Terry Pinkard's Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2000) is the only English-language biography of the colossally influential 19th-century philosopher once described by Schopenhauer as a "vulgar, dull, repulsive, witless charlatan." In this August 2000 interview with Danny Postel, Pinkard discusses the history of Hegel's reception in the Anglophone world and the relationship between the philosopher's life and ideas.
Britannica.com
August 1, 2000
Interview | Hegel: Spirit of the Times
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) is widely regarded as the most influential philosopher of the 19th century. Indeed many consider him one of the greatest of all modern thinkers. Yet he was not without his detractors: Arthur Schopenhauer, his contemporary, called him a "vulgar, dull, repulsive, witless charlatan." Karl Popper accused him of being an "enemy" of "the open society." Hegel's ideas have been blamed for everything from Nazism to Communism.
But who really was Hegel? Why have his ideas inspired such divergent interpretations and virulent reactions? What resemblance is there between his actual thought and the various uses to which it has been put?
The first English-language biography of the enigmatic philosopher, Hegel: A Biography, has just been published. Britannica.com's Danny Postel sat down to talk with its author, Terry Pinkard.
Britannica: This is the first English-language biography of Hegel. It's been almost 170 years since his death. Why do you think it's taken so long for a biography of such a major figure in modern intellectual history to be written?
Pinkard: The question itself points to a fascinating piece of intellectual history: the reception of Hegel in the English-speaking world. First, there was the establishment of Analytic philosophy by Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore in the beginning of the 20th century, which was itself always billed by both of them as an attack on "Hegelianism" in particular and "idealism" in general. Part of the force of that attack had to do particularly with Russell's own, rather stark modernism. He and that whole Edwardian generation were rebelling against the overdecorated Victorian house and against what they saw as irrational, suffocating Victorian morals—in short, against the whole panoply of overstuffed, overdecorated, pompous Victorian "earnestness" (think of Oscar Wilde's witty play on Victorian stuffiness) and the puffed-up excess that seemed to go with it. Against all of that, men cut their hair, shaved their mutton chops, and started wearing modern suits. Modern, rigorous houses were built, modernism in poetry became a movement unto itself, and so forth.
All these things signified a cultural change of no small magnitude. In philosophy this was touted as a defense of reason, a truly "scientific" approach to things, a mathematization of theory, a paring down to the arguments pro and con for a position, and the like. For Russell, the opposite of all that was the overly inflated, pretentious "Hegelianism" of his day. "Hegelianism" seemed like the perfect philosophical embodiment of everything that the "modernists" (in art, architecture, painting, poetry, and philosophy) were against. Thus, one of the great achievements of Anglophone philosophy—the invention of Analytic philosophy, its techniques of argument, its professionalized style, its extreme seriousness about itself—was achieved by, as it were, "killing off" Hegel. There is something almost Oedipal in the reaction of Anglophone philosophers to Hegel: He just had to be dead. Analytic philosophy could only be created by "killing" the Hegelians (Russell's and Moore's teachers); if Hegel were to return, the whole Analytic show, it was felt, would be doomed.
The other set of events had to do with the demonization of Germany in World War I and the German moral catastrophe that led to World War II. In both cases, for rather spurious and scandalous reasons, Hegel became identified with the kind of "Teutonism" that gave all things German a bad name. The Nazis never liked Hegel, and he was always considered by the party hacks to have too much "Jewish" influence in his thought to be really German. (Of course, there were also opportunistic philosophers in Germany trying to make Hegel, just as they tried to make all kinds of other German philosophers, into heroes of Hitler's state.) Nonetheless, in English-speaking countries, "Hegel" (already the bane of Analytic philosophers poised for their postwar takeover of philosophy departments) became the evil German Hegel. He thus became not only stuffy and pretentious, to be jettisoned in favor of the cool, sparse, argumentative rigor of Analytic philosophy; he became evil.
Those two events—the attack on Hegel that led to the establishment of Analytic philosophy and the false identification of Hegel with German militarism and Nazi terror—made Hegel persona non grata in the Anglophone world until, really, only a few years ago. Only now has Hegel begun to be taken seriously enough that anybody would think of writing such a biography.
