Mario Rossi – Hegelianism (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Table of Contents:

Introduction General considerations Crises in the earlier Hegelian school Hegelianism through the 20th century

Hegelianism, the collection of philosophical movements that developed out of the thought of the 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The term is here so construed as to exclude Hegel himself and to include, therefore, only the ensuing Hegelian movements. As such, its thought is focused upon history and logic, a history in which it sees, in various perspectives, that “the rational is the real” and a logic in which it sees that “the truth is the Whole.”

General considerations

Problems of the Hegelian heritage

The Hegelian system, in which German idealism reached its fulfillment, claimed to provide a unitary solution to all of the problems of philosophy. It held that the speculative point of view, which transcends all particular and separate perspectives, must grasp the one truth, bringing back to its proper centre all of the problems of logic, of metaphysics (or the nature of Being), and of the philosophies of nature, law, history, and culture (artistic, religious, and philosophical). According to Hegel, this attitude is more than a formal method that remains extraneous to its own content; rather, it represents the actual development of the Absolute—of the all-embracing totality of reality—considered “as Subject and not merely as Substance” (i.e., as a conscious agent or Spirit and not merely as a real being). This Absolute, Hegel held, first puts forth (or posits) itself in the immediacy of its own inner consciousness and then negates this positing—expressing itself now in the particularity and determinateness of the factual elements of life and culture—and finally regains itself, through the negation of the former negation that had constituted the finite world.

Such a dialectical scheme (immediateness–alienation–negation of the negation) accomplished the self-resolution of the aforementioned problem areas—of logic, of metaphysics, and so on. This panoramic system thus had the merit of engaging philosophy in the consideration of all of the problems of history and culture, none of which could any longer be deemed foreign to its competence. At the same time, however, the system deprived all of the implicated elements and problems of their autonomy and particular authenticity, reducing them to symbolic manifestations of the one process, that of the Absolute Spirit’s quest for and conquest of its own self. Moreover, such a speculative mediation between opposites, when directed to the more impending problems of the time, such as those of religion and politics, led ultimately to the evasion of the most urgent and imperious ideological demands and was hardly able to escape the charge of ambiguity and opportunism.

Stages in the history of the interpretation of Hegel

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The explanation of the success of Hegelianism—marked by the formation of a school that, for more than 30 years, brought together the best energies of German philosophy—lies in the fact that no other system could compete with it in the richness of its content or the rigour of its formulation or challenge its claim to express the total spirit of the culture of its time. Moreover, as Hegelianism diffused outward, it was destined to provoke increasingly lively and gripping reactions and to take on various articulations as, in its historical development, it intermingled with contrasting positions.

Four stages can be distinguished within the development of Hegelianism. The first of these was that of the immediate crisis of the Hegelian school in Germany during the period from 1827 through 1850. Always involved in polemics against its adversaries, the school soon divided into three currents. (1) The right, in which the direct disciples of Hegel participated, defended his philosophy from the accusation that it was liberal and pantheistic (defining God as the All). These “old Hegelians” sought to uphold the compatibility of Hegelianism with evangelical orthodoxy and with the conservative political policies of the Restoration (the new order in Europe that followed the defeat of Napoleon). (2) The left—formed of the “young Hegelians,” for the most part indirect disciples of Hegel—considered the dialectic as a “principle of movement” and viewed Hegel’s identification of the rational with the real as a command to modify the cultural and political reality that reactionism was merely justifying and to make it rational. Thus, the young Hegelians interpreted Hegelianism in a revolutionary sense—i.e., as pantheistic and then, consecutively, as atheistic in religion and as liberal-democratic in politics. (3) The centre, which preferred to fall back upon interpretations of the Hegelian system in its genesis and significance, with special interest in logical problems.

In the second phase (1850–1904), in which Hegelianism diffused into other countries, the works of the centre played a preponderant role; thus, in this phase of the history of the interpretation of Hegel, usually called Neo-Hegelian, the primary interest was in logic and a reform of the dialectic.

In the first decade of the 20th century, on the other hand, there arose still in Germany a different movement, after Wilhelm Dilthey, originator of a critical approach to history and humanistic studies, discovered unpublished papers from the period of Hegel’s youth. This third phase, that of the Hegel renaissance, was characterized by an interest in philology, by the publication of texts, and by historical studies; and it stressed the reconstruction of the genesis of Hegel’s thought, considering especially its cultural matrices—both Enlightenment and Romanticist—and the extent to which it might present irrationalistic and so-called pre-existentialist attitudes.

In the fourth stage, after World War II, the revival of Marxist studies in Europe finally thrust into the foreground the interest in the relation between Hegel and Karl Marx and in the value of the Hegelian heritage for Marxism, with particular regard to political and social problems. This fourth phase of the history of Hegelianism thus appropriated many of the polemical themes of the earlier years of the school.

