Hegel (Part I)

Sociopolitical conditions in which Hegel appeared

By 1800, the scene in Germany had quite dramatically shifted. Kant was publishing his first Critique in
1781 against the background of a widely felt sense (among the educated youth) that things simply had
to change and were about to change in favor of some more satisfying way of life; there was also a sense
that things were going to be as they had always been.

As Kant was finishing up his work, the younger generation born between 1765 and 1775 was now
coming of age, and the cohort of that group that belonged to the reading public had either already left
or was preparing to leave the university in pursuit of careers and positions that for all practical purposes
did not exist. In that context, the lust for reading, and particularly for the new, was intense.

Part of the appeal to these sorts of people (and to a huge number of the literate generation of 1765-
1775) of the kinds of books that fueled the “reading clubs” (and led to the so-called “reading addiction”)
was that they enabled them to imagine alternative lives for themselves: actively thinking about courses
of life that were not in harmony with the way life had been.

Kantian revolutions: philosophy in that climate began to play a leading, speaking part in the collective
and individual imaginative life.

They began to see themselves called to something different, to lead their own lives, not their parents’ or
grandparents’ lives, and, to a good many in that generation, Kant’s own assertion of the intrinsic
connection between autonomy and morality captured that sense exactly.

To assume responsibility for one’s own life, not to be pushed around by forces external to oneself
(either natural or social), meant assuming an uncompromising moral stance in a world of moral equals,
of acting according to one’s own law and not simply the rules one had been taught.

The tumult in France continued, but, by 1800, a new presence had entered the scene: Napoleon
Bonaparte had already staged a brilliant rise to prominence as a military officer and tactician, and then,
having risen to become a political force on his own, briefly ruled as part of a triumvirate until he
managed to conspire with others to stage a coup d’état and on November 9–10, 1799 (18–19 Brumaire
on the revolutionary French calendar) had himself made the First Consul of France.

He moved quickly on all fronts and in a short time abolished the “Directory,” the ruling body of the
Revolution for most of its existence.

The never finished, simmering conflict between the German princes, wedded to their power and to the
inviolability of their rule, and the aims of revolutionary France once again, perhaps inevitably, surfaced
and Napoleonic France was thus drawn into Germany, both by the force of the events themselves and
by Napoleon’s own rather immoderate ambition for rule in Europe.

The result was a series of full-scale Napoleonic wars – in effect, a Napoleonic invasion of Germany – that
completely altered the landscape of Germany. For the greater part of the Napoleonic conquest of
Germany, the armies of France under Napoleon seemed unstoppable. When Prussia foolishly decided to
engage Napoleon again in 1806, Napoleon took the Prussians on outside the town of Jena, and, within
about half an hour, the vaunted Prussian army was in full anarchic retreat.

Shortly before the battle, the Holy Roman Empire, the organization under which most of Germany had
lived for almost nine hundred years, had dissolved; Napoleon’s rout of Prussia put the nails in its coffin
and lowered it into its grave.

Napoleon, who had already begun to reorganize Germany in a way more advantageous to French
interests (and advantageous to the hopes of many modernizers in Germany), now set about creating a
full reorganization of German lands. The petty principalities of “hometown” Germany vanished as they
were swallowed up by newly created kingdoms loyal to Napoleon or by newly created kingdoms and
principalities gobbling up their neighbors to consolidate themselves against Napoleonic intervention.

Many princes (particularly those of Bavaria and Württemberg) found that alliance with Napoleon led to
greatly increased holdings and power, even the elevation to status of king. For a while it even seemed
that Prussia itself, decisively defeated by Napoleon, would either vanish as an independent state or
shrink into total insignificance. Germany, so it seemed, would simply have to learn to live with France in
general and with Napoleon in particular, since opposing either of them was apparently suicidal.

