Hegel: Adept

Six dialogues through the system itself

A course on the thought of G. W. F. Hegel.

What you will learn

  • Explain the Phenomenology's method: consciousness measured against its own criterion, the reader as participant
  • Trace the path's major stations and what each contributes: sense-certainty, perception, understanding, self-consciousness, reason, spirit
  • Reconstruct the instrument argument: critique-before-cognition is the Scholastic learning to swim on dry land
  • Run the empty-formalism objection on Kant's own deposit example and state what the universalization test secretly presupposes
  • Distinguish the Logic's three spheres and their transition-styles: being passes over, essence shines in its other, the Concept develops
  • Explain why Hegel calls the Concept 'the free' and what the absolute Idea adds: method as the retrospective form of the whole
  • Explain nature as 'the Idea in the form of otherness' and the impotence of nature: what philosophy derives and what it leaves to contingency
  • Reconstruct the ladder from chemistry to life to habit: why the organism is irreducible and how death points to spirit

Course outline

  1. The Ladder: Climbing the Phenomenology — The book from my coat at Jena, climbed rung by rung this time: how consciousness educates itself from "this, here, now" through despair to absolute knowing — and why you must climb it yourself.
  2. Against Kant: Swimming Before the Water — My reckoning with the master: why you cannot test the power of knowing before using it, why the thing-in-itself is a self-contradiction, and why the categorical imperative is an empty formalism.
  3. The Logic: Thought Thinking Itself — The system's foundation, written between morning classes in Nuremberg: being, essence, and the Concept — how pure thought, beginning from nothing presupposed, derives the categories of every possible…
  4. The Organic Worldview: Nature's Magnificent Impotence — Why an idealist needs a philosophy of nature: the Idea in the element of externality, the rights of contingency, life as a chemical process made perpetual — and death as the doorway through which…
  5. The Architecture of Freedom, Beam by Beam — The Philosophy of Right at working depth: the formalism of right and the self-subversion of conscience, civil society's wound re-opened, the corporation, the state as concrete freedom — and the…
  6. Absolute Spirit: The Statue, the Cross, the Concept — The system's summit: art as the sensuous shining of the Idea and the end of its highest vocation; religion as the truth in images — the death of God included; philosophy as the same content, finally…

Works read in this course

  • Phenomenology of Spirit — My 1807 'voyage of discovery' — consciousness educated, shape by shape, from bare sense-certainty to absolute knowing; finished the night before the battle of Jena.
  • Science of Logic — The system's foundation (1812-16) — pure thought deriving its own categories from a beginning with nothing presupposed.
  • Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences — My complete system in outline (1817; revised 1827, 1830): logic, nature, spirit.
  • Elements of the Philosophy of Right — My political philosophy (1821) — freedom made actual in right, morality, and ethical life.
  • Philosophy of Nature — The Encyclopaedia's second part — the Idea in the element of externality, from space and matter to life.
  • Philosophy of Mind — The Encyclopaedia's third part — soul, consciousness, and free spirit; anthropology to absolute spirit.
  • Lectures on Aesthetics — The Berlin lectures on art — beauty as the sensuous shining of the Idea, and art's highest vocation as something past.
  • Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion — The Berlin lectures — religion and philosophy share one content; religion holds it in images, philosophy in concepts.
  • Lectures on the Philosophy of World History — The Berlin lectures (1822-31) — world history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom.
  • The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy — My first publication (1801) — where I name division the source of the need of philosophy.
  • Faith and Knowledge — My 1802 polemic — Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte as philosophies of finitude, ending with the call for a 'speculative Good Friday.'

Terms introduced

determinate negation, the Concept, Vorstellung, true infinite, second nature, impotence of nature

Part of the Simposeum course library.