Notes and Commentary: RECENT HEGEL LITERATURE: General Surveys and the Young Hegel

It is now evident that the so-called Hegeljahre of 1970 — the 200th anniversary of Hegel's birth — was only the start of a decade of Hegel. Over the last 10 years a flood of commentaries on variousaspects of Hegel's thought have appeared, critical editions of his works have been published, and new translations of his works have been ventured. This review can make no claim to be comprehensive. In an attempt to provide some rough sense of the current status of research on Hegel, and most especially on the question of the role his social and "political thought plays in his philosophy, a few of the many commentaries and some of the more important new editions and translations have been selected for examination. It is impossible to work one's way through even this limited portion of the Hegel literature without some degree of agreement with a paradox noted by Charles Taylor at the conclusion of the more substantial of his two studies of Hegel.' While the level of interest in Hegel's work has perhaps never been greater, Hegel's ontology itself, in Taylor's words, "is quite dead." While we are more informed about the exact status of Hegel's project at the various points of its development thanks to a series of critical editions that have given us far more material than was available previously from the period of the Jena System, the Heidelberg and Berlin Encyclopedias and the Berlin lectures on the Philosophy of Right, we are still left with a situation where, in Taylor's words again, "no one actually believes his central ontological thesis, that the universe is posited by a Spirit whose essence is rational necessity" (538). Stated this baldly, there is something clearly amiss in Taylor's characterization of the present attitude toward Hegel, although rectifying the judgment only makes matters worse. It is not so much that no one believes that "the universe is posited by a Spirit whose essence is rational necessity" as that it is not even clear if anyone can now believe that Hegel himself believed anything so straightforward (though perhaps outlandish). While Hegel's immediate heirs in the 1840s were left with a rough sense of what he was saying, and hence free to agree or disagree, and while the subsequent tradition of Marxian-influenced Hegel interpretation had its stock Hegel in whom rational kernel could be separated from mystical shell, we lack an equally clear and coherent — if misguided — sense of how to characterize Hegel. We have the ability to modify any simple statement of what Hegel was in fact doing into virtual incoherence; we have a sense of what is misguided as a characterization of Hegel's thought; but beyond accounts of Hegel's thought as a certain type of intention, historically situated within a certain peculiar context, there is little one can offer as a general characterization without an almost instantaneous sense of doing violence to his thought. The major critical achievement of the recent work on Hegel has been at last to free Hegel from the various traditions of Hegelianism (right, left, British, or Neo-Marxian) in which he had been placed. But what emerges from this critique of corrupting traditions is less a coherent body of thought than a network of tensions, a set of intentions that strike us as incommensurable, and a series of summaries that can only be looked upon with an immediate sense of their inadequacy.