New Biography of Hegel

Hegel: The Philosopher of Freedom by Klaus Vieweg (German ed. 2019; English tr. 2023) is a highly acclaimed new biography of Hegel. Even more so than the also good one by Terry Pinkard, it provides evidence refuting longstanding misinformation about Hegel, and especially his political views. It gives more of a sense of what kind of person Hegel was and what his core values were than anything I’ve seen before. This background will be good to bear in mind for the upcoming treatment of Heidegger’s claims about Hegel.

Hegel comes across as warm, sociable, witty, deeply concerned with equality, and personally courageous. Vieweg says that his extensive engagement with the arts has been underappreciated, and that Hegel’s lectures on art basically gave birth to art history as a discipline. He also says the place of both ancient and modern skepticism in Hegel’s formation has been underestimated, and in particular that Hegel’s distinctive notion of negation reflects a skeptical heritage.

“The two pillars of [Hegel’s] thinking are freedom and reason…. He is the most famous figure in modern philosophy, arguably its greatest master…. Today, Hegel’s portrait deserves to be finally liberated from clichés and grotesque fairy tales” (ibid).

“Reason” in Hegel generally means something holistic, never mere logic chopping. “Freedom” is a key topic throughout German Idealism, and a subject of much ambiguous rhetoric. Its meanings include both civil liberties and something called free will. But Hegel at least — like Paul Ricoeur — has a clearly non-voluntarist notion of free will that is one of his most important ideas (see Actualization of Freedom; Hegel on Willing).

Vieweg emphasizes Hegel’s deep commitment to democratic or “republican” politics. Hegel took personal risks as a firm supporter of the moderate Girondin faction of the French Revolution, as well as defending the legal reforms of the Napoleonic Code, which ended the legal basis for aristocratic privilege. He repeatedly went to great lengths to defend students who had been arrested by the police. He could have been charged with treason for delivering a letter to a revolutionary in Paris.

“In Berlin, Hegel established himself as the premier intellectual opponent of the Restoration…. The secret police were watching him all along…; it was widely known that Hegel supported traitors and revolutionary students” (p. 3).

“Hegel was among ‘the first to really conceptualize people as social beings. He ushered in a normative, free era of thought ” (p. 6).

“According to Hegel, … a person is the ‘sum of their deeds’. It is our actions that show what lies deep within us” (p. 9).

Robert Pippin has very thoroughly developed this point in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy.

“A life should not be seen as ‘internally congruent’ but rather full of ‘strange interwoven branching paths’, which are affected by contingencies…. In Hegel’s own words, the particularity of a person, the unique, the ‘individual character’, is the most important thing” (ibid).

Individual character is emergent, and it is an accomplishment. I think Paul Ricoeur’s work on “narrative identity” is more Hegelian than Ricoeur himself recognized..

“Lawrence Stern’s Tristram Shandy, one of Hegel’s favorite books, posits that a biography should depict a person’s character such that the reader can discern the subject’s ruling passions. Hegel describes these quintessences, these crucial inner attitudes and motivations, by the Greek word pathos, and calls them the ‘self-justifying power of the mind, which holds rationality and free will'” (ibid).

“A life should be reconstructed in all its dimensions and perspectives, its changing circumstances, experiments, continuities, and moments of transition, for it contains all the errors and confusions of a human ‘I’: an ‘independent unity’ of countless deeds and episodes, synthesizing diverse personality traits that were, when they were being lived out, incoherent and full of self-contradictions. The identity, that which stays ‘true to itself’ throughout the changes, should and can only be determined afterwards” (pp. 9-10).

Similarly, unity of apperception is an emergence, and a tendency that reconstitutes itself at every moment. It can be treated as static only in hindsight, and it is never pre-given.

“[B]iography is but a medium for a plea for free thought. To use Lawrence Stern’s words: it must be an attack on stupidity, on any and all superstition, on vanity, on rationalizing dogma and fanaticism, on scholars lolling on the floor with their inkpots, on pompous philosophers. The most important thing to clarify is that Hegel sought to make philosophy the most rigorous form of knowledge, and that reason and freedom remained the common thread and continual credo of his entire life” (p.11).

In this example of unity of apperception and biography, we can see how the theoretical and the practical are being thoroughly intermingled.