Crises in the earlier Hegelian school

The earlier development of Hegelianism can be divided, according to predominant concerns, into three periods: (1) polemics during the life of Hegel (1816–31), (2) controversies in the religious field (1831–39), and (3) political debates (1840–44), though discussions on all of the problems continued through all three periods.

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Polemics during the life of Hegel: 1816–31

While Hegel was still living, discussion was dominated by the master. It was not a matter of polemics within the school but only one of objections against the system from various quarters: from speculative theists; from Johann Herbart, a prominent student of the philosophy of mind, and his followers; and from disciples of Friedrich Schelling, an objective and aesthetic idealist, and of Friedrich Schleiermacher, a seminal thinker of modern theology.

The substantive history of the school stems from Hegel’s later teaching at Berlin and from the publication of his Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse (1821; The Philosophy of Right). This book was reviewed by Herbart, who reprimanded Hegel for mixing the monism of the rationalist Benedict de Spinoza with the transcendentalism of Immanuel Kant, which had explored the conditions of the possibility of knowledge in general. There were also certain critics who directed the liberal press against Hegel for attacking Jakob Fries, a psychologizing Neo-Kantian, in the introduction of The Philosophy of Right. Some of the polemical writings of Hegel made a notable impact—e.g., a preface that he wrote for a book by one of his earliest disciples, Hermann Hinrichs, on the relation of faith to reason (1822). In this preface, Hegel saw the two things as the same in content but different in form—which for faith is the representation and for reason is the concept.

Particularly significant were eight articles in the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik (founded 1827; “Yearbooks for Scientific Critique”), a journal of the Hegelian right. Important among these were a review by Hegel that was unexpectedly eulogistic about the thesis that philosophy and evangelical orthodoxy are compatible and another review in which Hegel responded indirectly to arguments of Herbart. Among Hegel’s critics can be distinguished speculative theists such as Christian Weisse of Leipzig and Immanuel Fichte, the son of the more famous Johann Fichte, who reproached him for his panlogism and proposed to unify thought and experience in the concept of a free God, the Creator. Among the most loyal disciples of Hegel were Hermann Hinrichs, his collaborator, and Karl Rosenkranz, who defended the Hegelian solution of the faith-reason problem (which had asserted the identity of content and difference of form), thus aptly defending the free rationality of religion.

Period of controversies chiefly in religion: 1831–39

The tone of these early polemics became animated and embittered after the death of Hegel. But, inasmuch as conditions in Germany, during the Restoration, inhibited the liberalization of political discussions, the milieu of controversy shifted to the religious realm and became related to problems of immortality, Christology, and general

hortly before Hegel’s death, the youthful Ludwig Feuerbach, who later became a pioneer of naturalistic humanism, had published his Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit (1830; “Thoughts on Death and Immortality”), in which he contended that, from the Hegelian point of view, death must be necessary in order for humans to be transformed from the finite to the infinite, and it is thus a privilege for them preferable to empirical personal survival. This work was held to confirm the charge of pantheism that orthodox adversaries had directed at Hegel’s system. On this point, at the appearance of two volumes by Johann Friedrich Richter, a pantheist and critic of religion, Hegel’s disciples intervened, in an argument employing not a few dialectical artifices, to conciliate Hegelian statements with the traditional doctrine of immortality.

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The polarization of historical positions that the debate on immortality could not adequately express soon came into the open with Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet (1835–36; The Life of Jesus Critically Examined), of David Friedrich Strauss, a biblical interpreter and radical theologian. This work brought the problem of the nature of Christ up to date from the point of view that had been reached by biblical criticism; i.e., Christology was no longer an issue of denominational dogma but, rather, a problem of the interpretation and evaluation of the Gospel sources and of their meaning in the historical development of civilization. In this approach, the narrowly philological outlook was overcome by a reconstruction in terms of a philosophy of history strangely suggestive of the young Hegel. The thesis of the book was that the Gospel account is interwoven with myths that are not the works of individuals but of the collective poetic activity of the first Christian community, myths that resulted in part from messianic expectations, in part from the memory of the historical figure of Jesus, and in part from a transfiguration of the real elements. The aim of the myths was to demonstrate that philosophy and religion are the same in content and to offer, in an imaginative guise (as in parables), the meaning of the one truth that Substance is unification of the divine nature and of the human, which Christ symbolized and which is realized in the spirit of all humanity.

Strauss’s work provoked a lively reaction, to which he replied in his Streitschriften (1837–38; “Controversial Writings”), proposing the image of a Hegelian school split, like the French Parliament, into a right (Göschel, and several others), a centre (Rosenkranz), and a left (Strauss himself). There were responses from the right and centre and from Bruno Bauer, a philosopher, historian, and biblical critic. From the anti-Hegelian side there was, above all, Die evangelische Geschichte (1838; “The History of the Gospels”), by Weisse, who, conceding to Strauss the necessity to rationalize the Gospel story, propounded a speculative interpretation of the Christ figure as an incarnation of the Logos (Thought-Word), in contrast to the mystic and pantheistic views.

