Wittgenstein

and Hegel

Reevaluation of Difference

Edited by Jakub Mácha and Alexander Berg

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Alexander Berg
Identity in Difference—Wittgenstein’s Hegel
Abstract We can say with some certainty that Wittgenstein never read any of He-
gel’s works, yet he was able to talk about Hegel and even at several points to de-
scribe the relation between his own philosophy and that of Hegel. In this chap-
ter, I present two major moments in Wittgenstein’s philosophical career where he
was explicitly taught about Hegel’s philosophy, and attempt to evaluate Wittgen-
stein’s statements about Hegel and what they show about the influence Wittgen-
stein’s knowledge of Hegel may have had on his own philosophy.

In autumn 1948, Wittgenstein is taking a walk in Phoenix Park, Dublin, with his
friend and colleague Maurice O’Connor Drury. They are talking about the great
historical philosophers and the value of studying them.¹ In this moment of re-
flection, Wittgenstein thinks about his relation to these philosophers and his
own place as a philosopher in the long history of philosophy. His thoughts
turn to G. W. F. Hegel, one of the most influential thinkers in that tradition,
and he tries to determine the relation between his own philosophical thinking
and the philosophy of Hegel. These thoughts culminate in the famous remark:

Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really
the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really dif-
ferent (MDC: p.157).²

Considering this famous yet enigmatic remark, I will try to answer two pressing
questions. First: how was Wittgenstein able to talk about Hegel? (Did he even
had any knowledge about Hegel’s philosophy? And if so: how did he get this
knowledge, and what exactly did he know?) And second: following on from
that, what could be the deeper meaning of Wittgenstein’s remark in Phoenix
Park?
To answer these questions, I shall investigate two important events in Witt-
genstein’s philosophical career where he learnt important things about Hegel’s
philosophy from other major philosophers. Wittgenstein’s first contact with

 “Walking in Phoenix Park one afternoon: Drury: I sometimes regret the amount of time I spent
in reading the great historical philosophers, at a time when I couldn’t understand them. Wittgen-
stein: I don’t regret that you did all that reading” (MDC: p.157).
 For more detail cf. Berg (2019).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110572780-024
350 Alexander Berg

Hegel came right at the beginning of his philosophical studies in Cambridge,

through his first philosophy tutor Bertrand Russell. The second contact came
years later, when Wittgenstein came back to Cambridge and started to teach phi-
losophy himself, through his colleague and fellow philosophy tutor Charlie D.
Broad, who at the time was giving lectures about Hegel’s philosophy at the uni-
versity.

1
To consider the case of Bertrand Russell, we have to go even further back in time
to a point before Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge, namely to the moment in
1890 when the young Bertrand Russell himself arrived there to start his philo-
sophical career.
The young Russell came to Cambridge with some pre-existing philosophical
beliefs that he had developed during his private home-schooling. He instantly
made friends with John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, a philosopher already estab-
lished in Cambridge philosophy, from whom he learnt that the empiricist philos-
ophy Russell had favoured up until that point was now (1890) considered to be
“almost laughably old-fashioned” (cf. Monk 1996: p.44). McTaggart—already
working on his Studies in Hegelian Dialectic (McTaggart 1896)—introduced Rus-
sell to his own form of Hegelianism, which stood mainly on Bradleyan shoulders,
and by 1894 had completely won him over to his “semi-Hegelian metaphysics”³.
At that time, Russell even developed the foundations for a complete research
programme modelled on Hegel’s Encyclopaedia. This programme was based on
the idea of a “synthesis” of theoretical and practical philosophy. In the literature,
it is now called the “Tiergarten programme” because the main idea came to Rus-
sell during a walk in the Tiergarten park in Berlin (possibly inspired by Hegel’s
walks in the same park earlier that century):

I remember a spring morning when I walked in the Tiergarten, and planned to write a series
of books in the philosophy of the sciences, growing gradually more concrete as I passed
from mathematics to biology; I thought I would also write a series of books on social
and political questions, growing gradually more abstract. At last I would achieve a Hege-
lian synthesis in an encyclopaedic work dealing equally with theory and practice. The
scheme was inspired by Hegel […] (Russell 2009: p.15).