“Let us get this straight: at every stage of his work, Hegel stood for free republican ideals, . against the Restoration and conservative models of thought” (p. 12).

“To philosophize: to think and live freely” (p.13).

“They were up against a strong and despotic nobility” (p. 18).

“With respect to his budding philosophical interests, we may note his occupation with Epictetus’s understanding of freedom and self-determination, which was inspired by Aristotle’s thoughts on prohairesis” (p. 22).

With this reference to Aristotle and Epictetus, we again have an indication that Hegel’s talk of free will should not be interpreted voluntaristically.

“As early as 1787, in Stuttgart, the seventeen-year-old Hegel distanced himself from the religious vision that ‘all-powerful God rules at will'” (p. 25). “He referred to Rousseau’s view of God in Émile, which turns against the superstition inherent in all religions and against the notion that God brings happiness and unhappiness, and portrays God as connected with all ideas of understanding and good” (p. 26).

For years, I could not understand why Kant and Hegel would esteem Rousseau so highly, when Rousseau is an anti-rationalist voluntarist. The answer is that it was not his rather shallow “philosophy” that attracted them, but his practical and literary views of politics and religion and human goodness. And much of Hegel’s engagement with Rousseau was through the poet Schiller.

“Hegel was also a great admirer of poetry…. Hegel liked Schiller’s tone” (p. 28). “Schiller likened Rousseau’s philosophy to Prometheus’s fire which provided arms against the horrors of poverty and ‘demonic self-interest'” (p. 29).

The French Revolution’s “declaration of inalienable human rights and its first article — ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights’ — as well as Rousseau’s and Kant’s philosophy of autonomy — were suggestions and challenges for the young Hegel” (p. 32).”The [French] Revolution was motivated by philosophy; Hegel called it ‘the dawn of freedom’…. [F]reedom means rights for all humanity” (p. 36).

“[R]eports from the French capital proclaimed the the importance of philosophy for revolution — ‘the breath of life which is philosophy has reached every atom of civil society’ — and educated people far and wide on the concept of human rights” (p. 37).

All this is what Hegel means by freedom — human rights and civil liberties, nothing metaphysical.

[The poet] Hölderlin called his friend a genius; Schelling saw Hegel, with his bold and Kant-inspired philosophical revolution, as the one who would most ‘tear apart the web of stupid superstitions'” (ibid). “Rousseau’s and Kant’s ideas would help him construct a more profound subjective religion, a folk religion, which ‘goes hand in hand with freedom’…. Religion is one of the most important subjects, a Hegelian fragment declares. Hegel also loved Schiller’s Sturm und Drang poem ‘The Gods of Greece’…, with its provocative line ‘For gods were more human / and so humans were more divine’, not to mention Goethe’s creed, his invective against childlike faith. Meanwhile, Rousseau saw humankind not as burdened by original sin but as born free and good” (pp. 43-44, emphasis in original.).

“Schelling quoted Lessing almost verbatim in a letter to Hegel: ‘Orthodox concepts of the divine are not for me — hen kai pan! [one and all!] I know no other. Hölderlin also invokes hen kai pan in Hegel’s journal” (p. 44, emphasis in original).

This candid remark by the revered literary figure Lessing, along with Lessing’s enthusiastic endorsement of Spinoza, created a huge stir when publicized by the anti-rationalist literary figure F. H. Jacobi in the 1780s. Jacobi was a proponent of intuition and immediacy as superior to reason. He claimed that reason leads to atheism and anarchy.

“Theologians tore down Rousseau’s arguments, which Hegel proceeded to rebuild in his critique of Tübingen’s Christian teachings: ‘respect for Spinoza, Shaftesbury, Rousseau, and Kant’s virtue and morality'” (p. 45).

“Supernaturalist theology, according to which rights have their origins in heaven and are a revelation, went against the autonomy of reason…. The second theological pillar Hegel attacked is original sin” (p. 46).

Rousseau may have been the first modern European writer to publicly oppose original sin. But such a belief is also utterly alien to Plato and Aristotle.

“At the core of Hegel’s thinking is the famous image of the Reich Gottes: an inner life, not a physical church or a positive religion but an invisible church, a realm of morality. One enters not not through external forces like subordination, cults, or belief in miracles but rather, as Hegel answers Kant, by speaking and conducting one’s life in accordance with moral law” (pp. 46-47).