Meanwhile, Bauer shifted toward the left in a polemic against the orthodox Ernst Hengstenberg, a vehement accuser of the Hegelians, and in his Kritik der Geschichte der Offenbarung (1838; “Critique of the History of Revelation”). In 1838 was founded the earliest journal of the left, the Hallische Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst (“Halle Yearbooks for German Science and Art”), coedited by the activist philosopher Arnold Ruge and T. Echtermeyer. At first, the journal maintained a moderate tone, and Hegelians of the centre and right also contributed articles. In June, however, it veered to the democratic-liberal side as Ruge struck out against an accuser of the young Hegelians and as Feuerbach attacked earlier Hegelians. Hegelianism, which marks the culmination of speculative philosophy, Feuerbach charged, does not demonstrate its own truth, because its contrast between sensory reality and intellectual concept comprises an irresoluble contradiction. Thus, its dialectic turns out to be a “monologue with itself,” bereft of authentic mediation with the world. Hegelian philosophy, he held, is a “rational mystique,” and what is needed is a return to nature, which, as objective reason, ought to become a principle of philosophy and of art. Thus, an extensive examination of contemporary culture was conducted by the journal’s editors in an article that depicted Romanticism as a movement degraded to a reactionary stance and extolled the spirit of reform and of liberal (yet loyalist) Prussianism.

As for issues in the fields of logic and metaphysics, after several polemical exchanges the interest of philosophers was attracted to the publicist reawakening that came to Schelling, who reactivated certain anti-Hegelian criticisms. These criticisms dealt with the impossibility of building a valid philosophy upon the pure concept assumed as a point of departure and endowed with autonomous movement. Such a philosophy would be vitiated by

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presuppositions of what ought to be demonstrated and by hypostatizations (i.e., the making of an idea into an entity). Schelling proposed, on the other hand, that the real itself be taken as the subject of development, to be grasped with a “lively intuition”; and that, while accepting a “negative philosophy” (such as that of rationalism and Hegel) pointing to the conditions without which one cannot think, one must also add a “positive philosophy” delineating the conditions by means of which thought and reality can exist, premised on the existence of a free creative God.

Period of atheistic and political radicalism: 1840–44

The ensuing years marked one of the most intense periods in the cultural life of modern Europe.

Anti-Hegelian criticism

Advancing from Aristotelian presuppositions, an important critique against the Hegelian logic was presented by the classical philosopher and philologist Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg in his Logische Untersuchungen (1840; Logical Investigations). In Hegel’s view, the passage from Being to Nothing and to Becoming can be posited as a pure beginning “without presuppositions” of logic. In Trendelenburg’s view, however, this passage is vitiated by its spurious dependence upon the surreptitious presupposition of the empirical movement, without which support neither the passage from Being to Nothing (and vice versa) nor the recognition of Becoming as the “truth” of this primal opposition of concepts can be justified. Secondly, he charged that Hegel confused (1) the logical opposition or contradiction of A against non-A with (2) the real contradiction or contrariety of A against B. Contradiction (1) consists in the mere repetition of the first term with a negative sign; and from it no concrete movement can proceed. In contrariety (2), however, the opposition of the second term to the first is concrete—thus the second term cannot be deduced from the first and instead should be derived on its own account from empirical experience. Thus, Hegel constructed his entire system, Trendelenburg charged, on an arbitrary dialectic of elements intrinsically real (contraries), which he mistakenly treated as though they were abstract opposites (contradictories) and were such by logical necessity.

Meanwhile, Schelling continued to teach his “positive philosophy”—of mythology and of revelation (of a personal God). Hence the philosophy of the later Schelling became the target of all of the criticisms from the left and likewise exerted a notable influence on the speculative theists. Meanwhile, the centre, on account of the critique of Trendelenburg, oriented itself toward the future reforms of Hegelianism.

Among those who attended Schelling’s lectures was Søren Kierkegaard, the man who was destined to become one of the founding fathers of existentialism and whose religious individualism represents the earliest major result of the diffusion of Hegelianism outside of Germany. In all of his works—but above all in his Philosophiske Smuler (1844; Philosophical Fragments) and his Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift (1846; Concluding Unscientific Postscript)—Kierkegaard waged a continuous polemic against the philosophy of Hegel. He regarded Hegel as motivated by the spirit of the harmonious dialectical conciliation of every opposition and as committed to imposing universal and panlogistic resolutions upon the authentic antinomies of life. Kierkegaard saw these antinomies as emerging from the condition of the individual, as a single person, who, finding himself always stretching to attain ascendance over his existential limitations in his absorption in God and at the same time

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always thrust back upon himself by the incommensurability of this relationship, cannot find his salvation except through the paradoxical inversion of the rational values of speculative philosophy and through the “leap of faith” in the crucified Christ. Kierkegaard’s claim that the nexus of problems characterizing the individual’s condition as an existing being is irreducible to any other terms lay at the very roots of existentialism. It was destined to condition the critical relationship of this current of thought to Hegelianism throughout its subsequent history. Moreover, Kierkegaard’s thought, which Kierkegaard did not know—still more than that of Strauss—seemed reminiscent of those problem areas explored in the young Hegel’s religious thought—issues that were destined to appear only later when Hegel research would gain precise knowledge of the writings of Hegel’s youth.