Much of the post-Kantian debate in philosophy thus began to reflect the kind of anxieties that Germans
of all levels felt about the future of their land. Some saw Napoleon as the necessary iron fist required to
break the stranglehold of the old German princes and “hometown” mores, the necessary prelude to a
modernization of German life; others saw him simply as a foreign tyrant; still others saw him as the
expression of all that was harsh and ugly in modern life, a herald of a less beautiful world to come and a
threat to the authority of Christendom itself.

Whatever small amount of homogeneity there had been in German life up until that point crumbled in
the context of the Napoleonic restructuring of German life. In that hothouse atmosphere, the debate
over Kant’s legacy itself heated up, and, in that context, it was impossible for philosophy to be seen as
only an academic enterprise.

Hegel’s journey
Of all the post-Kantian idealists, Hegel probably has the greatest name recognition and both the best
and the worst reputation. Yet, until he was thirty-five years old, he was an unknown, failed author and
only dubiously successful academic.

After 1807, though, with the publication of his Phenomenology of Spirit, he became one of the great
figures of the post-Kantian movement (even though it took him nine more years before he received
university employment), and, at the height of his fame, he managed to do for himself what Kant had
done several generations earlier by managing to convince a large part of the intellectual world that the
history of philosophy had been a gradual development toward his own view and that the disparate
tendencies of thought at work in its history had finally been satisfactorily resolved in his own system.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in 1770 in Stuttgart and died in 1831 in Berlin. Entering the
Protestant Seminary in Tübingen in 1788, he had befriended and roomed with Friedrich Holderlin, and
later they shared a room and friendship with Friedrich Schelling (who was younger than them).
He became a “house-tutor” for two different families and experienced a failed independent career as an
author before becoming an unpaid lecturer in philosophy at Jena and a co-editor with Schelling of the
Schellingian Critical Journal of Philosophy, which, when it ceased publication, turned Hegel simply into
an unpaid lecturer at Jena.

After that position also collapsed, he became first a newspaper editor and then a high-school teacher in
Nuremberg (where he married a member of the Nuremberg patriciate), and finally in 1816, at the age of
46, he acquired his first salaried academic position in Heidelberg. In 1818 he accepted a position as
professor at the Berlin university, where he quickly rose to fame as the European phenomenon known
simply as “Hegel.”

Hegel became caught up in the post-Kantian movement relatively early in life. In one of his letters to
Schelling, written shortly after his graduation from the Seminary in 1793, he remarked that “from the
Kantian philosophy and its highest completion I expect a revolution in Germany. It will proceed from
principles that are present and that only need to be elaborated generally and applied to all hitherto
existing knowledge.”

While in Tübingen, he was inspired by the French Revolution (as were Holderlin and Schelling), and he
remained a lifelong advocate of its importance for modern European, even global, life. Like many of his
generation, he, too, saw Kant as the philosophical counterpart, even the voice, of the revolutionary
events going on around him and thought that “completing” Kant was part and parcel of the activity of
institutionalizing the gains of the Revolution.

For Hegel, Holderlin had shown how Fichte’s development of post-Kantian thought failed to understand
the way in which there had to be a deeper unity between subject and object, how the distinction
between the subjective and the objective could not itself be a subjective or an objective distinction, and
that our awareness of the distinction itself presupposes some background awareness of their deeper
unity.

Underlying the rupture between our experience of the world and the world itself, however, was a
deeper sense of a notion of truth – of “being,” as Holderlin called it – that was always presupposed in all
our otherwise fallible encounters with each other and the world.

his first philosophical book (and certainly the first that carried his name on it as the author) was his 1801
essay, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy. In it, he offered an
argument that Schelling’s philosophy (which until that point had been generally taken by the German
philosophical public as only a variant of Fichte’s thought) actually constituted an advance on Fichte’s
philosophy.

Schelling had argued that Fichte’s key claim– that the difference between the subjective and the
objective points of view had to be itself a subjective distinction, something that the “I” posits – was itself
flawed, since the line between the “I” and the “Not-I” was not itself absolute; one can draw it one way
or another, idealistically or dogmatically, depending on what one’s character inclined one to do.

