Hegel: Before and After: An Introduction to the History of Hegel's Thought

Author: (American) Tom Rockmore
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-04-01
Features: This new edition has provided me with an opportunity to improve (although not all of what I wanted to do has been implemented) this book. Taking this opportunity, I also updated the bibliography, added more recently published works, and re-examined some of my own views from previous editions. Thus, the main purpose of this book now is to offer a very simple but non-simplistic path into Hegel. My intention is not to say everything that should be said—this is, of course, an arduous task that others have attempted with varying degrees of success. What I will say will be very little, but I hope it will be enough to make people feel that Hegel's theory is interesting and that they should take it seriously, at least that it is worthwhile for a beginner with limited knowledge to spend time and effort to further master more extensive and profound Hegelian literature.
Hegel was a historicist thinker. He developed his theories within the context of world history and the history of philosophy. However, most books about him lack a historical perspective. The main difference between this book and other introductions to Hegel lies in its firm historicist approach, particularly in linking Hegel's theory to his own historical context and his interpretation of the theories of his predecessors and contemporaries. My consistent intention has been—and in a very brief form—to present Hegel as having grown out of his historical and conceptual background. To this end, my method is to bring together Hegel the person, his theory, and his historical context, while carefully avoiding reducing any one of these to another. I believe Hegel was a product of his time, and therefore he must be interpreted within it. If today we still hope to understand Hegel's main ideas as he understood himself, we must do so in the context of his time. However, I also believe that neither Hegel nor anyone else should be "reduced" to or fully explained solely in terms of their time. In Hegel's case, this approach would lead to great errors, because his theory was formed in the early 19th century and still retains its core significance two centuries later.
The birth of Hegel's theory was primarily a result of his participation in contemporary philosophical discussions. More precisely, it emerged from his intellectual exchanges with great contemporaries of German idealism such as Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. There is no quick alternative to describing Hegel within this intellectual context. The academic approach to studying Hegel—like studying other important philosophers—has its own value. The rules they adopt are often contrary to those that Hegel himself followed, recommended, or tended to accept. In the academic workshop of Hegel studies, all efforts are spent on establishing an interpretation of Hegel's theory and defending it against other interpretations. It is common to study Hegel's entire or nearly entire works and manuscripts in a non-Hegelian or anti-Hegelian manner. This means that Hegel has merely been subjected to routine reading, and the way he has been read is likely to be one he opposed or would have opposed. My purpose here is to attempt to read Hegel as he would have read his contemporaries in philosophy and to provide a Hegelian method for reading his own theory.
With the changes in philosophical discussions on a broader scale, discussions about Hegel have also been rapidly evolving. In the relatively short period since the first edition of this book, three developments in Hegel discussions in the English-speaking world deserve mention. First, the number of research materials on Hegel has exploded—though the value of this should not be overestimated. During the writing of this book, books on Hegel were published at an increasing rate, to the point where even the most diligent scholars could not keep up. Since World War II, for various reasons, Heidegger (in the continental philosophy circle) and analytic philosophy have tended to dominate the philosophical landscape in the English-speaking world. Each has formed vast discussion circles, leaving very little space for careful studies of other philosophers. Hegel, in particular, has been left with even less space, as he has become a target of almost everyone for various reasons. For various reasons, this situation is now changing. At the dawn of the 21st century, the decline of interest in Heidegger and the slow but persistent decline of analytic philosophy have allowed other philosophical themes and figures—including German classical idealism—to gain more space. Interest in Hegel has been growing steadily and has now reached a considerable level, which can be seen as a significant benefit of this shift in the philosophical landscape. Among other figures in the German philosophical tradition of the 19th century, therefore, this change has benefited Schelling, who is becoming increasingly popular, and Fichte, who is a more difficult and obscure author. Even Marx has benefited.
The second change is the growing interest in Hegel's theory of knowledge. In discussions of German classical philosophy, a little-known secret is that epistemology or the theory of knowledge did not (as Kant explicitly claimed and later generations believed) end with critical philosophy. After the French Revolution, heavily influenced by it, epistemology continued to develop in philosophers such as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Dilthey, Cassir, and many others. Kant was interested in anthropology and history. He published one of the earliest works on the history of anthropology. However, in his philosophy, he defended a non-anthropological and non-historical approach. This changed after the French Revolution. The consequences of the revolution continued to echo in later philosophy. For a long time, many people believed that the French monarchy was founded on an ahistorical reality and was independent of finite humanity. But now it has been swept away by the revolution. Many post-revolutionary philosophers drew the conclusion that the entire human world was a historical creation of humans themselves. This lesson is reflected in the emphasis on anthropology and history by some thinkers after the revolution, among whom Hegel stands out.