At this time the attitude of the centre was oriented toward reforms of the Hegelian system in the field of logic and historiography, as reflected especially in the emergence of Kuno Fischer, one of the foremost historians of philosophy. In the fundamental triad of the dialectic, as Fischer saw it, Being and Nothing are not equally static and neutralizing. The real movement does not interpose itself into their relationship because Being is here to be understood as the Being of thought, which, to the degree that it is a thinking of Nothing, possesses that dynamic surplus that becomes manifest in the moment of Becoming. It was in making responses to this view that the forthcoming Neo-Hegelian movement in Europe found some of its motivations.

Theological radicalism

In 1840 political conditions in Germany changed with the succession of the young Frederick William IV, whose minister began to repress the liberal press and summoned to Berlin in an anti-Hegelian capacity both Schelling and the conservative jurist F.J. Stahl, a stubborn critic of Hegel. Far from weakening the movement, however, these actions radicalized its revolutionary manifestations. Strauss, in Die christliche Glaubenslehre (1840–41; “The Christian Doctrine of Faith”), reaffirmed the opposition of philosophical pantheism to religious theism as a means of reunifying the finite and the infinite; and Feuerbach established a philosophical anthropology in his major work Das Wesen des Christentums (1841; The Essence of Christianity), in which humanity reappropriates its essence, which it had alienated from itself by hypostatizing it in the idea of God. The essence of humanity is reason, will, and love; and these three faculties constitute the consciousness of the human species as a knowledge of the infinity that man must regain. Humanity must thus reverse the theological propositions that express the spurious objectification of its universality in God; for this objectification had been effected through the individual consciousness in its effort to surmount its limitations. Thus, Feuerbach interpreted the Christian mysteries as symbols of the alienation of human properties absolutized as divine attributes, and he criticized the contradictions of theology that are found in such concepts as God, the Trinity, the sacraments, and faith. Humanity’s reappropriation of its essence from such religious alienation is consummated in the “new religion” of humanity, of which the supreme principle is that “man is God to man.”

To this period belong also the major critiques of Bruno Bauer on the Johannine (1840) and Synoptic (1841–42) Gospels. Differentiating his position from the pantheistic and mysticizing Substance of Strauss, Bauer held that the Gospels were not the unconscious product of the original community but a product of the self-consciousness of the Spirit in a given stage of its development. There followed two works specifically concerning Hegel, in which, feigning an orthodoxy from which he charged Hegel with atheism and radicalism,

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Bauer maintained, in the form of a parody, the revolutionary interpretation of Hegel that became customary in the current of the Hegelian left.

Sociopolitical radicalism

In the years 1841–43, the repressive measures of the government reached ever more decisive extremes: Bauer was debarred from teaching; Feuerbach did not even attempt to teach; and Ruge was enjoined to publish the Hallische in Prussia instead of Leipzig. (Actually, he transferred it to Dresden and changed its name to the Deutsche Jahrbücher.) Here also appeared one of Ruge’s major writings, “Die Hegelsche Rechtsphilosophie und die Politik unserer Zeit” (1842; “The Hegelian Philosophy of Right and the Politics of our Time”), in which Ruge denounced Hegel’s political conservatism, charging that his contemplative reason was reduced to the acceptance of existing conditions, to the exclusion of every effort to modify reality, and to the absolutizing of the Prussian state as the model of an ideal state. Ruge’s journal was suppressed early in 1843, but in March he published in Switzerland his Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik (“Anecdotes for the Latest German Philosophy and Political Journalism”), containing articles by Bauer, Ruge, Marx, Feuerbach, and others.

Feuerbach’s article developed the claim that the method of speculative philosophy, which is the ultimate form of theology, is to invert the subject and predicate—i.e., to substantialize the abstract and to treat concrete determinations as attributes or “logical accidents” of hypostatized abstractions. The inversion of speculative propositions, he held, leads to the philosophical reappropriation of the human essence; the philosophy of the future will achieve mastery through the negation of the Hegelian philosophy—and this is exactly what he entitled his forthcoming book: Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (1843; “Basic Principles of the Philosophy of the Future”). In place of the immediate Absolute of Hegel, he argued, there must be substituted the immediate individual existent—corporeal, sensible, and rational. The individual’s reappropriation of himself will be possible whenever his need to transcend his own limitations finds fulfillment in another person and in the totality of the human species: “thus man is the measure of reason.”