Invisibility here is not any kind of occult property, but a poetic name for universality. There is a close link between universality and considerations of equality.

“While still in Tübingen, Hegel diagnosed society as being harmfully detached from nature; instead, he advocated, people should recognize the power of nature. Much as we emphasize the legitimacy of spirit and the laws of reason, he wrote, ‘we must do the same when considering humankind in general: the sensuality of their lives, the dependence of the inner and outer natures, the effects of their surroundings, the desires of their senses’. And reason is to life as spices to a dish: it determines the taste of the whole thing. Like a light that shines through all of nature, reason is not a substance of old metaphysics but ‘looks, like light, different for each object'” (p. 47).

“Meanwhile, enlightenment through the cultivation of understanding is indispensable despite deficits. Hegel always based his philosophical understanding of nature on the latest science…. [W]ithout this kind of analytical understanding, there could be no reason” (ibid).

“Spinoza’s deus sive natura argued against the dualistic division between spirit and nature…. Reason and sensuality, moral law and bliss are all equally important to the development of humankind and free will. This comes from the view that humankind ‘is made of sensuality and reason together’ and is also how [Hegel] critiqued Enlightenment conceptions of bliss, ‘those hawkers of empirical cure-alls’, as well as Kant” (p. 48).

And I want to say that this non-division of reason and sensuality is good Aristotelianism, even if many of Aristotle’s later readers downplay it.

“Pyrrhonist skepticism… would be very important to Hegel (p. 42). “Hegel lived at the height of the revival of skepticism and Pyrrhonism (an ancient form of radical skepticism). [Hegel’s first biographer] Rosenkranz insisted that the principle of harsh, unbiased, true skeptical inspection was key to Hegel’s philosophical development. The revival of skepticism in the 1790s, especially Pyrrhonism and skeptical Kantianism, is often unfairly dismissed as a marginal event in Hegel’s life. But we are missing a huge part of Hegel’s thinking if we do not consider them. His conception of negativity was, without a doubt, a turning point in his philosophical growth. [The leading Pyrrhonist] Sextus Empiricus was, starting in Tübingen, a symbol for the exclusivity of Hegel’s absolute ideals of freedom. The young Hegel’s critical and skeptical thinking begins with Fichte’s response to Leonhard Creuzer and Gottlob Ernst (Aenesidemus) Schulze. He went from his philosophical critiques of the Frankfurt parallel reading on Plato and Sextus to his Jena Skeptizismusuafsatz (On Skepticism) to the project of the Phenomenology of Spirit as a self-fulfilling skepticism” (p. 49).

Hume already pointed out that ancient Pyrrhonic skepticism is very different from the kind of skepticism that people began to worry about after Descartes. For one thing, skepticism came to be regarded as a nihilistic position to refute, rather than as the kind of intellectual scruples we see Hegel reaching for here.

Vieweg’s phrase of “self-fulfilling skepticism” in connection with the arc of development across Hegel’s Phenomenology seems to mean the same kind of thing that I mean when I provocatively suggest that Hegelian “absolute” knowledge is principally distinguished by a thoroughgoing recognition of the relativity and conditioned character of knowledge claims.

“The heated controversies on skepticism were a huge motivation for Hegel’s astonishing philosophical development between 1790 and 1810. And [the skeptic] Schulze, an astute man who attacked Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, was an especially important agent provocateur. Schulze pushed Fichte and Hegel to revise their ideas and drafts more carefully. It all started in the Stift [Tübingen]: skeptical thinking instilled in the young revolutionaries both Pyrrhonic and skeptical Kantian methods, ‘a fundamentally unique part of transcendental philosophy’, two forms of anti-dogmatism par excellence” (ibid).

“Hegel was taken by the Pyrrhonists’ understanding of themselves not as lethargic doubters but harsh, unbiased scouts and inspectors who weighed pros and cons. He loved the Greek root word, skepsis, meaning investigation and proof, and Hume’s characterization of skeptics as diligent inspectors and critics. The principle of isothenia — for every opinion there is an opposite, equally valid opinion — is a cry against mere opinionation. Hegel had encountered this isothenic-antinomian motivation in Plato’s Parmenides as well as in Aristotle. The implicit or explicit presence of isothenia and antinomy would assist Hegel’s future conceptions of negativity and contradiction” (p. 50).