Of course Hegel never left continental European philosophy, where people were not taken in by the idea that he was a gasbag who couldn't "argue" or was really in his heart a proto-Nazi. Hegel simply never got burdened with those misreadings on the continent, where he stayed alive while he lived at best an underground existence in Britain, the United States, and Australia.
Britannica: What about some of the other tenets ascribed to him? For example, the notion that he was an idealist: that he believed reality to be ultimately conceptual or spiritual. Not true?
Pinkard: "Idealism" is a particularly hard word to pin down. The sense of the word in English philosophy tends to be associated with the 18th-century British philosopher George Berkeley. It has to do with the idea that all reality is (somehow) mental, that (ultimately) all we are confronting in the world are our own mental representations of it. A more contemporary form of this is "linguistic idealism," which is the idea that all we are ultimately confronting are our own ways of talking about things, not confronting any kind of nonlinguistic thing in itself. (In its postmodern forms this comes down to saying that there isn't just "one" reality, but as many different ones as there are ways of talking about reality.)
As that "idealist" notion gets developed and cashed out by the successors of Immanuel Kant (Hegel among them), it develops into the idea that we understand people and societies best when we understand them in terms of what they themselves ultimately value, how they evaluate themselves, and what is authoritative for them. The opposite of this form of "idealism" is the notion that we understand, for example, societies best when we don't look at what they ultimately value but at some other material force that is driving them (such as the economy or the geography of the place).
Nonetheless, just as Kant was originally taken to be an "idealist" in Berkeley's sense, Hegel was also interpreted as being a kind of cosmic idealist—it was thought that in his case he was saying that everything was mental and that the universe was therefore one big mind that was developing itself historically as it thought about itself. People like Russell jumped all over this as the embodiment of silliness and pretentiousness itself. Taking Hegel to be an idealist in that sense also made it easy to link Hegel and Marx: Hegel thought everything was mental and developing, Marx thought it was material and developing, and so forth.
There was a period in the late 19th century when it was thought that this form of "cosmic idealism" might be the only way to salvage religion from the attacks coming from those who accepted Darwin's rather convincing theory. The idea was that, yes, evolution is true, but it's all part of a bigger story about the Big Mind thinking about itself and "evolving" different conceptions of what it's all about, so that it develops conceptions of itself as ants, then salamanders, then apes, then us, who are its almost perfect expressions. Hegel was thus taken as the "synthesis" of Darwin and religion. That was a short-lived intellectual moment, and it made itself into a big, sweet target for secular debunkers like Russell.
Britannica: One of the things most associated with Hegel's thought is the thesis/antithesis/synthesis scheme, the process by which reality unfolds and history progresses. But you claim this never appears in Hegel's work.
Pinkard: This myth was started by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus. It appears in a history he wrote of recent German philosophy (published in the 1840s), in which he said, roughly, that Fichte's philosophy followed the model of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, but Hegel went further and cosmologized that notion, extending it to the entire universe. The book was widely read (apparently the young Marx was one of its readers), and the idea stuck. It's still touted in a lot of short encyclopedia entries about Hegel. Like many little encapsulations of thought, it has the virtue of being easy to understand and easy to summarize. It's just not very helpful in understanding Hegel's thought. It has also contributed to the lack of appreciation of Hegel in Anglophone philosophy. It's not too hard to point out all the places where it doesn't apply, dismiss it as a kind of dialectical trick, and then just go on to conclude that Hegel isn't worth reading at all.
Both ideas (Hegel as cosmological idealist, Hegel as seeing the development of this Great Mind as progressing from thesis to antithesis to synthesis) represent a falsification of Hegel's thought, and their ongoing popularity surely has to do with their sound bite quality. You can sum up Hegel quickly, get the impression you understand him, and also dismiss him just as quickly. Looking at the real Hegel is harder but more rewarding. If, to keep it as simple as we can, we try to understand how societies evaluate themselves and what is authoritative for them, then, so Hegel thought, we will also need to understand the complexities involved in how societies historically have come to evaluate themselves, how in turn they have historically become skeptical about whether those very terms of evaluation are themselves adequate, and about how such schemes of evaluation have historically broken down as it became more and more difficult for the participants in that way of life to live out the lives required by those schemes of evaluation they were mutually imposing on each other.