Meanwhile, a schism had been ripening in the left wing: (1) On the one hand, there were the “Free Berliners” (initially the young Friedrich Engels, later to become Marx’s theoretician, the radical anarchist Max Stirner, and the Bauer brothers), who, deeming themselves faithful to Hegel, developed a philosophy of self-consciousness (understood in a subjective and superindividualistic sense) directed toward treating social and historical problems with aristocratic intellectual detachment. (2) On the other hand, there was the group that included Ruge, the publicist Moses Hess, the scholarly poet Heinrich Heine, and Marx. Influenced in their theories by Feuerbach, this group directed radicalism toward an experience deepened by the classical Enlightenment and embraced the rising socialism. They thus involved Hegel in their critique of the political, cultural, and philosophical conditions of the time. The most widely known result of the first trend was Stirner’s book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1845; “The Individual and His Property”), in which the fundamental thesis of individualistic anarchism can be discerned. The unique entity, in Stirner’s view, is the individual, who must rebel against the attempt made by every authority and social organization to impose upon him a cause not his own and must be regarded as a focus of absolutely free initiative—a goal to be reached by emancipating himself from every idea-value imposed by tradition.

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The work of Marx

The years between 1840 and 1844, however, saw the emergence of a figure incomparably more representative of the crisis of German Hegelianism than any already cited, that of Karl Marx, who was destined to guide the experience of this crisis toward a revolution of world historical scope. Marx’s study of Hegel dates from his university years in Berlin, the earliest result of which was his doctoral dissertation with the exceedingly important preparatory notes, in which he ventured an original application of Hegelian method to the problem of the great crises in the history of philosophy. At first a friend of Bauer, Marx clung closely, however, to the democratic wing of the left. In 1843 he completed an important critical study of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in which he reproached Hegel for having absolutized into an ideal state the Prussian state of the time. Such absolutizing, he charged, lent itself to generalizations of broad critical scope with respect to the idealistic procedure of hypostatizing the Idea and brought about (as allegorical derivatives from it) certain concrete political and social determinations, such as family, classes, and the state powers. Not yet a communist, Marx nonetheless completed, in his Kritik der hegelschen Staatsrechts (1843; Critique of Hegel’s Constitutional Law), a criticism of the erroneous relationship initiated in Hegel between society and the state, which was destined to lead Marx from the criticism of the modern state to that of modern society and its alienation.

It will be recalled that Hegel had likewise proposed the concept of alienation, describing the dialectic as a movement of the Absolute that was determined by its alienating and then regaining itself (thus overcoming the self-negation). Already in the Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844 (1932; Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844), Marx had enunciated a general critique of the Hegelian dialectic that revealed its a priori nature, which, in Marx’s view, was mystifying and alienated inasmuch as Hegel did nothing but sanction, by a method inverted with respect to real relationships, the alienation of all the concrete historical and human determinations.

Marx then directed himself against his former colleagues on the left—against Bauer in his Die heilige Familie (1845; The Holy Family) and against Stirner in his Die deutsche Ideologie (1845–46; The German Ideology), criticizing their “ideologism” (i.e., the illusion that idealism can be carried into the revolutionary camp since it is ideas that make history). The historical materialism that Marx counterposed against idealism expressed the conviction that the basis comprising the relations of production, both economic and social, conditions the superstructure of political, juridical, and cultural institutions and that the interchange among these spheres of production within the totality of a historical epoch must be designed to overcome their contradictions. This materialism, though not belonging any more to Hegelianism, was destined nonetheless to remain linked to it by continuing polemical relationships and overlapping problem areas throughout the subsequent history of the movement (see also dialectical materialism).

Along with Marx must, of course, be mentioned his colleague Friedrich Engels, who was more tied, however, to the Hegelian conception of the dialectic—particularly regarding the dialectic of nature—than Marx was.

Hegelianism through the 20th century

Development and diffusion of Hegelianism in the later 19th century

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In Germany, the second half of the 19th century witnessed a decline in the fortunes of Hegelianism, beginning with the Hegel und seine Zeit (1857; “Hegel and His Age”), by Rudolph Haym, a historian of the modern German spirit. The decline was urged on by Neo-Kantianism and positivism as well as by the political realism of Otto von Bismarck, the founder of the German Empire. Hegelian influences still appeared in the first representatives of historicism (which urged that all things be viewed in the perspective of historical change). The surviving Hegelians, however, such as Kuno Fischer and Johann Erdmann, devoted themselves to the history of philosophy. Strauss and the Bauer brothers were won over to conservatism, and even Ruge, returning from exile in England, became a conservative.

