A Rationally Ordered Introduction

It happened in the way these things ordinarily do with me. I had taken down from my shelves Stefan Müller-Doohm’s biography of Jürgen Habermas titled Habermas A Biography and had not read very far into it before learning of Habermas’ affiliation with The Frankfurt School and Max Horkheimer. Not being even passingly familiar with Horkheimer I put down the book and spent a little time researching him and his work. From this I discovered that Horkheimer was deeply influenced by, and much of his work was infused – either as material to build upon or to critique – with the ideas of, Hegel, Marx, and Freud. While I can claim to be at least conversant in the ideas and works of the latter two of these, Hegel was another matter entirely.

Now at this point you may be wondering,”So what; you don’t need to understand the ideas of all these people simply to read a biography of someone.” Actually, I do; or at least I need to at a level to which references to them are not lost upon me. For how can I claim to understand the ideas of someone for whom these very ideas are the principal reason for their notoriety if those ideas are a direct result of the ideas of their own teachers, mentors, or intellectual inspirations without being at least somewhat familiar with the ideas of these people themselves? And to that matter, how can anyone truly consider themselves well-read without a familiarity with the significant writers of the past, particularly those whose words literally changed the intellectual climates of societies, the fates of nations, and the course of world history?

While I was presented with Hegel at university, both in philosophy as well as political science courses, it was always only in the most cursory manner. I can’t recall having read more than one or two sentences at any given time of anything he wrote, and even these were simply quotations from an overview in a textbook. However I did recall it having been mentioned that Hegel’s ideas, and the books through which he expressed them, were complex and often difficult to comprehend. Reading them, especially given the paucity of my own modern education in comparison to that Hegel and his own students would have received in their own times, left me in need of preparation prior to any attempt on my part to read them with reasonable hope of comprehension.

At some point in the past, I must have once before seen the need to acquire a better understanding of Hegel’s ideas, as I found in my collection of Oxford’s Very Short Introductions the volume Hegel by Peter Singer. Knowing from past experience that these little books are remarkably effective doorways into the understanding of subjects with which one is unfamiliar, I plucked it from its resting place and began reading.

Professor Singer is to be highly commended for the manner in which he presents Hegel to his readers. Not beginning with the ideas of this great thinker but rather by placing the man in his own times, the reader is offered a foundation upon which a more nuanced understanding of Hegel’s ideas can be progressively erected.

Hegel’s life and times being outlined, Professor Singer them proceeds to offer an explanation of how Hegel interpreted the world – his ideas about history having a purpose and his subtly complex understanding of religion being key to this. Reading these explanations, I was increasingly gladdened that my own university professors failed to delve deeply into Hegel. A student during one of America’s hopelessly pointless late twentieth century “culture wars,” I could easily see any attempt at discussion of Hegel’s assessments of progress in civilizations, particularly those he judged to have been stuck, in their realization of freedom quickly becoming mired in juvenile condemnations of “cultural imperialism” and “racism,” quite possibly followed by a walk-out of half the students in the class and a likely protest of the hapless professor teaching it. But I digress.

From his explanation of Hegel’s ideas regarding purpose in history, Professor Singer moved on to explain in greater detail Hegel’s ideas about freedom, and how these ideas do not align with how the word is most commonly used today. Indeed, Hegel’s ideas of freedom may strike many today as quite the opposite, and yet the deeper one looks into how he understood freedom in society, and the very idea of a rationally ordered society itself, the more intelligible they become. For whether one in the end agrees with Hegel on these points or seeks to refute them, any mature reaction to them, positive or negative, requires that they be sufficiently understood (something we all-to-often seem to forget when approaching ideas these days).

The only section of Professor Singer’s explanation of Hegel’s ideas that I found insufficient for my own needs (and to be fair, this is a subject the understanding of which has eluded me for many years prior to reading this book) was his explanation of Hegel’s practice of dialectical thinking. The outline of thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis is fully presented, and clear examples are given, yet in the end I still remained – and remain – unable to provide an explanation of it in my own words (something I consider essential in being able to do before I can confidently state that I understand a thing). Yet as I have already declared, this is a subject with which I have long struggled, and the fact that Professor Singer’s own explanation of it failed to break through my own mental block should in no way be interpreted as a weakness on the part of his book.

Having read Professor Singer’s Hegel, A Very Short Introduction, I now think myself much better prepared to begin a reading of Hegel’s own works, beginning (admittedly, against Professor Singer’s recommendation to begin with Philosophy of History) with the chronologically first Phenomenology of Spirit / Mind (Phänomenologie des Geistes). It’s another intellectual quirk that I have – the preference for exploring an author’s works from an early point in order to discover not only what his (or her, as the case may be) ideas were but also how they developed over time.

Title: Hegel, A Very Short Introduction