Abstract
This chapter explores ties between Hegel’s philosophy and existentialism from three crucial perspectives: first in a comparison with key writings of the earlier pre-systematic period of Hegel’s development, where a fusion of themes with political, religious and aesthetic importance is pursued; second, as Merleau-Ponty and others have suggested, in the developing notion of experience central to the Phenomenology of Spirit; and finally in an examination of recent reconstruals of Hegel’s later systematic social philosophy, particularly the notions of agency, conscience and responsibility, which together offer a useful comparison—and potential challenge—to the claims of existentialist thinkers.
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Notes
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One might think about the development of this reconstrual of Hegel in three waves: the first, starting with the attempt by Avineri 1972 to make a case for the liberal side of Hegelian politics; the second, in the ground-breaking work of Robert Pippin (1989, 1997) and Terry Pinkard (1994, 2000, 2002) as it bears on political and social philosophy; finally the series of recent books by Moyar, Yeomans, Quante, Alznauer and others discussed in the final section of this essay.
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A helpful formulation of existentialism’s resistance to both natural scientific or moral terms can be found in Crowell 2019.
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From Hegel’s Letter to Schelling, 2 November 1800, Briefe von und an Hegel, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner 1952), I, pp. 59–60. Much has been written about this crucial turning-point in Hegel’s life and his appeal to Schelling, who had achieved early academic success in a way that Hegel had not yet. Of relevance also in this connection is the so-called “System Draft,” translated in Knox (1948, pp. 309–319).
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There was a long dispute after their rediscovery about whether these writings should be regarded as primarily religious or political in nature. Nohl’s titles both for the volume of pre-Jena writings (Hegels Theologische Jugendschriften) and for the particular fragments he brought together in “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate” suggested the former, and Lukács’s well-known interpretation (The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics) the latter, for example, but later readers have been less dualistic in their views. See Otto Pöggeler, “Hegel, der Verfasser des ältesten Systemprogramms des deutschen Idealismus,” in Mythologie der Vernunft: Hegels ältestes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus, ed. Christoph Jamme and Helmut Schneider (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1984), p. 141, and Christoph Jamme, Ein ungelehrtes Buch: die philosophische Gemeinschaft zwischen Hölderlin und Hegel in Frankfurt, 1797–1800 (Bonn: Bouvier 1983), p. 280.
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Tracing Hegel’s development across these fragments has been difficult because it is only relatively recently that there has been a critical edition of them (see Jaeschke 2010, p. 85 and Frühe Schriften II). Nohl treated them as a unity, as does the most widely-used English translation (published in Knox’s Early Theological Writings).
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In an earlier draft (see Frühe Schriften II, p. 29; Nohl 1907, p. 371) Hegel had begun with the same initial phrase but had not stressed the complete break with his family or the motivating desire for independence: “Abraham, born in Chaldea, left his fatherland with his father and family and lived for a long time on the plains of Mesopotamia….”
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I have amended Knox’ translation here slightly: Knox translates Zerreissen as “distraction,” but I have emphasized with “disruption” the harshness of the human break with nature that the flood and other events evidently caused.
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Hegel had written during his Bern years (1795–1796) a “Life of Jesus” in which Jesus is treated as a Kantian moral exemplar. The new critical approach Hegel took to Kantian morality in “The Spirit of Christianity” fragments corresponded particularly to the close reading of Kant’sMetaphysics of Morals he did during the period at Frankfurt (1797–1800) and his sense of the need to understand the relationship between law or right and morality in a different light—a critique we can reconstruct, even though the commentary that Hegel apparently wrote on the Metaphysics of Morals has been lost (see Speight 1997). In one of the most famous passages, Hegel makes clear that he now views Kantian morality as an internalized form of the positivity of law: “We might have expected Jesus to work along these lines against the positivity of moral commands, against sheer legality, and to show that, although the legal is a universal whose entire obligatoriness lies in its universality, still, even if every ought, every command, declares itself as something alien, nevertheless as concept (universality) it is something subjective….By this line of argument, however, positivity is only partially removed; and between the Shaman of the Tungus, the European prelate who rules church and state, the Voguls and the Puritans, on the one hand, and the man who listens to his own command of duty, on the other, the difference is not that the former make themselves slaves, while the latter is free, but that the former have their lord outside themselves, while the latter carries his lord in himself, yet at the same time is his own slave” (Knox 1948, pp. 210–211).
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Knox 1948, p. 253: “Morality cancels domination within the sphere of consciousness; love cancels the barriers in the sphere of morality; but love itself is still incomplete in nature.”
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Knox 1948, p. 236. In the fragments, beauty of soul is discussed as the “truth of both opposites, courage and passivity”: “the life in the former remains though opposition falls away, while the loss of right in the latter remains, but the grief disappears….There thus arises a transcendence of right without suffering, a living free elevation above the loss of right and above struggle. The man who lets go what another approaches with hostility, who ceases to call his what the other assails, escapes grief for loss, escapes handling by the other or by the judge, escapes the necessity of engaging with the other” (Knox 1948, pp. 234–235).
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On Jesus’s fate: “since the state was there and neither Jesus nor his following could annul it, the fate of Jesus and his following…remains a loss of freedom, a restriction of life, passivity under the domination of an alien might” (Knox 1948, p. 284); on the fate of Christianity: “This is the point at which the group is caught in the toils of fate, even though, on the strength of the love which maintained itself in its purity outside every tie with the world, it seemed to have evaded fate altogether. Its fate, however, was centered in the fact that the love which shunned all ties was extended over a group; and this fate was all the more developed the more the group expanded and, owing to this expansion, continually coincided more and more with the world’s fate…” (Knox 1948, p. 295).
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Nohl 1907, p. 273: “Das Schicksal des Eigentums ist uns zu mächtig geworden, als daß Reflexionen darüber erträglich, seine Trennung von uns, uns denkbar wäre.”
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Pace Josiah Royce, Hegel did not think of the Phenomenology of Spirit as itself a Bildungsroman, but Hegel’s incorporation of novelistic features remains part of the interesting literary challenge of the work (see Speight 2001, chapter 4).
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The development of Hegel’s views on the Beautiful Soul, from Frankfurt to Jena to Berlin would need more development than space here affords, but what is characteristic of the latter moments is Hegel’s presentation of a kind of typology of such moments: both the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right offer competing notions of the figure and suggest (though in different ways) how these competing accounts may be compared with one another.
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On Kierkegaard’s engagement with Hegel’s typology of these types of conscience, see Stewart 2010, pp. 120–141.
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For a fuller account of Hegel’s notion of conscience’s alternating evaporative/expansive moments within history, see Speight 2006.
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Speight, C.A. (2020). “Return to Intervention in the Life of Human Beings”: Existentialist Themes in the Development of Hegel’s Social and Political Philosophy. In: Stewart, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_6
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