Political and cultural problems: eastern Europe and the United States

The diffusion of Hegelianism outside Germany was oriented in two directions. With respect to its political and cultural problems, the Hegelian experience developed in eastern European philosophers and critics such as the Polish count Augustus Cieszkowski, a religious thinker whose philosophy of action was initially influenced by the left; and the theistic metaphysician Bronislaw Trentowski. Among the Russians can be cited the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, the democratic revolutionary writers Aleksandr Herzen and Nikolay Chernyshevsky, and certain anarchists such as the Russian exile and revolutionist Mikhail Bakunin. And among the French there were Hegelian socialists such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

In the United States, the interest in Hegelianism was stimulated by its political aspects and its philosophy of history. Its two centres, the St. Louis and Cincinnati schools, seemed to duplicate the German schism between a conservative and a revolutionary tendency. The former was represented by the Hegelians of the St. Louis school: the German Henry Brokmeyer and the New Englander William Harris, a pedagogue and politician, and the circle that they founded called the St. Louis Philosophical Society, which published an influential organ, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Their legitimism, or support for legitimate sovereignty, was expressed in the quest for a foundation, dialectical as well as speculative, for American democracy and in a dialectical interpretation of the history of the United States. The Cincinnati group, on the other hand, gathered around August Willich, a former Prussian officer, and John Bernard Stallo, an organizer of the Republican Party. Willich had participated in the Revolutions of 1848 as a democratic partisan in southern Germany, and, as an exile, had been in lively intercourse with Marx. He founded the Cincinnati Republikaner, in which he reviewed Marx’s Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1859; A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) and endeavoured to base the principles of social democracy upon the humanistic foundations of Feuerbach. Stallo, on the other hand, tried to interpret the political philosophy of Hegel in republican terms. The democratic community became, for him, the realization of the dialectic rationality of the Spirit with a rigorous separation of church and state.

Logic and metaphysics problems: Italy, England

The second trend in non-German Hegelianism was directed, in Italy and in England, to problems of logic and metaphysics. A vigorously speculative rethinking of the foundations of Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik (1812; Science of Logic) was engaged in by the major liberal Italian philosopher Bertrando Spaventa and his associates. Seeking to rediscover the connection between the thinking of the Italians of the 16th century and that of the German idealists, Spaventa encountered the system of problems involved in the relationship between Kant and Hegel. He adopted from Kuno Fischer the solutions by which Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel had rendered Kant’s transcendental ego consummatively veritable. He thus proposed an epistemological interpretation of the Hegelian logic as an idealistic theory of knowledge, according to which one premise of the logic is the dialectic of consciousness described in

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Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; Phenomenology of Mind), and the problems of the genesis of logic are resolved in the sense that Being is, from first to last, Becoming; i.e., it is thought in action, which negates the objective residue of thought-out Being and, for that reason, is confirmed as a creative process. From Spaventa, whose intention was to vindicate the freedom and autonomy of thought against denominational dogmatism, was derived the foundation for the subjectivistic formalization of Hegelianism soon undertaken by Giovanni Gentile, an early 20th-century idealist.

As in Italy, so also in England, interest in Hegel arose from the philosopher’s need to round out his experience of classical German thought by tracing its vicissitudes since the time of Kant; and this interest was directed toward the fields of epistemology and logic and in this instance was applied to problems of religion and not of politics. The pioneer in English Hegelianism was James Hutchison Stirling, through his work The Secret of Hegel (1865). Stirling reaffirmed the lineage of thought that Fischer had traced “from Kant to Hegel,” endeavouring to penetrate the dialectic-speculative relationship of unity in multiplicity as the central point of the dialectic. Toward Hegelianism as a unifying experience the ethics scholar Thomas Hill Green, the foremost representative of Hegelianism at the University of Oxford, applied himself, though with more original attitudes; and the brothers John Caird and Edward Caird dedicated themselves to right-wing interpretations of religious subjects—Edward in a well-known monograph entitled Hegel (1883).

Hegelianism in the first half of the 20th century

At this point, the development of Hegelianism branched out in two directions: one of which, in England and Italy, pursued the tendencies of the Neo-Hegelians of the preceding decades, while the other, in Germany and France, accomplished the philological interpretative renewal known as the Hegel renaissance.

Neo-Hegelianism in England and Italy

With respect to the first tendency, there appeared in England at the turn of the century various outstanding works on Hegel’s logic by authors who were partly Hegelian in spirit. These scholars, toiling through the system of problems that they shared—which focused on establishing a criterion for the unification of the multiplicity of experience—ended up in diverse positions: those of Bernard Bosanquet and John Ellis MacTaggart, for example, who were translators and commentators of Hegelian works; but above all that of the foremost spiritualistic philosopher then in England, F.H. Bradley, author of the renowned Appearance and Reality (1893), whose development led him to positions more and more at odds with the absolute panlogism of Hegel. His affirmation of the dualism of appearance and reality was the result of a critique of the category of relations, which, by introducing contradictions between the qualities of the thing, utterly shattered the unity of experience in which it might seem that true reality could be reached—a reality that in Bradley’s view it is not given to thought to attain.