The skeptics’ real point is to advocate suspension of judgment. We could advocate suspension of judgment without making the positive claim that all opinions are equal, and this would allow us to embrace a kind of skepticism without destroying the possibility of discourse. Saying all opinions are equal is like saying everything is an illusion. It obliterates distinction, but without distinction there can be no meaning or understanding. In spite of this, there have been a few people who tried to seriously sustain such a claim. Hegel too sometimes writes as if things were more evenly balanced than I think they could be, but he certainly would not countenance any wholesale obliteration of distinctions.

“The images of the ‘free republican’ and of a rationally formed society of self-possessed, free agents were a big part of this ‘young generation’s ideal’. Such a way of life would require a republican national education. All people, regardless of culture, nationality, ethnicity, gender, religion, and so forth are born free, and all have the right to a free life…. Their ideal of freedom and brotherhood were part of the reason for Hegel’s interest in stoicism, especially Epictetus [who was himself a slave], who doubled as a symbol of overcoming slavery through education. Meanwhile the ideals of the Stoic Marcus Aurelius took equal rights and freedom to a new, universal level: the polis became cosmopolitan. We are all citizens of one state. The world is a public under a great law, the general law of reason” (pp. 51-52).

Here we see a French Revolution style linking of freedom with equal rights. And on this kind of topic, we get to see Stoicism in a sympathetic light.

I should write on Epictetus one of these days. His ethical focus is almost entirely independent of the representationalist-realist dogmatism in Stoicism that I often use as a negative reference in contrast to Plato and Aristotle. (Many other aspects of Stoic ethics, physics and logic are interesting as well. It is what Kant calls dogmatism that I object to. The historic characterization of then-dominant Stoicism as “dogmatism” by other ancient philosophers is the source of Kant’s usage of the term.)

“Hegel was an ardent advocate for separation of church and state: only in the ‘unhappiest countries’ do ‘religious leaders rule’. Hegel was also against the idea that religion and morality are inherently inseparable; he insisted, in fact, that they be divided. National religion (Volksreligion) and freedom of conscience must be able to coexist. Hegel favored free thought as portrayed in Schiller’s Don Carlos, … and he referenced Lessing’s Nathan the Wise as he argued for a diversity of religions and perspectives. Neither church nor state, he also argued, nor ‘fanatic priests nor decadent despots’ could issue ‘any commands or prohibitions’ on morality and religion; otherwise, as he would later add, there arises fanaticism, his word for fundamentalism. Neither church nor state can send out moral overseers, judges who measure morality with ‘a religious ruler'” (p. 52).

Genuine morality cannot be based on obedience to commands. (But fortunately, Plato and Aristotle never proposed such a thing.)

“In 1794, German idealism was born in Jena, with Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge, a text that sparked the single most creative decade in the history of philosophy” (pp. 58-59).

“Meanwhile, there were stormy skies ahead for the French Revolution…. As [Hegel] would later say, Robespierre’s answer to everything ‘was la mort!‘ [death!]. Despite these profound conflicts, Hegel remained — unlike many contemporary German intellectuals — loyal to the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity and would eventually become the philosopher of modern freedom” (p. 59).

“Something is not true just because people posit or assume it, because it is an accepted fact, or because everyone agrees that it is so. As for censorship, Hegel’s thoughts on positive religion, as well as his Rousseau- and Kant-inspired Life of Jesus, would have generated tremendous outcry…. Hegel wisely kept [these] manuscripts to himself” (p. 60).

“The second constant was his employment of poetic devices in philosophical argumentation, his appeal to the senses, his use of his vast literary knowledge. This set him apart from Kant and Fichte, whose literary and artistic knowledge was rather limited” (ibid).

This is a significant point. Hegel employs a great many figures of speech, and has a high linguistic awareness. This is not just idiosyncrasy.

“His Berne writings, for example, combined Lessing’s Nathan and its thoughts on religious tolerance with ancient Greek tragedy, which thematizes human accountability and responsibility (Oedipus Rex) and the collision of different ethical principles (Antigone)” (p. 61).

“He was concentrating on developing a unique, systematic way of philosophizing, in which he does not separate the themes of religion, art, and education” (ibid, emphasis in original).

That is an interesting different take on “system”.

