CRITIQUE OF HEGEL'S SYSTEM OF ABSOLUTE IDEALISM

The paper tries to give an overview of Hegel's absolute idealism and his justification of it, demonstrates a serious problem for this justification, and then draws some consequences from its failure.

This is a draft of the first chapter of my dissertation, On Being at Home in the Modern World: Hegel, Individuality, and Literature. It presents an overview of my interpretation of Hegel’s idealism and system, in terms of which the subsequent chapters develop a critical reinterpretation and defense of his philosophy of art. Comments most welcome.

It is the argument of this paper that Robert Pippin is wrong. What he is wrong about is, depending on one's point of view, either very interesting or exceedingly dull. I argue that he is wrong about the plausibility of his own non-metaphysical idealism. For such non- or anti-metaphysical idealism is, whatever else it is, very likely quite false to the facts of Hegel's idealism and for that reason inadequate to address the philosophical issues which Hegel's idealism raises. But this is to say that Pippin's position is a very implausible position to take concerning the truth about Hegel. I have endeavored to show, at least schematically, that and how all this is so. (This paper was written for a graduate seminar at Villanova University)

Springer eBooks, 1993

At the end of his masterful study Frege: The Philosophy of Language, Michael Dummett, the doyen of Frege scholarship, argues with a certain modicum of self-assurance that idealism, especially Hegel’s, “is by its very nature prone to slip into psychologism, although the possibility of a viable idealistic theory of meaning depends precisely upon the possibility of resisting this temptation.”1 Dummett claims furthermore that in “Frege’s day the kind of idealism that was everywhere prevalent in the philosophical schools was infected with psychologism through and through. [So] it was not until it had been decisively overthrown that it became possible to envisage a non-psychologistic version of idealism.”2 For Dummett, Frege presides over the requiem of idealism through his critique of psychologism, a critique which, by implication, would toss Hegel’s idealism into the historical litter basket that, in Dummett’s view, so obviously yawns for it.3

An advance on recent revisionist thinking about Hegelian philosophy, this book interprets Hegel’s achievement as part of a revolutionary modernization of ancient philosophical thought initiated by Kant. In particular, Paul Redding argues that Hegel’s use of hermeneutics, an emerging way of thinking objectively about intentional human subjects, overcame the major obstacle encountered by Kant in his attempt to modernize philosophy. The result was the first genuinely modern, hermeneutic, and “nonmetaphysical” philosophy.

A Companion to Nineteenth Century Philosophy, 2019

A systematic summary of Hegel's encyclopaedic philosophy with a general introduction to his method and discussions of the Logic, Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy of Geist and concluding remarks about Hegel's non-systematic works.

1984

The present project has been fortunate in receiving support without which it certainly would not have now been completed. Most importantly, a grant from the Translations Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities permitted full-time work on the volume in 1979-80. Appreciation is expressed in particular for the advice and encouragement of Susan Mango of the National Endowment. In the March 16, 1981, issue of Newsweek magazine, the lead-off question in an article on the Endowment asked: "if synthetic fuels and child-nutrition programs were on the block, after all, who would go to bat for. . . the first book-length edition of Hegel's letters in English" [p. 28]. Hegel himself, the reader will see, went to bat philosophically for the sort of European type of "rational state" which is prepared to support such undertakings, Of course, without the Endowment grant the project might still have been completed, though in less timely fashion, with the support given by the state of Indiana to its universities. But, without attempting to address here the serious philosophical issue raised by the above quotation, it is surely permitted to thank those who in fact have gone to bat for this particular undertaking. They include Professors Moltke Gram and H. S. Harris. Harris, who consented to serve as an NEH consultant for the project, painstakingly reviewed much of the manuscript. Appreciation is also expressed to Mr. Richard Meiner of Felix Meiner Verlag-publisher of the German edition of the letters which has primarily been used for translationfor his encouragement over several years, and for his willingness to make page proofs of supplementary letters to the German edition available prior to publication. The commentary is particularly indebted to the annotational and biographical work of Johannes Hoffmeister and Friedheim Nicolin contained in the Felix Meiner edition. Hoffmeister has been frequently cited with regard to specific interpretations, but throughout he has been the most frequent source of dates, titles, names, and immediate historical data. The American Philosophical Society and Indiana University must be thanked for funding Christiane Seiler to do bibliographical and documentary work at the Hegel Archiv in West Germany. A Fulbright Summer Travel grant to Clark Butler in 197 4 was the real beginning of the present commentary. Professor Otto Poggeler, Director of the Hegel Archiv, and his staff -especially Drs. Helmut Schneider and Walter Jaeschke-are to be thanked for their assistance. Assistance with Latin was obtained from Margaret Vojtko and John Brennan of Indiana-Purdue Ft. Wayne (IPFW), and from Professor Waldemar Degner of Concordia Theological Seminary, Ft. Wayne. Margaret Vojtko translated the one letter which is entirely in Latin [30a]. Finally, the help provided by students and clerical personnel cannot be ignored:

This paper examines Hegel's claim that philosophy " has no other object than God " as a claim about the essentiality of the idea of God to philosophy. on this idealist interpretation, even atheistic philosophies would presuppose rationally evaluable ideas of God, despite denials of the existence of anything corresponding to those ideas. This interpretation is then applied to Hegel's version of idealism in relation to those of two predecessors, leibniz and Kant. Hegel criticizes the idea of the Christian God present within his predecessors in terms of his own heterodox reading of the Trinity in order to resolve a paradox affecting them – the " paradox of perspectivism " .