The echoes of this idealistic system were not long in being felt in the United States by one of its most profound philosophers, an Absolute Idealist, Josiah Royce, who, in The World and the Individual (1900–01), discussed the skeptical idealism of Bradley in order to overthrow its consequences in favour of a conception of the infinite as a self-representative system and of the world (or the All) as an individualized realization of the intentional aims of the idea copresent in a superior eternal consciousness. In Anglo-American Neo-Hegelianism, the

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Hegelian experience has always been merely an episode—which fact serves to refine, by contrast, the methods of experimentalism that are more congenial to the empirical tradition in England.

In Italy, on the other hand, the Neo-Hegelianism of the 20th century took the form of a spiritualistic reaction to the spread of positivism that had followed upon the unification of Italy. This reaction developed in two directions: that of the historicism of Benedetto Croce and that of the actualism of Giovanni Gentile, two scholars who divided the realm of philosophy between themselves and occupied it—rather heavy-handedly—for four decades. The Crocean reform of Hegelianism dates from his volume Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto della filosofia di Hegel (1907; What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel) and from the systematic works of his so-called “philosophy of the spirit.” Croce accepted the dialectic from Hegel as a requirement for the unification of opposites; but he rejected its system, in which Hegel would put in opposition and treat dialectically certain intellectual forms that are not really opposite but only distinct—such as the beautiful, the true, the useful, and the good, each of which has its dialectical opposite over against itself that it has to overcome within the purview of each grade. Consequently, renouncing the possibility of a philosophy of nature or of history, Croce formulated a development of so-called “distinct grades” according to the spiritual forms of art, of philosophy, of economics, and of ethics and contended that the comprehensive meaning of the development of the Spirit is given by history “as thought and as action” and a realization of freedom.

Gentile, on the other hand, accentuated the opposition of subject and object by considering every objective factuality as surpassed by the living dialectical development of the act—i.e., the becoming of the Spirit in its own self-making, proceeding from an originating self-establishment, or autoktisis, of the Spirit itself. From this position he derived an absolute subjectivism that exploited all the possibilities for dialectically transforming every fixed position into its opposite, a downright sophistry of disengagement. Gentile’s pro-Fascist stance, however, condemned his actualism to collapse.

Hegelian renaissance in Germany and France

Already from the beginnings of the century, however, there had been in Germany a change in Hegelian interpretation instigated by Wilhelm Dilthey’s re-examination, in 1905, of the youthful manuscripts of Hegel and by the publication by one of Dilthey’s principal disciples, Herman Nohl, of Hegels theologische Jugendschriften (1907; “The Theological Writings of Hegel’s Youth”). Inasmuch as there had been heretofore only fragmentary notices on these unpublished literary remains, the effect of this rereading of the texts was to place them in contrast with the works of his maturity; they thus emerged as dealing, for the most part, with various problem areas in ethics, religion, and history; as lacking systematic preoccupations; and as rich discourse, tending to the mystic, which invited their comparison with the severe technical uniformity of his major works. Hermeneutical interest, however, centred especially on the problem of the beginnings of the philosophy and dialectic of Hegel, of which the first formulations were investigated in order to collate their meanings with those of the major works and of the Phenomenology, which was a key work of the Hegelian evolution inasmuch as it participated both in the romanticized colouring of the youthful writings and in the systematic demands of the Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1817; “Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline”).

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Scholars were soon led to investigate the historical matrices of Hegel’s intellectual culture—the late Enlightenment and dawning Romanticism—a direction of inquiry that yielded imposing contributions rich in discussions that continue to this day. These studies began with Dilthey’s monograph, which pointed out the irrationalistic and vitalistic aspects of Hegel’s youthful writings. In addition, a basic work by Franz Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat (1920; “Hegel and the State”), genetically reconstructed the political thought of the young Hegel in relation to its historical sources and concluded that the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau prevented Hegel from becoming the genuine “national philosopher of Germany.” Jean Wahl, a French metaphysician and historian of philosophy, wrote on the “wretched conscience,” interpreting Hegel existentially. Further, the German philosopher Richard Kroner studied the development from Kant to Hegel, integrating it with the contributions of early Romanticism. And Hermann Glockner, a Bavarian aesthetic intuitionist, saw following one another in the development of Hegel a so-called “pantragistic” phase up to the Phenomenology and, subsequently, an opposing “panlogistic” phase that betrayed the most lively and concrete instances of the preceding phase—a work that approached the efforts at interpreting Hegel that were made by the Nazis.

