Hegel, Part 3a
Hegel and Napoleon Bonaparte,
Jena, 1806
The Young Hegel and what
drove him
Now that we have struggled
with some of Hegel’s own words, we may as well take advantage of some of Andy
Blunden’s illuminating scholarship. See the attached document, or the download
linked below, for the first of Comrade Andy’s set of ten lectures on Hegel,
called by him “The young Hegel and what drove him”.
Andy sketches the world of
Hegel, corresponding in time with the first (English) Industrial Revolution,
containing the Great French Revolution, and extending to the bourgeois military
conquests of Napoleon Bonaparte. Hegel actually saw Bonaparte in the streets of
Jena, Prussia, in 1806. Hegel admired Bonaparte, and called him “The World Spirit on horseback”. “World
Spirit” did not mean God.
Andy Blunden points out that
in an age of liberals, Hegel was not a liberal. Andy’s remarks correspond with
Christopher Caudwell’s “On Liberty”,
where Caudwell points out that men without institutions are mere brutes. (“Unfortunately not only is man not good
without institutions, he is not evil either. He is no man at all; he is neither
good nor evil; he is an unconscious brute.” – On Liberty)
Andy Blunden says: “There is some basis for associating Hegel
with notions of progress and a ‘cultural evolution’ in which all the people of
the world are subsumed into a single narrative”. We must look to see if it
is with Hegel that the idea of one human history, and “one race - the human
race” arrives. In a work like Engels’ “Origin
of the Family, Private Property and the State”, written a little over
half a century after the death of Hegel, and indeed in the “Communist
Manifesto” of 1848, the idea of a single human revolutionary history is strongly
expressed.
Lastly, Andy Blunden
introduces Hegel’s “The Spirit”. Read about it and leave it to bed down in the
mind. But note this passage of Andy’s (shortened):
“One of the
difficulties that Hegel had to overcome was the problem of dualism… Kant’s philosophy got around
mind-matter dualism at the cost of introducing a host of other such dichotomies
and it was the need to overcome these dichotomies in Kant’s philosophy which
was one of the main drivers for Kant’s critics [including] Hegel. For Hegel, it
was all thought. We will presently come to how Hegel arrived at difference from this abstract
beginning, but the idea of thought, of Spirit, shaping the world, served as a
foundation upon which to build a philosophical system… Thinking [is] the
activity of the human mind, but the content of that thinking is objective, it
is given from outside the individual, it is the individual’s ‘second nature’.
The objects around us and which are the content of our perception and thoughts
are the objectifications of the thought of other people, or ourselves. We live
in a world not of matter, but of thought objects, which are, like all objects,
also material things.”
Here is a hyperlinked list of main Works of Hegel in
English:
The German Constitution, 1798-1802 (HPW) Ø
Introduction to The Critical Journal of
Philosophy, with Schelling
(1801) Ø
Faith & Knowledge (1802) Ø
System of Ethical Life (1802-3) Ø
Realphilosophie I (1803-4) & II (1805-6) Ø
Phenomenonology of Spirit (1807) Ø
The Science of Logic Ø
Part
I: The Doctrine of Being (1812)
Part II: The Doctrine of Essence (1813)
Part III: The Doctrine of the Notion (1816)
Part II: The Doctrine of Essence (1813)
Part III: The Doctrine of the Notion (1816)
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817 & revised up till his death in 1831)
The Philosophy of Right, 1821 Ø
·
The above is to introduce
the original reading-text:
The Young Hegel and
what drove him, 2007, Andy Blunden.
