[In the following essay, Lauer outlines Hegel's philosophical system and provides an overview of his works.]

The Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy is particularly significant, as we have already noted in our Preface, because of the place which it holds in the overall “system” which Hegel's philosophy purports to be. What that place is can be clarified in an attempt to sketch the system as a whole, which is at once Hegel's philosophy and his reply to those who would discredit the whole metaphysical endeavor.

In an attempt to overcome the abstract speculations of both traditional Scholasticism and continental rationalism, the British empiricists in general, and Hume in particular, insisted on the primacy of the immediate presence of reality in sensation. In this context, then, thinking—as opposed to sensation—is a movement away from reality; thought is a progressive abstraction from the full, rich content immediately given in sensation. The empiricists would, of course, have been contradicting a constant in human experience did they not see a definite usefulness in this process—if nothing else, it simplified reality to the point of making it more manipulable. Still, they felt that in thought there was a definite loss of concreteness which could be regained only by a return to the immediacy which the senses guaranteed.

For Hegel, who in this was seeking to complete the endeavors of his great predecessors Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, to answer Hume, it simply was not true that the locus of concreteness was in the immediacy of reality's presence to sensation. Taking his cue from Plato rather than from Locke, he was convinced that reality was more concretely present (more real) in thought, in ideas, than in sensation. For this he needed as a starter no more than the common human experience that in seeking to grasp reality more thoroughly we consult our ideas of reality rather than reality itself. Strangely enough, he found the warrant for this conviction in the experimental sciences, whose observations of the real world were simply sterile until they had been transformed into thought. With Kant he recognized only too well that “conceptions without intuitions are empty,” but in true dialectic fashion he recognized equally well that “intuitions without conceptions are blind.” This, however, meant more to him than simply that thought and sensation are complementary: it meant that, although a content of consciousness may be given in sensation, it cannot be fully grasped in sensation but only in a process moving from an initial minimal awareness to the (ideal) totality of awareness in complete rational knowledge; it meant, too, that the process of thinking is no more than an empty game, if it clings to its initial abstractness and is not characterized by a progressively more concrete manifestation of its content—which is ultimately (again ideally) the totality of reality. The totality of awareness, then, which he calls “knowledge” (Wissen) or “science” (Wissenschaft), is the awareness of a totality of reality; and this involves a realization that man will find the very reality of reality only in the awareness of reality which is at the same time reality's progressive self-manifestation.

The heart of Hegel's system, then, is his Logic, where philosophical thinking seeks to penetrate thought and find in it the revelation of reality. He himself characterized this Logic as “the presentation of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of the world or of a single finite spirit,”¹ which is but another way of saying that the totality of thought does not wait upon the unfolding of human history in order to be identified with the totality of reality—even though man's awareness of this identification cannot be achieved independently of the historical process of developing consciousness. It is true enough to say that reality is truly real only when it is thought-reality; but it is equally true that thought is truly thought only as a process of coming to terms with the real. It is for this reason that, while contemplating the articulation of his monumental Logic as the cornerstone of his system, Hegel realized that it would be impossible to plunge into the depths of thought, there to find reality, without prefacing his effort with an account of the process whereby awareness becomes thought in the fullest sense of that term. Thus, the overall structure had to wait until its foundation could be laid in a Phenomenology of Spirit which would describe the route that consciousness takes through history in coming to the awareness that as Spirit² it could legitimately look into itself in order to find reality.³

Once its foundation was made secure in the Phenomenology, the most systematic of philosophical systems could begin to take shape (even though prior to the Phenomenology Hegel had already drafted more than one blueprint for the total structure). The Logic now becomes the articulation of an awareness that the categories of thought reveal themselves as the categories of reality. The progressive awareness of itself that Spirit achieves through history will be a gradual revelation of all that was there from eternity—“before creation”—but a condition for Spirit's recognizing all this in itself is that it first go outside itself, in order to return to itself enriched by the knowledge that all that “out there” is its own work. It goes out of itself, then, in a “philosophy of nature” (which, although it is admittedly not Hegel's strong point, does show that he had a penetrating awareness of the significance of the natural science of his day). Its point was to manifest that in nature was to be found a purposeful order which indicates that nature itself is the embodiment of ideas and that, thus, nature reveals itself as the work of Spirit. Science is successful because, as Kant had noted, it can compel nature to yield up answers to its questions, and these answers belong to the world of ideas.