“Ultimately, Hegel’s thoughts culminated in a radical critique of all authoritarian religion. For him, the important thing was to develop a new way of educating people…. Going back to Lessing, Rousseau, and Kant, Hegel believed that only a natural and rational religion could count as a religion, not this positive faith that only served to establish external authority. No one should be blindly obedient to laws they have not themselves made. And religions of obedience are founded not in the freedom of the will or any kind of freedom at all but in subordination….The court of moral law, as he put it, has the question ‘Rational or irrational?’ engraved over its doorway” (pp. 62-63).

“Thinking of Lessing, he wrote that if Jesus teaches a pure moral religion, how could Christianity become positive, that is, authoritarian? ‘The objectivity of divinity goes hand in hand with corruption and the enslavement of humankind’…. This ‘downfall’ replaces reason with miracles. The higher power lies in a totally unknown world, which we do not share…. The most disturbing thing is that, in the name of this ‘objective’ God, one ‘murders, slanders, burns, steals, lies, and betrays’. Such a distorted religion is the ‘tool’, ‘advocate’, and ‘fiery praise of the ungodly crime’ of soul-sucking despotism. With that said, Hegel knew that rights cannot exist without positive rights and that religion cannot exist without positivity” (p. 63).

“Nothing had done more to make religion authoritarian than belief in miracles” (p. 64).

“After the fall of the Jacobins, Hegel distanced himself from the folk religion idea and ended up emphasizing the separation of church and state. All his ponderings about folk education wound up being fundamentally unviable; his search for a close connection between Rousseau and Kant brought no great results. But as he considered original sin, his folk education project came back into the picture. He began attacking both theological and Kantian positions by emphasizing human self-respect: People are not sinners nor carved out of crooked timber, and they must never be treated with disdain” (p. 65).

“While Hegel was in Berne, his theories did not paint a picture of decadence and decay, even though he was influenced by Rousseau…. Hegel foresaw no downfall, nor was he pessimistic. Instead, he describes a human tendency toward authoritarian despotism and argues against subordination and for an ideal of freedom. One can see how he distanced himself from Rousseau. Inalienable human rights, he writes, are the ‘beautiful sparks of reason’; slaves and servants will not behave like sheep forever. The supposedly subordinated ones have no duty toward a higher power, since they have human rights. Yet rights and duty are indivisible…. When people are subjugated, they are wounded in the most profound way. People’s rights are infinite, inalienable, and absolute. In the Berner Briefen, Hegel asks: Why did it take humanity so long to realize that this dignity lies at the center of things?” (ibid).

“[M]easured, carefully articulated withdrawal from Kant, Fichte, and Schelling was accompanied by praise of their work…. [Hegel] called for dignity, human freedom, and a cosmopolitan, anti-despotic way of thinking…. Now he proposed an anti-Kantian ‘amalgam of sensuality and reason’. One must not divide intention from result, reason from sensuality…. So Hegel bid adieu to Kant’s deontology, despite having consulted it for many early fragments about freedom. This was inevitable: Hegel focused on friendship and love, while Kant worked ‘in a world of intangible ideas’, a stranger to the five senses…. He … pits love against asceticism. Ascetics want to tax every thought, control every feeling, crush one’s joy, love, friendship and social life — things that Hegel valued tremendously his whole life long” (pp. 66-67).

The friendship and love and anti-ascetism here all sound like Aristotle.

“Hegel further opposed the dogma of the ‘sin we are naturally born with’, that is, original sin. He believed that people must take responsibility for their actions; only then can free will exist…. One is only responsible for one’s actions if one undertook them knowingly and with an awareness of the law…. People are not deficient because of their sensual desires; they are natural beings, not sinful weeds in God’s garden”(p. 67).

Free will here basically means unimpaired reason.

His first systematic-philosophical manuscript from 1795 “is full of reservations about Fichte’s, Kant’s, and Reinhold’s notions of freedom. In the first place, they all think they need to master nature: they conceptualize the unity of reason and nature, but one is the master while the other is mastered…. Free thought does not come from assuring people that there is support from on high…. And in regard to nature, there can be no relationship of ‘master’ and ‘slave'” (p. 68).

As Brandom has especially emphasized, Hegel is utterly opposed to the idea of “mastery” that is sometimes foisted on him.