Instead, there had to be an overarching point of view that was presupposed by both points of view,
which Schelling called the “absolute” and which, as encompassing both the subjective and objective
points of view, was itself only apprehendable by an “intellectual intuition.”
Hegel endorsed that line of thought, giving it some added heft by arguing that, in doing so, Schelling had
implicitly brought to light what was really the upshot of Kant’s three Critiques, namely, that the sharp
distinction that Kant seemed to be making between concept and intuition was itself only an abstraction
from a more basic, unitary experience of ourselves as already being in the world.

On Hegel’s recounting in the Difference book, Fichte, having in effect dropped Kant’s requirement of
intuition altogether, was then forced into understanding the “Not-I” as only a “posit” that the “I” had to
construct for itself, and by virtue of that move was driven to the one-sided conclusion that the
difference between the subjective and the objective had to be itself a subjectively established
difference.

Hegel hinted that Schelling’s conception of the “absolute” already indicated that Fichte’s views
concerning both the sharp differentiation between concept and intuition and the subsequent
downplaying of the role of intuitions were themselves unnecessary, and, on the first page of the essay,
Hegel noted that “[i]n the principle of the deduction of the categories Kant’s philosophy is authentic
idealism” – that is, that the part of the Critique where Kant wishes to show that there can be no
awareness of unsynthesized intuitions was implicitly the part where Kant himself showed that the
distinction between concepts and intuitions is itself relative to an overall background understanding of
what normative role various elements of our cognitive practices must and do play.

Classifying something as a “concept” or an “intuition,” that is, is already putting it into the place it plays
in the practice of giving and asking for reasons, in what Hegel (following Schelling’s usage) took to calling
the “Idea,” which Hegel eventually more or less identified as the “space of reasons” (although this was
not his term).

He did not take this to be merely an academic issue. That such oppositions (such as those between
nature and freedom, subject and object, concepts and intuitions) have come on the agenda of
philosophers in 1800 only indicates, he argued, that something deeper was at stake:

“When the might of union vanishes from the life of people, and the oppositions lose their living
connection and reciprocity and gain independence, the need of philosophy arises.”

Philosophy, that is, is called to make good when crucial matters in the lives of agents in a particular
historical social configuration are broken; and philosophy is to make good on these things by looking at
what is required of us in such broken times to “heal” ourselves again. Philosophy, that is, is a response
to human needs, and its success has to do with whether it satisfies those needs.

The guiding question behind almost all of his initial philosophical work was one that had been nagging at
him since he was a student at the Protestant Seminary in Tübingen: what would a modern religion look
like, and was it possible to have a modern religion that would satisfy our needs in the way that classical
religions seemed to have satisfied the needs of the ancients?

The need to be free in a Kantian or post-Kantian sense, and the question that Hegel was implicitly asking
was: what would it take to be able to lead one’s own life, to have a life of one’s own, to be, in the
language that Kant had introduced, autonomous, self-legislating?

For the young Hegel, it was more than clear that the established Protestant Church of Württemberg (his
homeland) was not in any way capable of satisfying that need, and the Catholic Church was simply out
of the question for Hegel the Württemberg Protestant. But if not those churches, then what? Another
form of Christianity? Another religion? No religion at all?

After the scandal of 1803 involving Schelling and his new wife, Caroline, Schelling traded his position in
Jena for a better one in Würzburg, abandoning Hegel to his fate in the declining university at Jena.

Hegel worked on one attempt after another at developing his “system” of philosophy, finishing some,
cutting off some others in the process, but eventually putting all of them in the drawer as simply not
good enough. As he was finally running out of money and all hope for any future employment as an
academic, he set to work on his greatest piece, the epochal Phenomenology of Spirit, finished in 1806
and published around Easter, 1807. He completed work on it as Napoleon led his troops into the
decisive battle of Jena, where the French routed the Prussian army and threatened the town of Jena
itself.

While writing the Phenomenology, Hegel also managed to engender an illegitimate son from his
landlady, and, despite the success of the book, Hegel was nonetheless unsuccessful at landing a
university position for himself for several more years.