H. S. Harris

Hegel's development, night thoughts (Jena 1801-1806)

This book, which takes account of everything that survives from the manuscripts Hegel produced during his first academic career at the University of Jena, is the first comprehensive survey of the development of Hegels mature system.

Genesis and structure of society

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Hegel’s Correspondence Theory of Truth

“The world,” said Wittgenstein, “is the totality of facts, not of things.” According to the “correspondence theory,” therefore, “the truth” will be the totality of assertions that state “the facts.” In Hegel’s mature theory of “truth,” this is not “philosophical truth” at all, but the ideal limit of “correct statement.”

The End of History in Hegel

When we are studying Hegels answer to any question, or his solution to any problem, we must always look first at the systematic context in which the problem is raised, or the question asked. Hegels “philosophy of world-history” comes as the climactic stage of the development of “objective spirit”; and it provides the transition to the spheres of “absolute spirit”. The philosophical comprehension of political history provides the ultimate context for our political theory; and then it leads us on to the sphere in which we are directly aware of “the Absolute”. Our political science comes to an end, when we recognize that “the worlds history is the worlds court of judgment”. But that “court of judgment” has jurisdiction only over the objective forms of political and social organization. The judgment of history is not the “Last Judgment” for everything and everyone. There are modes of experience which emerge and develop in history, but which are recognized as transhistorical; and when “philosophy”, as the historical quest for wisdom, reaches its goal, we can see and say why Greek art has an enduring significance for us, even though the Greek religion (which their art expressed in its highest form) has passed over into history just as completely and irrevocably as the “city-state”. Our political thought and action exists in the context of a religious ideal that will not allow us to divide the human community into “us” and “them”, the freemen and the slaves, the civilized and the barbarians. But only the arrival of philosophical “wisdom” has enabled us to see and say what is “absolute” about our religion (just as it is we, and not the Greeks themselves, who have the “absolute” consciousness of Greek art).

Hegel for Today

Just a few months before Charles Taylor’s Hegel (Cambridge, 1975) appeared, Anthony Quinton was calling in the New York Review of Books for ‘some strong spirit’ to ’address itself to the cryptogram of Hegel’s metaphysics, with Ivan Soll’s clarity and concision but at a greater critical distance.’’ It can fairly be said of Taylor’s book that it is the work of a ‘strong spirit’, that it preserves an almost perfect balance of intelligent sympathy and critical distance, that it addresses itself to the main Hegelian ’cryptogram’ (the Logic) with admirable concision. To my mind, there remains a slight ambiguity in his reading of the ’cryptogram’; and because his book is a long one, with many necessary and some unnecessary repetitions-for his spirit is not always strong enough to maintain the standard of concise clarity achieved in his central discussion of the Logic-I fear some readers may manage through a selective, or an unduly rapid, reading, to gain from his pages support for certain prejudices of which Taylor is himself almost entirely free. However, the most prejudiced reader will gain critical insight from the reading of even a single chapter (any chapter) of this book. What Quinton asked for is here, in all essentials, provided.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Religion

The chapter on Religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit has been overshadowed in the general literature on the subject by the Berlin lecture courses on the philosophy of religion. Sometimes it is studied in the context of Hegel’s early concern with the forms of cultural “happiness” and unhappiness; and sometimes comparisons are made between the Jena period and the Berlin lectures. Sometimes, alas, everything is lumped together, and appealed to indifferently as “Hegel’s views”, as if all his talk of a self-forgetful immersion in the Sache selbst was merely hypocritical, or at best a folly of self-deception; or else as if the Sache selbst in which he was immersed — the “forms of Union” (1798), the “Science of experience” (1806) and the “self-exposition of Absolute Spirit” (1821–31) — was always identically one and the same. These different concerns are (needless to say) intimately related; but they are not quite identical.

What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Croce

When Croce published his celebrated essay on “What is living and what is dead in the philosophy of Hegel” in 1907, Hegel was already seventy-six years dead. In 1966 we reached the centennial of Croces birth; but even now, in 1968, it is only sixteen years since death took the pen from the hand of the indefatigable “Don Benedetto.” Clearly therefore, it is still too early to draw up anything like a final balance sheet for the heritage that he has left us. But since the centennial was marked for us by the appearance of an English translation of the great anthology of essays on Philosophy, Poetry, History selected by the author himself at the very end of his life and often referred to in Italy as “Croce in one volume,” it is perhaps appropriate now to raise the question about the enduring heritage of Croce, if only to see more clearly how far, and in what ways, we are still not in a position either to appropriate it or to estimate it.