What Spirit seeks in nature, however, are not merely answers to its questions about nature but also answers to its questions about itself. These answers, too, it will find in ideas, not insofar as nature with its laws constitutes the content of those ideas but insofar as the having of ideas reveals the nature, so to speak, of spirit. Thus begins Hegel's philosophy of spirit.

At first it is the philosophy of subjective spirit, which, we might say, tells us what man is capable of because he is spirit and not merely nature. In this there are three stages: (a) anthropology, wherein man discovers the sort of being he is, his nature; (b) phenomenology (not to be confused with the preface to the whole system), in which man examines his capacity to be conscious both of external reality and of himself; and (c) psychology, in which man sees himself as a subject determining himself by his own spiritual activities, at the summit of which is free activity. It is precisely this last sort of activity which provides the transition to the second step in the philosophy of spirit—i.e., philosophy of objective spirit—which concerns itself with what is true of man, precisely because he is free, not merely acting and reacting but self-determining, in the sense that he determines himself to be a self. This philosophy of objective spirit, too, presents itself in three stages: (a) individual man as person, who is characterized by rights, chiefly the right to own that which is not himself; (b) the individual person as self determining to moral behavior (Moralität), which is a self-imposed limitation on his subjective willing; and (c) the person not merely as individual but as member of society—family, city, and state—whose free will is oriented toward a higher morality (Sittlichkeit) which governs the society as a society.⁴

Only when man, the free spirit, has been established both as an individual and as a member of society, is it possible to proceed to a third stage in the philosophy of spirit, which Hegel calls the philosophy of Absolute Spirit. This concerns itself not so much with what any individual man is, can do, or does, but with what man (or mankind) has produced by virtue of the fact that man is a free spirit who can act upon nature, on himself, or on other men, thus not only transforming the world in which he lives but also revealing all that man as such is capable of—the seal of man is, so to speak, put upon all that man does. This last stage in the philosophy of spirit constitutes the quantitatively major portion of the legacy Hegel has bequeathed to posterity (although, paradoxically enough, very little of it was published by Hegel himself—the courses he gave were transcribed by students and ultimately published posthumously). The outline for this is provided by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where he seeks to show that the ultimate in rationality is to be found in the relationship of the absolute Spirit to the absolute Idea. It is as absolute Spirit that consciousness reaches its apogee on the subjective side, and it is with the absolute Idea that the objective content—i.e., “the whole of reality”—adequately corresponds with its subjective conceiving, and Spirit is revealed as both subject and object in this ultimate synthesis. As the whole movement of the Phenomenology had revealed, content precedes form, in the sense that consciousness is constantly being impelled to catch up with, become adequate to, its own content. Thus, the content of Spirit's consciousness is absolute before Spirit's grasp of this content is itself absolute, and the stages through which man's spirit goes in approaching this adequacy are the three stages of man's activity whereby he relates himself to the Absolute—i.e., art, religion, and philosophy.

THE WORKS OF HEGEL

If at this point we go back over the whole corpus of Hegel's writings we find that they fit not only neatly but also convincingly into this systematically articulated structure. We have already seen the place of the Phenomenology of Spirit and of the Logic. The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences is an attempt to describe the entire structure. Hegel never did develop a philosophy of nature—the only hint of what it might have been is contained in the Encyclopedia under that heading.⁵ By the same token the philosophy of subjective spirit is—with the exception of the Phenomenology—nowhere explicitly developed by Hegel (although, as we shall see, there are both anthropological and psychological implications throughout his writings). Under the heading of philosophy of objective spirit come not only his Philosophy of Right, the last of his works published during his own lifetime, but also the many political writings which have contributed so much to modern constitutional theory. There is, of course, no difficulty in situating either his Lectures on the Philosophy of Art (better known as Aesthetics) or the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion along with the sixteen lectures on the proofs for the existence of God. Under the same heading of philosophy of religion we can also place his Early Theological Writings which, apparently, he never intended to publish. We have difficulty in placing only the Philosophy of History and the Lectures on the History of Philosophy. The former, it seems safe to say, could well fit under the philosophy of objective spirit. To situate the latter demands a bit of conjecture.

When, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel elaborates the three stages of consciousness of the absolute, he is careful to point out that the absolute of which spirit is conscious is one and the same throughout. What differs is the form of consciousness. In art the absolute is present to consciousness in sensible form; in religion the form is representation (Vorstellung, which may be translated “imaginative representation,” provided the term “imaginative” is not construed too narrowly); and in philosophy the form is thought, the only form of consciousness which is itself absolute. Now, it is not without significance that, in his teaching, Hegel developed a philosophy of art and a philosophy of religion; but nowhere does he present a philosophy of philosophy. It might, of course, be argued that the system in its entirety is precisely that, but it might also be pointed out that not only did he work out nine distinct courses on the history of philosophy but also in those courses he tells us exactly what philosophy is in a way he does not do elsewhere. It is precisely in and through its history that we see what philosophy is. On this interpretation, then, the history of philosophy would be the philosophy of philosophy, the coping stone of the philosophy of absolute spirit and of the whole Hegelian system. If nothing else, such an interpretation makes the Introduction to his Lectures on the History of Philosophy much more intelligible

THE PLACE OF THE INDIVIDUAL PHILOSOPHER

Before following out the indications given in this interpretation and thus attempting to make the Introduction more intelligible, let us say a word about the individual philosopher, who is, after all, the channel through which philosophy is transmitted. If philosophy has a history it is only because there have been philosophers who stand, as it were, as milestones along the path of human thought, revealing not only the distance that thought has traveled but also the direction in which it is traveling. It should be noted, however, that, although the name “philosophy” has been reserved for that which is pre-eminently a rational discipline, and although history has accorded the title “philosopher” only to those who have contributed to the rational elaboration of human experience, it is also true that the greatness of the great philosophers who “make” philosophy's history does not rest solely on the inner consistency or on the convincing power of such rational elaborations. Rather their greatness consists (as does that of the great artist or great religious genius) in the quality of their experience, in the capacity of this experience to reveal in a new way the possibilities of human experience. The philosopher's formulations of that experience, then, are precisely the provisional in his contribution, even though they do serve to point up the significance of the experience which he has elaborated and through which he leaves his mark on the experience of those who come after him. Although we cannot minimize our admiration for the rational structures they have bequeathed to us, the influence of a Plato or an Aristotle, a Kant or a Hegel, even of a Whitehead or a Dewey, is the result not of the perfection of these structures but of the profundity of an experience which a combination of philosophical genius and hard work has made possible and which the lucidity and power of their elaboration have enabled them to communicate. The great philosopher's experience, in its turn, is not significant simply because it is experience—as though experience infallibly delivered insight into the real—but because it is the experience of genius, a sort of witness to the capacity of human experience at its best. Thus, it would seem, we can say that each great philosopher has so experienced that his experience in a very special way both belongs to and helps constitute the sum-total of human experience. To the extent that this experience is philosophical, philosophy itself lives on in it.

It would be futile to attempt in a few lines or, for that matter, in a whole book to recapture the Hegelian philosophical experience, but we can begin doing so by pointing out that it was characterized first of all by an extraordinary confidence in reason. This confidence is opposed explicitly—and rather obviously—to the “romantic” glorification of emotion and intuition, which Hegel constantly characterized as an unwarranted short cut to knowledge. The absolute, he was sure, could be known in human thought, but only a systematic adherence to methodical thinking could make it known. Quite as explicitly but not so obviously, Hegel's confidence in reason was opposed to the sentimental rationalism of the “Enlightenment,” which first deified reason and then knelt down in adoration of its own creation, without asking whether this was truly reason or merely non-faith, non-authority, non-tradition. This confidence was not, finally, the confidence of a Kant or a Fichte, a confidence which Hegel admired and even shared, but which, he thought, did not go far enough, since it handed over to a kind of faith the ultimate concerns of human living and confined reason to mundane considerations, thus settling for a reason that is not truly reason.