“Hegel … identified the fatal flaw in all abstract concepts of unity: How does one derive different concrete things from a vague, even empty unity?” (p. 70). Manuscript 41 from 1795 says “where subject and object, or freedom and nature, are thus unified, so that nature is freedom and subject is not to be divided from object, that is divine” (p. 71). “With unified thought, it cannot be about master and servant; it cannot be that the subject is powerful while the object is submissive, nor vice versa. Right after arriving in Frankfurt, though it created a huge burden of proof, Hegel would say that the true hen kai pan [one and all] is love” (ibid).

“In the fight against ‘living in chains’, against being ‘rowers in a galley’, against political and religious despotism, against all master/slave structures, Hegel employs the principle that people must live exclusively by laws that they have made for themselves” (p. 76).

“[T]he core of modernity is freedom of thought (Meinung, ‘opinion’), knowledge (Wissenschaft), art, and religion. The ‘coincidental differences of opinion and belief’, people who think or believe differently, must be respected. A good citizen should believe whatever they want; yet the Holy Inquisition and colonizers ‘avenged the offended majesty of God through murder’, upon indigenous peoples, pagans, Muslims, and Jews…. These hypocrites profess sympathy or love toward people whom they really see as deeply mistaken just because they have differing beliefs…. [A] clear distinction must be made between legality and morality. A ‘virtuous state’, whether it comes from religious fundamentalism or a Robespierre-like regime, tends to exclude all people who think differently, making them seem like deviants and promoting fanaticism” (pp. 76-77).

“Hegel repeatedly distinguishes between beautiful, free imagination and its ‘adventurous excesses and images of a terrifying world’. The latter is the source of prejudice” (p. 78).

“The ideal of his youth can be summed up in a single word: freedom. Freedom as Rousseau, Schiller, Kant, and Fichte defined it, in the spirit of the French Revolution” (p. 87).

“From the Romans, who owned slaves and indulged in their vices, to the wild ‘barbarians’ and the Italian city-states, to the monarchies that held their people in bondage, it is an ambiguous history, full of great scientific and artistic achievements but also of banning and censorship…. Christianity preached love of one’s fellow humans and equality; yet under the Spanish cross, entire populations of Native Americans were being wiped out. The English sang songs praising the destruction of India” (p. 97).

“Positive faith creates a master/slave structure, through abstract opposition and heteronomy. This is no sign of the ‘Reich Gottes’ (Kingdom of God), for nothing that rules me, within or without, can be godly…. Hegel looked to Aristotle to demonstrate the unity of humanity and God. The actualization of divine reason in an active life, as an individual, containing opposition, must be understood in this way (p. 101).

“Nothing that rules me can be godly” — I like that.

“Humans and God must be imagined as being of the ‘same nature’, which is spirit itself imagined by spirit (human beings)…. In 1799, Hegel described the divine as ‘the highest freedom, whose existence and relationship to the world comes in the form of beauty’…. Miracles illustrate the extreme of positive or objective religion; the ‘most ungodly’ lies in creatio ex nihilo [creation from nothing]. In the context of religion, too, Hegel is concerned with the insufficiency of unity without diversity: disdain for the diversity of life leads only to fanaticism. If the divine is pure, shapeless, and unconnected, then it follows that everything else must be impure and loathsome. It also leads to the idea that people who worship different gods are ‘unbelievers’. Those who hate all gods but their own must ‘carry a hatred of all humankind in their pocket'” (pp. 101-102).

“To Hegel, an avid reader of Shakespeare, love between two people… represents the ‘finding of one in the other’…. ‘The more I give, the more I have. The individual finds within the other a way to be free” (p. 102).

“Hegel did not see humans as Fremdlinge (aliens) in nature or Pfichtlinge (dutiful beings) in the moral world. Regardless of categorical imperatives, they have a right to happiness and well-being, to act on their desires; duty and desire cannot be pitted against each other. In religion, God must be imagined as a ‘friendly being’, and humans must be not only beings of duty but beings of joy, love, and laughter…. In Frankfurt, Hegel changed his terminology, ‘unifying’ morality and legality into a higher term. As Rosenkranz puts it, ‘first came simply life, later came ethical life” (p. 103).

“Aristotle’s Metaphysics, book 12, was particularly important for his understanding life as identity” (p. 106).

“Truth is freedom from ruling / being ruled” (ibid).

“Beginning in the autumn of 1801, he was close to Goethe, and they often went together to the theater” (p. 113).

