An Introduction to Hegel (original) (raw)

The John Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory

There is no better way to characterize G.W.F Hegel (1770-1831) than as a philosopher of truth. Like most classical and early modern thinkers, Hegel believed that the task of philosophy was to furnish as comprehensive and true an account of reality as possible. As in Aristotle or Spinoza, truth as a category implied extreme rigor, a uniquely wide breadth of scope-ranging from physics and ontology to politics and logic-and a capacity both to reflect the world as it actually is and to express it in the form of a system. Systematicity was for Hegel proof of thoroughness and of the muscularity of reason, but it also mirrored formally an important aspect of reality itself: the latter, he argued, was also a kind of system-an organized, deeply interconnected, and (to some extent) living (or at least dynamic) whole. From a Hegelian standpoint, truth exists not just in the sense that it is possible, that it can be grasped, shared, and made actionable by humans (or perhaps other rational creatures), but that it is fundamentally thisworldly or immanent, rather than other-worldly or transcendent. Truth was not, as in Platonic Idealism, something that hovered over or preceded the world in the form of a static essence. Nor was it contained, ready-made, in the mind of God, an eternal logic or law that only had to be humbly recited by humans to be known. These ways of understanding truth, thought Hegel, reduced humans to passive instruments of a reality they had no hand in making themselves. Instead, truth was best understood as back-bendingly difficult work-a process that could be understood as simultaneously discovery (of something objectively there in the world) and invention (something we ourselves create and wilfully sustain). Despite Hegel's reputation in some circles as an austere theologian of eternity it is important to keep in mind the deeply existential dimension of Hegel's work, one that helps to explain why he was taken up so readily