Hegel's was rather the confidence of a Plato, an Aristotle, or a Spinoza, who saw rational thought as that which in the highest degree characterizes man as man and which should, therefore, characterize man when he is concerned with that which is of the highest interest to him. Like Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza, he saw reason as infallible, in the sense that what reason saw to be true could not be other than true; and, again like them, he saw reason as absolutely one, so that what any human reason saw to be necessarily true had to be true for any other reason which was truly reason. Had he gone no further than this, however, Hegel would have involved himself in the deceptive tautology of defining reason as thought functioning in such a way that what it affirmed had to be true, because if what was affirmed were not true it would not be reason that affirmed it. This would be to guarantee truth by an appeal to reason and at the same time to guarantee reason by an appeal to the truth of its affirmations. Kant had recognized this dilemma and had, therefore, instituted a “critique” of reason which would lay down the conditions for reason functioning as reason. In Hegel's eyes, however, this was equivalent either to using something other than reason to set down the rules of reason—like learning to swim before jumping into the water—or using reason to formulate a set of rules to validate its formulating these rules. The remedy for this was, as we saw in our account of the Phenomenology of Spirit, to follow consciousness from its first act of minimal awareness which had to be true, because it affirmed no more than that it was awareness, through all the successive purifications which were forced upon it by its own realization that it was not adequate to the implications of its very awareness, until it reached a form of awareness which was adequate to its content—i.e., the absolute. The result of this process was absolute reason, the function of absolute Spirit, and its thinking was philosophy. What Hegel seeks to do, then, is not to formulate the rules which would certify that thought is proceeding rationally, as Aristotle does in his logic, or to determine the conditions which must be fulfilled if reason is to be operative, as Kant does in his critiques, but to follow human consciousness until it reaches a level beyond which it cannot and need not go.⁶ To call this reason—or, better still, spirit as the fullness of reason—is simply to say that reason is thought at its very highest and best. This is the reason which can justifiably look into itself in order to see what is true, and what reason does at this high level is philosophy. Reasoning is the highest form of experience, and the highest form of reasoning is philosophy.

It would, of course, be saying too much to claim that each philosopher—even each “great” philosopher—in history has come up with a philosophy which corresponds with this exalted Hegelian notion of philosophy. Nor does Hegel make such a claim; strictly speaking, he does not even make that claim for his own philosophy. What inevitably forces itself on us when we read Hegel carefully and consistently is a conviction that reason itself must constantly recognize that it is not rational enough, that it is rational only to the extent that it becomes more rational, that being rational is a process which no philosophy exhausts. Reason is truly reason when it is not merely reason, when it becomes spirit; and spirit is inexhaustible, infinite. What Hegel does claim, then, is to have delineated the character of genuinely philosophical thinking and to have been able to trace a history in which this ideal is the guiding thread permitting him to situate the thought of individual thinkers, or of “schools,” in the overall movement. It was with a view to making this claim intelligible that the Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy was written.

Notes

1. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Meiner, 1934), Vol. I, p. 31. English translation by A. V. Miller (London: Unwin, 1969), p. 50.

2. Throughout this discussion and in the translation of Hegel's text it is inevitable that there will be a certain amount of arbitrariness in capitalizing or not capitalizing the term “spirit” (Geist). The German text, of course, offers no help whatever. Thus, each time the term occurs, a decision must be made, based on the context, about the meaning which Hegel intends. “Spirit” has, it would seem, at least five possible meanings (or connotations). (1) Absolute Spirit, which is the overall personalized Spirit which reveals itself progressively in the history of thinking in all its forms. It is, of course, debatable whether this Spirit should be identified with God, but the contrast noted above between “God” and “finite spirit” would seem to indicate that “Absolute Spirit” is infinite and, thus, scarcely distinguishable from God. (2) Each human individual, realized as what he most truly is, is “spirit” (participating, so to speak, in “Spirit”). (3) The “spirit” of a people or of an age, which is a sort of common source of collective activity. (4) “Spirit” is used as a sort of universal term, of which the other uses are instantiations. (5) There are instances when the term seems to combine all four of the above meanings. When the meaning is clearly the first or when it seems to be the fifth, the term will be capitalized. In all other occurrences it will not be capitalized.

3. The Phenomenology of Spirit (rather unfortunately translated Phenomenology of Mind) is Hegel's attempt to trace the process of experience from mere sensation to absolute knowing and, thus, to show that the movement toward knowing is one of progressive concretization. The Logic which follows upon this, then, is a logic of concrete thought.

4. There is an apparent conflict between the relationship of Moralität and Sittlichkeit here (the schema comes from the description of the whole system contained in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences) and that described in the Phenomenology. In the latter, Sittlichkeit is a somewhat vaguer stage leading up to the more conscious Moralität. Whatever conflict there may be, however, is one of terms rather than of concepts. Sittlichkeit simply does not have the same meaning in the two contexts.

5. With the publication, in 1923, of Hegel's Jenenser Logik Metaphysik und Naturphilosophie (2nd ed.; Hamburg: Meiner, 1957), of course, we have further manuscript evidence of how he developed a “philosophy of nature” (pp. 187-359), but even that is little more than a sketch.

6. When consciousness—or thought—has reached this “level,” we might say, it has discovered that there are no more pertinent questions to be asked. Strictly speaking, however, short of the totality of knowledge there are always pertinent questions still to be asked.