“Dogmas generally come in the form of presuppositions without evidence: assumptions, revelations, empty assurances…. Each of these approaches assumes that there is something before reflection, beyond reflection — spontaneous, given facts, the unchangeable. All are variations of the myth of the given. An unexamined assumption, a pure reassurance, cannot found or ground a philosophy, because critical examination remains suspended. Immediacy, if merely assumed, is fraudulently acquired: a fatal leap into belief or faith, akin to an appeal to oracles” (p. 120).

“Instead of ‘I = I’, the postulate is ‘I should be I’, only a demand for unification, a unification that will never happen” (ibid).

“No logical path leads from pure unity to duality or diversity, and vice versa. In Plotinus’s Neoplatonism, the One is supposed to metaphorically radiate outward. Fichte also made an illegitimate leap in logic, from the ‘I’ to the ‘not-I’…. Finding evidence (Beweis) for the beginning forced Hegel to drastically change his strategy of thinking while still in Jena” (p. 128).

“Reading Aristotle and Fichte, Hegel understood thought and will as different but not as confronting each other; in each, the theoretical and the practical are connected…. Reason must stand against both dogmatism and skepticism — against Plotinus’s example of empty unity, empty monism, and against Sextus’s example of mere division, empty dualism…. Philosophical thinking cannot accept pure immediacy, or anything prereflective…. [T]he key concept of ‘ethical life’ (Sittlichkeit) aims at a philosophy of concrete self-determination” (p. 130).

“True ethical life must overcome extremes, both for private subjects that are only for themselves and for empty and abstract generalities” (p. 133). “True ethical life claims the identity of the universal and the particular in form and content: concrete freedom” (p. 134).

Vieweg quotes from an 1803 fragment, “Geist is not being, but becoming; it comes from negation and, having prepared for itself the ideal element of nothingness, can move freely. Geist is but the elevation of its other; this other self is nature; Geist makes this other and itself the same…. Geist recognizes that this nature, or otherness, is not actually other. This knowledge makes Geist free, for the first time truly Geist…. Only by leaving itself and returning to find itself can Geist prove itself Geist” (p. 139, ellipses in original).

“With a precise categorical definition of development, he countered the relativist mantra of procedure as an endless cycle of self-creation and self-destruction up until the bad infinity of St. Neverland Day. There is no lottery without a payout; the purpose of being-in-oneself becomes real when it becomes for-oneself…. Second, he defined the relationship with oneself as knowing” (p. 140).

“Hegel fought against the fiction of pure, unconditional immediacy, and abhorrent dogmatic assurances of a pure immediate, setting against these assertions the skeptical climbing of the ‘rope ladder of logic”. Skepticism was his weapon against what is supposedly sacrosanct, primordial, prereflective doubt, or skepsis, is the opposite of the pure immediate” (p. 142).

“[H]e continued his debate with skepticism and sharpened his concept of negativity, a point whose importance is still underrated” (p. 143).

“The monadic-solipsistic ego is only able to achieve self-consciousness in a thinking self-relation through the sublation of its imaging and yearning self-relation, only through knowledge of the will, which is thus conceived as a universal will and is essentially being-recognized” (p. 144, emphasis in original).

“He was working to overcome the paradigm of consciousness” (p. 148, emphasis in original).

“Hegel wrote a popular, accessible essay called ‘Who Thinks Abstractly?’ This little gem is an excellent place to start on Hegel’s philosophy; it addresses the main barrier to philosophy — namely, that it is too abstract: ‘Metaphysics, thought, and abstraction are words that make everyone run away more or less as if from the plague’. Hegel’s answer to the titulary question is perhaps surprising: it is the uneducated who think abstractly, not the educated. Abstract thinking means, for example, seeing in a murderer nothing but the abstract fact of being a murderer, thereby denying them everything else — their concreteness, the fact that they may also be a strong, attractive person on whom the sun likewise shines; an uneducated person thinks abstractly, reducing a person to a single predicate” (p. 185).

“‘The answer that Robespierre gave to everything: whatever anyone said, thought, did, or wanted, he cried, La mort! It became repetitive’. Schelling’s absolute knowing is the same: ‘great broom, sweeping everything away'” (p. 186).