Hegelian studies in the later 20th century

With respect to the later 20th century, one has to speak not of the presence of Hegelianism as an operating philosophical current but only of studies on Hegel and of an experience of the Hegelian philosophy, to which, however, almost no orientation in philosophy was foreign. The repeated encounter of Western culture with Marxist thought after World War II brought to the fore the political, ethical, and religious implications of Hegelianism; and a marshalling into opposing camps analogous to that of the earlier crisis of the school took shape. There were no orthodox Hegelians, but there were denominational critics of Hegelianism, especially Roman Catholics, whose cognizance of Hegel’s painful development invoked, despite their differences, a certain fellow feeling with him.

In the centre were found scholars of a liberal and radical frame of mind but with varying orientations with respect to historical interpretations. Karl Löwith, a German philosopher of history and culture, saw Hegel as the initiator of the “historicist” crisis in modern thought, culminating in Marx and in Kierkegaard; and to this he contrasted the metahistorical perspective reflected in the Nietzschean motif of the “eternal return,” based on the ideal of a Goethean serenity. In France, Alexandre Kojève, noteworthy for his effort to harmonize Hegel with Martin Heidegger, proposed a reinterpretation of the Phenomenology as a manifesto of the emancipation of “man the servant” from all alienations. Jean Hyppolite, author of an outstanding commentary on the Phenomenology, usually presented a restrained humanistic interpretation of the Hegel of Jena. This renaissance of the study of Hegel conditioned the thought of some of the major thinkers of France. Particularly notable, however, was the Hegelian conditioning of German philosopher-sociologists such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. The former was sometimes regarded as the most Hegelian thinker of the mid-20th century because he sought to bring again to the fore Hegel’s dialectic, understood in a new anti-intellectualistic sense, as a method for the solution of contemporary social problems. Marcuse, a partisan of a Diltheian interpretation, approached the position of the first Hegelian left, ending up in what critics saw as a neoromantic anarchism. The major merit of both of these thinkers lies in their incisive analyses of aspects of modern consumer societies, especially American—though their proposed remedies remain uncertain.

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The major interest, however, in Hegel interpretation during this period was displayed by the Marxist camp. Marxist interpretation of Hegel had permeated the entire history of Hegelianism (notwithstanding the fact that the critical activity of young Marx against Hegel had been vehemently conducted and had led to various effects). This interpretation had settled upon the distinction made by Engels between the method and the system of Hegel’s philosophy—i.e., between the dialectic considered as a revolutionary “principle of movement” that achieves fulfillment in human culture, and the system, regarded, on the other hand, as reactionary because idealistic and conservative. With varying emphases on critical issues, this interpretation was continued in subsequent Marxist thinkers—from the Russians Georgy Plekhanov and Vladimir Ilich Lenin to Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin—the latter of whom affirmed the complementariness of historical and dialectical materialism.

Many Marxist scholars, especially in the countries of eastern Europe, remained favourable to the traditional line of Engels; and above all György Lukács, a Hungarian philosopher and literary critic and author of a volume on the young Hegel, did so. With the intention of revealing the romantic and irrationalistic presuppositions of Nazism, Lukács reevaluated, in German culture, the tendency of the Enlightenment and of democracy, which he recognized in the young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in Friedrich von Schiller, in Friedrich Hölderlin, and in the young Hegel—in whom he saw, however, a reactionary involution.

A secondary tendency, which drew attention in France with the work of Louis Althusser, drew Marx close to structuralism, a school that sought through a “human science,” to probe the systematic structures evinced in cultural life. In this school Marx’s humanism is viewed as a temporary, Feuerbachian phase, surpassed by commitment to the scientific observation of the structure of bourgeois society. Such structuralistic interpretation of Marxism thus ran the risk of departing from a due emphasis on the historical substance of Marxian materialism.

The latter motive was, on the other hand, the essential aim of a third Marxist current, in Italy, initiated by Galvano della Volpe, a critical aesthetician who discussed the relationship between bourgeois and socialist democracy and championed, in aesthetics, a critical and antiromantic Aristotelianism. This current was continued by Mario Rossi, who asked one to read again in full the texts of Hegel and Marx, to reconstruct the related movements, and to compare the materialistic conception of history with more recent philosophical currents such as structuralism, sociology, and the logic of the sciences.

A conclusion of a theoretical-systematic nature concerning Hegelianism has become not only impossible but also inopportune, because its possible interest has been effectively replaced by that of the sheer history of the movement. The latter has shown how the substantial ambiguity of the philosophy and dialectic of Hegel can be resolved only when its claim to be able to solve all problems on a theoretical level and to achieve a “circular” decisiveness in its arguments—which violates the conditioning specificity of historical facts—is refuted. It is then the scholar’s task to explore the limits of Hegel’s thought as well as its conditioned inadequacies—but also its merits, which are above all those of having expressed and documented the major part of the cultural problems of modern civilization.

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