This book belongs to the third change: the growing interest in the contributions of German idealism to the question of knowledge—especially Hegel's contributions. This change explains why a series of rigorous and specialized studies on various aspects of the theory of knowledge have recently emerged. Currently, research interest in Hegel's contributions to epistemology is being pursued in two ways: one is within the Hegel studies community, where scholars attempt to grasp and reconstruct Hegel's views on various issues, and the other is by some analytic philosophers who attempt to use Hegel's ideas to solve their own problems. These two approaches to Hegel's theory of knowledge are closely related. Analytic philosophy's focus on the problem of knowledge has been constant, even obsessive. Therefore, the attention of analytic philosophy to Hegel's contributions to certain aspects of the theory of knowledge is essentially two different aspects of the same effort to reformulate Hegel's epistemology for specific analytic purposes. The interest of analytic philosophy in Hegel has been present from the beginning. Currently, it is in a transitional phase. The figures that dominated analytic philosophy discussions for half a century are now retiring or have recently left the historical stage, while new topics are emerging. One of the foundational events of British analytic philosophy was the rebellion against idealism launched by G.E. Moore and Russell in the early 20th century, a rebellion that has continued to this day. Marxists and analytic philosophers understand "idealism" in very different ways. However, both have determined their philosophical methods by opposing any form of idealism. Hegel's position is often understood as a specific form of idealism, and he himself understood it this way. There has never been any document that can truly refute this interpretation. One peculiar feature of the current interest of analytic philosophy in Hegel is that for something that analytic philosophy has always been uninterested in—or even disliked—as idealism, it has never been so fond of it as it is now. The strange result is that analytic thinkers are now turning to Hegel not because of their interest in his unique idealism, but because of an Hegel beyond idealism. This is somewhat like how analytic philosophy treats Kant: analytic philosophy has a persistent interest in Kant's empiricist idealism, but not in his transcendental idealism.
This book is roughly divided into three parts: the path to Hegel, Hegel's theory itself, and the philosophical responses to Hegel after him. Looking back, when this book was first written, the turn toward Hegel by analytic philosophy was barely discernible. If I were still writing or rewriting this book today, I would discuss more extensively the interest of analytic philosophy in Hegel at its inception, as an important aspect of the complex situation of post-Hegel responses to Hegel. The path from analytic philosophy to Hegel, which was closed off by the strong negative reaction of analytic philosophy's founders, Russell and Moore, in the early 20th century, was later reopened through various means. One of these was the sharp critique of (British) idealism by late Wittgenstein, which remains influential to this day. Wittgenstein's critique made serious studies of a figure like Hegel, an idealist, possible within the analytic philosophy circle. Wittgenstein was Russell's student and later became a colleague of Russell and Moore. In his critique of Moore, Wittgenstein attacked his colleague's distinctive empiricism. Further work was carried out by Wilfrid Sellars, who fully adopted and adapted Hegel's arguments on sensory certainty at the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit to oppose general empiricism. More recently, a significant portion of analytic philosophers, including Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell, have turned to Hegel in various ways (and with various intentions). This is not the place to delve deeply into the still-nascent turn of analytic philosophy toward Hegel (and Hegelianism). Whether the recent turn of analytic philosophy toward Hegel will develop into a well-established movement or quickly fade away remains unclear. It is puzzling: how could analytic philosophy, as an analytical doctrine that takes as its standard of realism an objective grasp of the external world independent of the mind, and that views knowledge as ahistorical, be compatible with a completely different kind of Kantian and Hegelian epistemological realism, especially with a particularly Hegelian doctrine deeply imbued with a historical perspective on knowledge?