What is still controversial in all that is that Hegel thought that we had to understand that complexity "internally," not in terms of our being driven by blind economic forces or just our natural (these days we would say "genetic") makeup. There is, he thought, a kind of "logic" to the way these matters develop, and we understand them best when we understand them from the point of view of the people living those lives, how they matter to them, and why they come to find they can't "carry on" in that way anymore. Of course, it's just so much easier to say "ah, the thesis, then the antithesis, then the synthesis." Easier but not more enlightening.
Britannica: You write that Hegel's life "intersected with his thought in a variety of deep ways." What were some of those ways?
Pinkard: One of the most obvious ways is the extent to which Hegel responded to his own Württemberg upbringing. "Old Württemberg" had, to borrow the term from the historian Mack Walker, a "hometown" structure. It was organized into a series of small communities, each of which had a clear sense of who belonged, who didn't, what the social rules in that particular community were, what were the duties of the community to support its members, and so forth. Basically, there were lots of little communities, and you had to be part of that community to know what its rules were and what mattered to it.
This posed a severe challenge to all reformers and modernizers: Attempts, for example, to open up employment to talent, or for the emancipation of Jews, or to allow competition in the local marketplaces, were deeply resented and resisted by the "hometowners," who would see this as undermining and corrupting their own particular way of life. (They were, by the way, right about that.) Hegel, as a modernizer, had a good understanding and an appreciation of what drove those "hometowns," but unlike many others, he did not fall into the one-sided solution either of romanticizing the closed "communitarian" nature of these "hometowns," nor of simply cheering on the bureaucratic attempts to impose rational, universal structures from "on high." Instead, he struggled to find a way to reconcile those two elements within his thought. It's a problem we still struggle with today in various forms.
Another way in which Hegel's own Württemberg upbringing played a significant role in his thought had to do with the celebration in Württemberg of what was called "the good old law." As I said, many Württembergers were deeply suspicious of the various Enlightenment schemes to impose universal legal solutions on people. One of Hegel's youthful heroes, J.J. Moser, developed a rich sense of how the law of a land develops out of its particular historical past and is both contingent (in the sense that it can only be understood in terms of that particular past) and at the same time necessary for that people (although Moser himself was never very clear as to just why it was necessary). That left Hegel with a clear sense of one of the key modern paradoxes, which in turn he strove in his own thought to come to terms with: the contingency of our basic evaluative stances (how they could have been otherwise had our particular history gone just a little bit differently) and how they nonetheless called out for a justification in terms that, at least at first glance, aren't relative. That problem of the relativity of our standards versus the nonrelativity of the ways we go about justifying them is also one of those issues with which we are still trying ourselves to come to terms nowadays. Hegel's own attempts at this are still alive and instructive for us.
Hegel's stay in Bavaria as a high school teacher in Nuremberg also allowed him to see some of the problems in modernizing Europe in general and Germany in particular. He was living in a Protestant area that had been subsumed in the Napoleonic wars into the Catholic kingdom of Bavaria. He thus had a firsthand experience of what it was like to be a religious minority in an area that on paper was committed to full confessional rights for all its members but which was still torn by deep-seated divisions and suspicions within its own ranks. His own mature political philosophy was worked out during this period, and some of his best insights into the problems of modern political and social life were developed while he was both managing and teaching in a Protestant high school (a "gymnasium," as they are called in Germany) in Nuremberg.
It's safe to say that Hegel's own attempts at understanding just what this new, modern world required of us—how it called on us to sail out, as Hegel used to say, into the open with nothing above us and nothing below us—intersected crucially with his own experiences of the revolution in France and the ensuing Napoleonic wars in Germany, with all the upheaval they caused, the fears they instilled, and the hopes for a reformed world to which they gave rise. Hegel's generation—the group born around 1770—experienced a wrenching change from a way of life rooted in (at least what seemed like) ancient European practices into the unsettling modern world of political, social, and economic revolution. Hegel's own agenda became that of figuring out how to think our way through all that—what kind of "logic" do we need, what kind of view of ourselves and nature, ourselves and God, the role of modern art, the structure of the modern, constitutional state, and so forth. How, in short, do we conceive of ourselves and the world in terms of continuous upheaval and continuous renewal, as always tearing things down and building them up again? That was Hegel's own life, and it was the object of his thought.
