Hegel: A Reinterpretation

432 Pages·1978·37.696 MB·English

by  Walter Kaufmann

HEGEL
A
Reinterpretation
Walter Kaufmann is Professor of Philosophy at Princeton
University, Bom in Germany in 1921, he graduated from
Williams College in 1941, and returned to Europe with U. S.
Military intelligence during the war. In 1947 he received his
Ph.D. from Harvard. He is well known for his works on ex-
istentialism and on religion, and for his translations of
Goethe's Faust and Twenty German Poets.
In his Nietzsche he offered a comprehensive reinterpreta-
tion that quickly won wide acceptance. Since then he has
been asked to write new articles on Nietzsche for the Ency-
clopaedia Britannica, Encyclopedia Americana, Collier's En-
cyclopedia, Grolier's Encyclopedia, and the Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, among others. His first article on Hegel attracted
international attention, and American and European scholars
have long urged him to write a book reinterpreting Hegel.
HEGEL
A REINTERPRETATION
WALTER KAUFMANN
Undergraduate
193
H36/Z
K/6Z
1978
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS
NOTRE DAME, INDIANA
University ofNotre DamePressedition 1978
Copyright© 1965byWalterKaufmann
PublishedbyarrangementwithDoubleday & Company,Inc.
Alltranslationsinthisvolumearetheauthor's.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kaufmann, Wjilter Arnold.
Hegel, a reinterpretation.
"First published by Doubleday &: Company, inc., in
1965, as the first seven chapters of Hegel: reinterpreta-
tion, texts, and commentary."
Reprint of the 1966 ed. published by Anchor Books,
Garden City, N.Y.
1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831.
I. Title.
[B2948.K3 1977] 193 77-89765
ISBN 0-268-01068-4
FOR MY MOTHER
who read the Phenomenology in 1914,
in return for her copy of the book
Was du ererbt von deinen Vdtern hast,
Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!
Faust, 682f.
Acknowledgments
For over a dozen years I have taught Hegel both in graduate
seminars and to undergraduates. I want to give thanks to my
graduate students for their interest and helpful discussions,
above all to Professor Frithjof Bergmann who wrote his thesis
on Hegel. Much of the work on the Index was done by
Michael Spence. I am grateful to Sanford G. Thatcher for his
cheerful and reliable help with the proofs and other last-
minute chores.
My
debts to scholars are acknowledged throughout the
book. But I should like to add that one of my teachers, Pro-
fessor John William Miller of Williams CoUege, who never
lectured on Hegel, often remarked that Hegel's philosophy
was much more open and less rigid than is usually supposed.
I am most indebted to Georg Lasson, who pioneered the
critical editions of Hegel's writings, to Johannes Hoffmeister,
who continued this work and edited Hegel's letters—he also
had my first article on Hegel translated and published in Ger-
many—and to Rolf Flechsig, who edited the fourth volume of
Hegel's correspondence after HoflFmeister's death. All Hegel
scholars have reason to be grateful to Felix Meiner who, for
over half a century, has published these critical editions.
For his companionship during the hours before and after
midnight when much of this book was written during the sum-
mer of 1964, I thank my son, David. My debt to my wife,
Hazel, is chronic by now. And thanks to Anne Freedgood and
Robert Hewetson, the final stages, after the manuscript was
turned over to the publisher, were free from birth pangs: one
could not wish for more understanding editors.
Preface
The aim of this book is as simple as its execution is difficult:
to establish a comprehensive reinterpretation of Hegel—not
just of one facet of his thought but of the whole phenomenon
of Hegel.
That this is worth doing, few will question. It is generally
agreed that Hegel was one of the greatest philosophers of all
time, and no philosopher since 1800 has had more influence.
A
study of Hegel enriches our comprehension of subsequent
philosophy and theology, political theory and literary criticism.
Indeed, recent intellectual history cannot be understood apart
from him.
Since 1905 a great deal of new material has come to light,
including many important Hegel manuscripts as well as letters
and documents. Most of it has never been translated into
English, and British and American monographs on Hegel
have persistently ignored it.
What needs to be done, however, has not yet been done
in German or French either. Many German studies of Hegel
are very erudite, and in the two-volume works by Franz
Rosenzweig, Theodor Haering, and Hermann Glockner the
manuscript discoveries made early in this century are taken
into account. But since the last of these volumes appeared in
1940, new material has been published and the critical edi-
tion of Hegel's works has progressed. Moreover, Rosenzweig
confined himself to Hegel's political philosophy; Haering re-
quired thirteen hundred pages to reach Hegel's first book and
then, after giving that a few pages, stopped; and Glockner,
after a thousand pages, finished with Hegel's first book, and
devoted only a few pages to Hegel's later work.
It is a worthy ambition to publish volumes that can be con-
Vlll PREFACE
suited repeatedly in libraries, but only a book that can be read
straight through before being referred to again and again can
establish a really new interpretation.
In the body of this book the reader will find Hegel and not
me. But in the Preface some autobiographical remarks may
be forgiven if they help to explain my approach. They might
even help some readers in their approach to Hegel.
In our living room in Berlin, where I grew up, a large pic-
ture of Kant hung over a green tile stove in one corner. On
the flat surface of the stove, which was never used, reposed