The reissue of this book has given me the opportunity to reflect the new contributions to the discussion of Hegel described above in the bibliography. In this new edition, I have also corrected some obvious errors in wording and improved some expressions. However, since it is not possible to make substantial changes to the main text, I have had to limit the discussion of the broader development to this new preface. Two points that were overlooked in previous editions now appear to be very important: the general issue of realism and, as a result, the Copernican revolution in philosophy attributed to Kant. While writing this book, I have increasingly noticed the central importance of the realist view of knowledge in the Western philosophical tradition, which began with ancient Greece. Realism is far from being a single form; it means very different things to different people. At least since Plato, Western philosophy has sought to know what is truly the case in various ways—in other words, it has strived to grasp reality independent of consciousness, not merely as it appears but as it actually is. For complex reasons that cannot be detailed here, Kant opposed this view in his philosophical Copernican revolution. According to Kant, we can never know whether we are knowing an external object independent of the mind or the thing-in-itself. He restricted knowledge to the realm of empirical truth—or roughly, to the limits of what can be known, because it is given in experience. He excluded all concepts independent of experience, such as the thing-in-itself, because he believed that we could not think about these without falling into contradictions, and therefore they were unknowable. Hegel inherited Kant and also opposed any form of the demand for knowledge of the world that is truly the case and independent of the mind, restricting knowledge to the realm of empirical truth. In short, he adopted a view of empirical realism very close to that of Kant. In a more thorough discussion of Hegel, this point should be elaborated, and the differences between Hegel's and Kant's forms of empirical realism should be described in detail.
Kant's philosophical stance, formed in the Critique of Pure Reason, was highly attractive to his contemporaries and later philosophers. Although some contemporaries opposed it, it was largely immediately accepted by many philosophers—including some of the most powerful thinkers of the time—as a landmark in philosophical thought. Most of Kant's contemporaries believed his thought was unfinished and in need of improvement. There was agreement on the need to improve Kant's thought, but disagreement on how to do so. The nature of Kant's thought and how to bring it to completion has always fascinated later thinkers. Currently, the most interested in this issue seems to be the German social theorist Jurgen Habermas. The question of how to complete Kant's theoretical project has raised many difficult issues. In his writings, Kant strongly advocated the system as a criterion of science, that is, the commitment to a scientific philosophy. Kant's emphasis on the system was highly influential. Philosophers like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel (even Marx), who directly contributed to efforts to complete Kant's critical philosophy in the post-Kantian discussion, were all staunchly systematic thinkers. Following Kant's explicit concern with the system, the focus of this book is on how Hegel's thought emerged in the context of reconstructing and completing critical philosophy to create an acceptable notion of the system. Undoubtedly, for Kant and the German idealists of the post-Kantian era, the system was very important. However, later thinkers—of whom Nietzsche is the most prominent—opposed the notion of the system, viewing it as a mistake. Today, few philosophers accept Kant's method of making the system the core of science, although this method was widely accepted in the first half of the 19th century. Since the book was written, I have increasingly tended to believe that a better way to understand the emergence of Hegel's overall thought is through the philosophical Copernican revolution frequently mentioned but little understood by Kant, yet extremely important. Kant never used this term to describe his own position. However, it is widely used in discussions of his theory to refer to his philosophical Copernican revolution. What the Copernican revolution usually means in Kant's context concerns Kant's view of Copernicus's contribution to astronomy. In astronomy, Copernicus replaced the widely accepted geocentric model, which had been formed in ancient times, with the heliocentric model. In simple terms, we can say that on a profound level, Kant's theory relies on and further develops his understanding and development of Copernicus's contribution to modern science. More clearly, in the Critique of Pure Reason, he bases his philosophical theory of science on his understanding of Copernicus's astronomy and his philosophical view of science on his views about science.
Kant's philosophical Copernican revolution can be rephrased in two related viewpoints. First, as mentioned above, he believed that we do not know whether we are knowing a real world independent of the mind. Second, based on this point, he argued that we can only know what we "construct" in some way. Constructivism is well-known in mathematics. For example, Euclidean geometry requires constructing simple figures with a ruler and compass. Kant's philosophical Copernican revolution led to a constructivism in the epistemology of knowledge. There is a major difficulty on this path: how to understand the concept of epistemological construction. Although Kant suggested that we must "construct" in some sense what we know, he never told us how to understand the key concept of "construction." In a profound sense, later German idealists, including Hegel, were concerned with how to complete Kant's "constructivism"—a constructivism that Kant proposed but did not fully in his works within a specific social and historical context. If I were writing this book today, I would focus the discussion on Hegel's very interesting and philosophical reaction to Kant's philosophical Copernican revolution. This would lead to a very different, though not necessarily better, book.
This book offers a very simplified path into Hegel. Hegel emphasized the inextricable link between knowledge and history. Hegel is now, and in the coming years, perhaps the creator of the philosophy of our time.