 “McTaggart had Hegelian answers to the rather crude empiricism which had previously satis-
fied me. […] I stood out against his influence with gradually diminishing resistance until just
before my Moral Sciences Tripos in 1894, when I went over completely to a semi-Kantian,
semi-Hegelian metaphysic” (Russell 1959: p.38).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110572780-024
Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations XI

Notes on Authors XV

Jakub Mácha
Introduction: Hegel, Wittgenstein, Identity, Difference 1

Part 1 General Introduction, the Analytic-Continental Split

Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer
On Metaphysical Images in Analytic Philosophy: Overcoming Empiricism by
Logical Analysis of Language 25

Part 2 From Identity to Difference

Thomas Rentsch
Three Key Hypotheses regarding Hegel and Wittgenstein 51

Tom Rockmore
Wittgenstein, Hegel and Cognition 59

Herbert Hrachovec
No Evaluative Authority Is beyond Evaluation: Common Ground between Hegel
and Wittgenstein 73

David Kolb
The Diamond Net: Metaphysics, Grammar, Ontologies 89

Jonathan L. Shaheen
The Communitarian Wittgenstein and Brandom’s Hegel on Recognition and
Social Constitution 103

Lorenzo Cammi
Hegel and Wittgenstein on Wirklichkeit: Sketch of a Comparison 119
VIII Table of Contents

Kai-Uwe Hoffmann
Beauty: Hegel or Wittgenstein? 141

Part 3 From Difference to Identity

Paul Redding
Hegel and the Tractarian Conception of Judgement 161

Terry Pinkard
Forms of Thought, Forms of Life 181

Valentin Pluder
Rule-Following and Institutional Context 199

Valentina Balestracci
Hegel and Wittgenstein: Elements for a Comparison 213

Vojtěch Kolman
Master, Slave and Wittgenstein: The Dialectic of Rule-Following 227

Ingolf Max
Hegel and Wittgenstein on Identities and Contradictions 243

Marco Kleber
Rethinking the Limits of Language: Wittgenstein and Hegel on the
Unspeakable 259

Part 4 Hegelian Approaches to Wittgenstein

Aloisia Moser
Hegel’s Speculative Method and Wittgenstein’s Projection Method 275

Ermylos Plevrakis
A Hegelian Reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 291

Gaetano Chiurazzi
Are There Simple Objects? Hegel’s Discussion of Kant’s Second Antinomy in
Relation to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus 311
Acknowledgements

Most of the chapters in this volume were originally presented at the conference
“Wittgenstein and Hegel: Reevaluation of Difference”, which took place at the TU
Dresden between 28 and 30 June 2017 and was co-organised by the editors of this
volume. The talks at the conference were recorded and are available on the con-
ference website: wittgensteinhegel2017.weebly.com. Jakub Mácha and I are grate-
ful for the generous funding provided by the TU Dresden Graduate Academy, a
German Federal Ministry of Education and Research’s Excellence Initiative. We
would like to thank the other co-organisers of the conference, namely Louisa
Frintert, Marco Kleber and Alexander Romahn, as well as Thomas Rentsch
and Jim Conant for their intellectual support for the conference. It goes without
saying that the discussion and exchange of ideas at the conference and beyond
helped to greatly enrich the articles in this volume. I am especially thankful to
my son Jakob E. Berg for the video recordings of the conference presentations.
In addition to papers by the conference participants, the editors have also
included six other chapters written especially for this book. We are especially
grateful to the authors themselves, who have contributed their knowledge and
many hours of work to make this volume a reality. Special thanks go to our re-
viewers (some of who were also contributors themselves), who provided valuable
feedback and helped to improve the quality of this book. We note with sadness
that Wilhelm Lütterfelds passed away while this volume was in preparation. We
are especially glad and privileged to have been able to include his work.
We are also grateful to our proof-editor Andrew Godfrey, who edited most of
the chapters by non-native speakers of English (www.agodfreytranslations.com).
His valuable suggestions helped to greatly improve the clarity of these chapters.
Danica Ježová helped us with the formal consistency of the volume. This publi-
cation was supported by the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno.
Last but not least, my thanks go to everyone at De Gruyter, especially to
Christoph Schirmer for his editorial advice and support, and to Stefan Majet-
schak and the International Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, who made it possible
for the volume to appear in the series On Wittgenstein.
Many of the contributors to this volume, as well as other authors, have ex-
pressed a definite interest in further clarifying the relationship between Wittgen-
stein and Hegel and building on the results of this volume in future research. The
editors would be very happy to contribute to the continuation of this work.

Alexander Berg, Prague, January 2019

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110572780-001