“Hegel wrote the Philosophy of Right inspired by the spirit of 1789. The Restoration proved a danger to his publishing it. (It is a double irony that Hegel-haters today call him a Restoration ideologue.)” (p.269).

“Hegel was a danger to the Restoration. In his lectures and books, he insisted fearlessly on free thought. He supported students who stood accused of treason” (p. 270). “Hegel spoke with hotheaded youths, sympathizing with their yearning for freedom and discouraging nationalism and anti-Semitism, evidently with some success…. [H]is Philosophy of Right proved that theories of nationalism, especially those that excluded Jewish and French people, were absurd” (p. 271). “The secret police, inevitably, kept an eye on him, for he was supporting ‘traitors’…. And yet, despite all this, there are still those who call Hegel a Restoration apologist. They should read the Philosophy of Right, which is arguably history’s greatest book against Restoration ideology, against nationalism, colonialism, and racism, and for a modern society of freedom and justice” (p. 272).

“The preface to the Philosophy of Right is one of the most misunderstood texts in philosophical history….. [Hegel] would be vilified for his universalism and his rejection of German chauvinism, nationalism, and racism at key moments in later history — 1870, 1914, and 1933″ (p. 274).

“Not everything that exists is ‘actual’ (wirklich); only rational forms have that attribute. Positive rights cannot be equated with the right of reason (Vernunftrecht)…. What exists is not the standard, as the Prussian state would have it, but rather reason: the standard and the court where ‘rights’ must justify themselves. In a lecture Hegel said, ‘What is actual (wirklich), is rational. But not all is actual, that exists” (p. 275).

“In colloquial speech, actuality encompassed every ‘stunted, transitory existence’. Vieweg quotes Hegel, “But when I speak of actualization (Wirklichkeit), one should instantly wonder in what sense I use this expression, for I also discussed actuality in the Logic and I do not just mean contingencies, which do exist. I have precisely distinguished actuality from Dasein, existence, and other categories'” (ibid).

“The prologue also includes one of the most beautiful metaphors in philosophy: ”The owl of Minerva begins her flight when dawn breaks’, The cliched, pessimistic interpretation is that philosophy comes too late. But Hegel described the French revolution as a glorious sunrise: for the first time, there was a constitution based on rights” (ibid). The modern world represents the ‘dawn’ of history, the highest stage of freedom. First, it suggests that a free society can realize the singular freedom of all subjects. Dawn and sunrise stand for the French Revolution” (p. 276).

“Relationships such as master/slave and despotism are not forms of freedom: both ‘master’ and ‘slave’ are unfree, as is the despot; they are ‘in the same relationship’ of unfreedom. People’s reciprocal recognition is intrinsic to Hegel’s free will. The idea of interpersonality appeared in the Encyclopedia back in 1817: a person is ‘realized only in the being of other people’; only then am I ‘a real person for me‘. The principle of recognition is fundamental in the Philosophy of Right. It is the substance of true community, of friendship, love, family, state. Abstract right demands that I ‘be a person’, and with regard to intersubjectivity, ‘respect every other “I” as a person, a subject with rights’…. All actions that do not respect a person as a subject with free will or interfere with their freedom are unfree. Third, Hegel has a concept that goes back to Kant and Fichte: every being with free will is — unlike a thing — its own end” (p. 281).

“The three dimensions — recognition, inviolability, and the end in itself — all concern people’s equality in their ‘humanity’, with their right to personality/personhood and are the foundation of human rights…. Every being with free will has the absolute right to recognition of their person” (ibid).

But at the same time, “Equating arbitrariness with freedom is a theoretical fallacy” (p. 296).

“Having finished the Philosophy of Right, Hegel became one of the main inspirations for the explosion of poetry in the 1820s…. Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art, which were about modern and Romantic literature and art in general, were especially important to them” (p. 318). “Hegel was a big part of the Berlin musical scene….’Hegel was especially at home in the company of Berlin women, and quickly they, too, came to care for and look after him, the good and humorous professor'” (p. 320).

“Hegel’s success and polemical statements also inspired jealousy, hatred, and rejection….Hegel had friendly, collegial relationships with many fellow intellectuals…. But he also had influential enemies” (p. 327). “The nobility, correctly, did not find Hegel to be a Prussian political philosopher, a royalist; in fact, he was one of the most philosophically dangerous enemies of the Restoration” (pp. 327-328).