a huge seventeenth-century Bible, and Kant was flanked by
smaller portraits of Fichte and Hegel. In a sense, I have lived
with Hegel since I was four.
Next to Fichte, the wall was covered with German liter-
ature from Lessing to the present. At right angles with that,
on the wall facing Hegel, the center bookcase was devoted
to philosophy. But though we had Kant's "works" and an
incomplete set of Nietzsche, there were only a few volumes
by Hegel. It was not until I was a graduate student that I
started seriously on those, having read only the Philosophy of
Right in college.
It was in the summer of 1942, after I had passed my
"Prelims" at Harvard and got married, that I first read the
Phenomenology and the Encyclopedia. One might study Hegel
with one's teeth clenched, but I read him in a honeymoon
spirit.
It was a delight to find again and again that after consider-
able effort one could make sense of passages that at first had
seemed quite incomprehensible. Georg Lasson, who had con-
tributed prefaces in a spirit of loving discipleship, was my
friend; Rudolf Haym, who was quoted as having disparaged
the Phenomenology was not. Josiah Royce, too, remarked
,
that Haym had not done justice to the book, and it was not
until much later that I read Haym and found his book one of
the best on Hegel. But that summer the point was to com-
prehend the incomprehensible, not to read unsympathetic
criticism; and the presumption was that his critics had not
understood Hegel, which was true enough in most cases.
PREFACE IX
In one of my weekly reports on my reading, I criticized
Royce's image of Hegel. My professor made a notation on
the paper for me to see him, and then invited me for lunch at
the Faculty Club. Since I thought that he looked like Bis-
marck, and I had never set foot inside a faculty club, I was
apprehensive. The menu came, and I ordered something
from the middle. Then my professor said: "Waiter, bring me
an apple!" While I had to eat, I was told that I was confused,
that all German philosophers were confused, that Kant and
Hegel had been confused, and that Royce had tried to make
some sense of Hegel. In one way at least I was in good
company.
My honeymoon with Hegel is long passed. The discovery
that what at first makes no sense is after all by no means
meaningless too often leads to joyous assent. The Heidegger
vogue is a striking example. But recognition of an author's
meaning is one thing, comprehension another. When a phi-
losopher is exceptionally difficult, most readers leave him
alone or soon give up. The few who persevere and spend
years figuring him out naturally do not like to be experts on
something that is not worth while. So one is tempted to sus-
pend criticism and concentrate on exegesis. Heidegger actually
encourages and inculcates this approach: in immensely repeti-
tive essays, particularly on Holderlin and the pre-Socratics,
he practically preaches exegetical thinking. It is one of the
many important differences between Hegel and Heidegger
that Hegel distinguished clearly between such thinking and
comprehension. Comprehension without critical evaluation is
impossible.
One of the glaring faults of most "existentialism" is this
lack of seriousness. One remains at the surface and is edified.
For all the usual protestations of ultimate seriousness, there
is something exceedingly playful about Kierkegaard's manip-
ulation of language and examples, about what Heidegger does
with words, and—in their philosophical writings—about Sartre's
brilliance and Camus's gambits. They ask us, in effect, to
suspend our critical faculties and not to take things too ex-
actly. In Kierkegaard's terms one might say that they ask
X PREFACE
to be read on the aesthetic plane. In "existentialist" writers
this seems even more ironical than it would be in Hegel's
case.
Hegel often failed in the same way, and in his case, too,
this is ironical because he called his philosophy "science."
But in principle he was clear on this point. Comprehension
requires sympathetic immersion as well as criticism: we must
enter not only into a train of thought, but also into its subject
matter; and insofar as possible we must take the author's
positions more seriously than he himself took them. Only
in that way can we hope to make progress beyond him.
Indeed, we are not doing Hegel justice when we say that,
in spite of his frequent lapses, he was clear about this in prin-
ciple. This suggests that the standard itself is an old one. In
fact, nobody has done so much to establish it as Hegel did.
It is often difficult to fuse sympathy and criticism. Most
writers on Hegel fail in one respect or the other, if not in
both. On the whole, the most scholarly German studies are
too close to their subject, while most of those who have
written on him in English do not really seem at home with
him. His world is after all not theirs.
This is illustrated by the divergent attitudes toward Hegel's
early period. Recent German scholarship has become so im-
mersed in it that it often does not get around to even an
attempt at any critical consideration of his mature thought.
British and American scholarship, on the other hand, has
refused altogether to immerse itself in Hegel's develop-
ment, and as a result usually fails to comprehend his thought
from the inside.
Perhaps my own experience of having lived with Hegel for
so many years, while also living with Goethe and Nietzsche,
existentialism and—in the flesh—American students and col-
leagues, has helped to establish a proper balance between
closeness and distance. And it may be fortunate, as well as
unusual, that the closeness came first and the distance after-
wards. It would not be in Hegel's spirit to try to go back to
him; but to take him seriously and go beyond him is not to
betray him.