Britannica: Yet you point out that Hegel himself "firmly resisted the idea that the philosophical author's life sheds any light on his works." Doesn't this stand in direct opposition to your attempt to link his life and his ideas?
Pinkard: In one sense it quite obviously does. Hegel thought that in philosophy, the less there is of "This is my opinion" and the more there is of "Here's my argument for my position," the better off we are. Hegel was also being very modern in this approach. He extended this not just to philosophy but also to the various arts. In this way he anticipated, for example, people like T.S. Eliot, who also argued for the "disappearing author." The idea is that you should be able to approach a work of philosophy, or a painting, or a poem, and be able to appreciate it and, most importantly, evaluate it—to ask, "Is it true?"—without having to know anything about the author in question. Quite the opposite is true in, for example, politics, where you need to know something about the politician in order to be able to evaluate whether what he or she is doing or proposing is perhaps more of an expression of power or self-interest than it is something aimed at the common good.
There is, however, another important sense in which linking Hegel's life to his works doesn't contradict some of the other things he says. For Hegel, one of the fundamental tensions in all life, and especially in philosophy, is the one between the way a particular thinker embodies a very specific outlook on things—the result of his or her own personality, upbringing, historical situation, what he or she has come into contact with—and the way in which that thinker makes assertions that purport to be more than just expressions of individual points of view. When a person asserts that, say, constitutional government is the best form of government, he is asserting more than that this just strikes him as the best or that this is an expression of his own personality; he's saying that it really is the best. On the other hand, the person asserting this is also a particular person with his own set of taken-for-granted beliefs and assumptions, and his assertions also have to be understood within that context. This is the tension between the "universal" and the "particular" in Hegel's thought.
To give a somewhat simplified version of what this amounts to, consider the following: When we come to find out that what we had taken as "the truth" has, in our historical experience, turned out to be only the expression of a particular "interest" of some social class or a particular group, we lose our allegiance to that purported "truth." At one point, for example, we might have thought that rule by kings was simply written into the nature of things, that nothing else was consistent with human nature, maybe even that there was a kind of divine plan behind that system of rule; we gradually came to find out, though, that what had seemed like very good arguments for that system had turned out to be tainted by the "particularity" of the people making them and that, bit by bit, the assertions of the inevitability of monarchic rule gradually failed to hold our imaginations any longer.
Actually, the story, even on Hegel's own account, is much more complicated than that, but it makes (I hope) a general point: that the basic tension animating "us moderns" has historically come to be that between, first of all, the inevitability of our seeing all our various claims—for the superiority of capitalism, of limited government, of human rights, or even for the sheer relativity of all such claims—as being themselves purely contingent, resting on accidental configurations of history, personality, and circumstance; and secondly, the necessity to provide a justification of those claims, to redeem them in some way that is not simply the expression of a point of view but something more in which we can also put our allegiance. (Even the hard-core relativist has to give us some way of redeeming his or her idea that all these things "really are" relative, that we should throw our lot in with the relativists and not with the nonrelativists, and that this view isn't just some idiosyncratic personal "thing.")
In writing about Hegel's life and times, I've tried to bring that tension out. I've tried to show how much of what he did and said was related to his own circumstances or was even a product of them; my goal was for us to be able to put ourselves, so to speak, in the Hegelian position of being able to evaluate Hegel himself.
One other thing: A biographical (as opposed to a more detached, nonbiographical) treatment of Hegel also stays true to one of his key dictums: that only the concrete is real; abstractions have no reality until they are embodied in flesh and blood people and real institutions and social practices. If we accept that Hegelian dictum, then Hegel's own thought should never be considered purely as an abstraction but rather in terms of the way it was concretely embodied in the practices, history, and institutions of his time. It's a mistake to reduce a thinker to his own time and place; but it's also a mistake to abstract him out of it. Yes, Hegel was a middle-class 19th-century German intellectual; but not every middle-class 19th-century German intellectual was Hegel.
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