Abstract
According to the conventional story told by intellectual historians, the nineteenth century witnessed a major break in the philosophical tradition, jumping from German Idealism (identified with Hegel) to existentialism (identified with Kierkegaard). Jon Stewart disagrees: and in Idealism and Existentialism he challenges this account and puts forward an alternative view of Hegel. (While most of the chapters consist of articles or lectures already published in one form or another, by collecting them in book form Stewart makes them more accessible to readers and, taken in their totality, an overarching argument emerges.) The first three chapters address themselves to the vexed question of the structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, discerning a clearer argumentational architecture in the work’s parallel analyses. Other chapters examine Hegel’s relation to other nineteenth-century thinkers: although Schopenhauer, for example, dismissed Hegel’s philosophy as ‘a colossal mystification’ (p. 73), Stewart argues that, as far as their view of religion is concerned, both thinkers shared the same fundamental conceptions. In a detailed reading of the ‘Religion’ section of the Phenomenology, Stewart highlights the proximity between Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s views on tragedy: ‘Man thus puts himself in the place of the statue as the shape that has been raised and refashioned for perfectly free movement’, says Hegel of the Bacchic reveller (p. 149), while, in what Nietzsche called the Dionysian, Man ‘is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art’ (p. 149). And in three further chapters, Stewart defends Hegel against the criticism articulated by Kierkegaard, arguing that the famous maxim from the Philosophy of Right, ‘What is rational, is real, and what is real, is rational’ (pp. 12, 79), was fundamentally misunderstood by the Danish thinker. Finally, after an overview of existentialist ethics (surveying Kant, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Camus, Sartre and Beauvoir), Stewart examines the role of freedom in thought of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; although Hegel might appear to be marginal to these discussions, his definition of freedom as insight into necessity (Enzyklopädie, I, §158) reveals his profound affinity with Sartre’s view that ‘to be free is not to choose the historic world in which one arises … but to choose oneself in the world whatever this may be’ (pp. 208–9). Overall, Hegel emerges as a forerunner of the so-called ‘irrationalist tradition’, in a way that could help rehabilitate that much-misunderstood school of thought.
Although Jon Stewart’s prose is clear and relatively non-technical, anyone encountering difficulties understanding the figure of Hegel as it is presented in his book will find help at hand in the form of The Hegel Dictionary by Glenn Alexander Magee, the author of a major study of Hegel and the hermetic tradition (Cornell University Press, 2001). His Dictionary, one in a series of such works planned by Continuum (Derrida and Sartre dictionaries have already appeared; Deleuze and Guattari, Gadamer, Heidegger, Husserl, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein are promised for the future), is a genuinely useful tool for getting to grips with Hegel, containing a series of entries discussing names, works, concepts and especially phrases (‘the bacchantic revel’, ‘the night in which all cows are black’, ‘the cunning of reason’, ‘the slaughter-bench of history’, ‘the rose in the cross of the present’) found in his writings. Although Magee’s dictionary inevitably invites comparison with Michael Inwood’s A Hegel Dictionary (Blackwell, 1992), which is pitched at a different (and more scholarly) level, it would wrong to think of Magee as a kind of Inwood-lite: but because Inwood sticks quite closely to the actual formulations used by Hegel, Magee will probably be preferred by the undergraduate or general audience at which it is aimed. (One quibble – the abbreviation system indicating the sources from Hegel refers to certain works by using the name of his English translators, which can sometimes be disconcerting: a reference system based on the titles of his works only would be clearer.) Other entries, such as the one on the phrase ‘foaming chalice’ (found in the conclusion to the Phenomenology of Spirit), make clear Hegel’s indebtedness to his contemporary cultural context (here, the final lines of Schiller’s poem on friendship), turning a technical point about a literary source into a discussion about what Hegel’s misquotation of Schiller’s text actually implies. So even if Hegel’s work still appears to many to be (in the words of the presenter of a recent episode of ABC Radio National’s The Philosopher’s Zone) ‘a little intimidating’, Magee’s determination to make Hegel accessible will, one hopes, be rewarded by a new generation of readers prepared for their own adventures in the concept.