, Isabelle C. DeMarte, Jeffrey A. Gauthier, Molly Gibson, Sarah Marchand Lomas, Sarah Ann Lowenstein, Meredith Margaret Nelson, Kristin Parvizian, Brianne Riley, McKenzie Judith Southworth.

“I used to think gratitude a heavy burden for one to carry. Now I know that it is something that makes the heart lighter. The ungrateful man seems to me to be one who walks with feet and heart of lead. But when one has learnt, however inadequately, what a lovely thing gratitude is, one's feet go lightly over sand or sea, and one finds a strange joy revealed to one, the joy of counting up, not what one possesses, but what one owes. I hoard my debts now in the treasury of my heart, and, piece of gold by piece of gold, I range them in order at dawn and at evening.”

Oscar Wilde, Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 276.

1

Introduction

Why study Hegel? So far, philosophy has had only two heroic moments – times where it cast aside everything that is external and became fully itself. The first is Neoplatonism, which begins with Plotinus in 3 bce and lasts several hundred years. The second moment is German idealism. Hegel is the greatest of the German idealists. Not the most brilliant or creative: that would be Schelling. But it is Hegel who thinks things through to their conclusions and links them together. The world today would be almost unimaginably different without him. Hegel's philosophy decisively influenced both Marx and Lenin. Without them, communism would never have existed, there would have been no Soviet Union or communist China, and the First World War would have concluded quite differently than it did.

Martin Luther King Jr. was influenced directly through reading Hegel, especially the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, and indirectly through studying philosophical personalism while a doctoral student at Boston University. Personalism, by the way, is the view that ultimate reality – God, if you prefer – is a person. Whereas Aristotle claims that God is the Unmoved Mover, wholly unaffected and indifferent to the universe, a personalist such as King believes that God is in a loving relation with the universe and – like a person – God has thoughts and feelings. The history of the civil rights movement would have been substantially different without Hegel.

Hegel is also important for philosophy. The beginnings of Anglo-American philosophy – one thinks, in this context, especially of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell – are marked by a rejection of Hegel's philosophy. Twentieth-century French philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as German philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas, develop much of their philosophies in conversation with Hegel. By contrast, more recent French philosophy is defined by a concerted rejection of his philosophy. Indeed, David Carroll writes that, for Jean-François Lyotard, “the central problem is still, as it has been since at least Nietzsche, how to escape from or exceed the recuperating powers of the dialectic.”1 Carroll further observes that

there is really no critical philosopher in France in the last twenty years – this is especially true of Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, as well as Lyotard – who has not made this one of, if not the most pressing of all critical tasks. The political implications of all of their work could even be argued to be directly rooted in their critiques of the Hegelian and Marxist dialectics.