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The paper deals with the character of Lenin’s ‘dialectics,’ of which there has, until recently, been many erroneous interpretations. I attempt to show that Lenin’s idea of a dialectical method in most cases boils down to the demand of a “concrete analysis of a concrete situation.” This demand Lenin turned against the un-dialectical and dogmatic interpretations of Marxism of the Second International. Actually, Lenin’s idea of dialectics as, above all, a method of a concrete analysis is not borrowed from Plekhanov or other Marxist theoreticians, but from the Narodnik writer Alexander Herzen. As to the claim that Lenin changed his mind after 1914 when he began to study Hegel’s ‘Logic’, there is no evidence to support the thesis. Lenin did not abandon the positions he had taken earlier, in 1907, in his ‘Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.’ This is obvious from his writings after the October Revolution of 1917; for example, in the notes he criticizes Bukharin’s inability to use dialectics correctly (i.e. to make a concrete analysis).

This chapter briefly considers the relationship between Lukacs, the outstanding Marxist philosopher, and Lenin, the outstanding Marxist political figure. Classical Marxism, which was invented by Engels, is anti-Hegelian. Not surprisingly, views of the relationship between Lukacs and Lenin differ. There is a basic difference between Marxist philosophy and Marxist politics. I will be suggesting there is a deep tension between Lukacs’ philosophical Hegelian Marx interpretation and Lenin’s political version of Marxist orthodoxy. This tension is later partially covered up by Lenin’s philosophical turn to Hegel, hence to a Hegelian view of Marx he never worked out, as well as by Lukacs’ turn, after the invention of Hegelian Marxism, to Marxist political orthodoxy. Classical Marxism is based philosophically on an anti-Hegelian reading of Marx invented by Engels and defended by a long series of later Marxists. Lukacs made his breakthrough to an anti-Marxist Hegelian reading of Marx in ‘HCC.’ Lukacs’ Hegelian interpretation of Marx led him to criticize Engels in that book and throughout his later writings. After ‘HCC,’ he remained faithful to his most important philosophical insights in continuing to defend and to develop Marxian Hegelianism. Yet beginning in his little book on Lenin, he accepted the political hegemony of Leninism suggested in the Leninist political concept of partyness. From a political angle of vision, in virtue of his acceptance of Marxist political hegemony, Lukacs is a political but not a philosophical Leninist. But he is certainly not a Leninist in an unqualified sense. Under the influence of Engels and Plekhanov, Lenin initially adopted an anti-Hegelian approach before his later conversion to Hegelianism in the Philosophical Notebooks. Suffice it to say that as a philosopher, Lukacs is neither a Leninist nor an anti-Leninist. He is rather the single most important Marxist philosopher, who, in formulating Hegelian Marxism, simultaneously refutes classical anti-Hegelian Marxism while inventing Western Marxism.

The era of German Idealism stands alongside ancient Greece and the French Enlightenment as one of the most fruitful and influential periods in the history of philosophy. Beginning with the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 and ending about ten years after Hegel’s death in 1831, the period of “classical German philosophy” transformed whole fields of philosophical endeavor.

In this chapter, we consider the role of leisure according to Hegel through reflecting on the centrality of the Lord/Slave dialectic contrasted with a Nietzschean concept of work and leisure (or otium). We found that while Hegel’s negative concept of leisure is Modern, Nietzsche’s theorisation of otium develops an already postmodern concept. First, we show how Hegel masterfully poses the issue, describing the dialectic which makes work transforming and turns leisure into slavery. Second, we examine the reasons why only work is liberating, describing the dialectical process that occurs in the confrontation between consciousness desiring mutual recognition, without desiring mutual annihilation. Thus, by showing how two conflicting desires of consciences can be resolved through the process of recognition, the final section of this text presents how the desire of a conscience must be suppressed and transformed in work (resented, according to Nietzsche), while the other, the desire of the Lord, is the only acceptable desire, but without the possibility of recognition. Finally, we conclude—in line with Gorz and Lafargue—that it is necessary to rethink the concepts of leisure and work in the light of a new conception of temporality, to discuss the profound political implications that the Hegelian vision of work and leisure still bears on contemporary societies.

In this chapter, Dennis Schulting is interested in how, following Hegel’s critique of Kant, recent Hegelians have read Kant’s claims in the Transcendental Deduction (TD) in particular. Hegelians such as Robert Pippin think that in TD Kant effectively compromises or wavers on the strict separability of concepts and intuitions that he stipulates at A51–2/B75–6. For if the argument of TD, in particular in its B-version, is that the categories are not only the necessary conditions under which I think objects, by virtue of applying concepts, but also the necessary conditions under which anything is first given in sensibility, the fixed separation between concepts and intuitions seems incompatible with the very aim and conclusion of TD. Schulting examines these charges by looking more closely at Pippin’s reading of the B-Deduction. Pippin believes the orthodox Kant cannot be retained, if we want to extract something of philosophical value from TD. He defends a Kantian conceptualism shorn of the remaining nonconceptualist tendencies, which are in his view antithetical to the spirit of Kant’s Critical revolution. Schulitng argues, by contrast, that we must retain the orthodox Kant, including its nonconceptualist tendencies, in order not to succumb to an intemperate conceptualism.

It is in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1821) where he developed the institutional details for the concept of moral life or Sittlichkeit that views everything in society – including corporations – as socially constructed. Three levels of morality are necessary to establish Sittlichkeit.253 Hegel places corporations at the second level between families and states. The first level of morality is that of the family or Familiensittlichkeit.254 This is the most immediate and natural form of social coexistence and cooperation because families are the first social entity of mutual and equal recognition. This is the place where human beings experience parental love, intimacy, closeness, mutual support, ‘the solidarity of families’, and Hegel’s ethics of recognition.255 Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (1994), for example, stresses just how important recognition is for human beings: recognition is ‘a vital human need’.256

I argue that Hegel’s Science of Logic is not, as the tradition believes, a metaphysical treatise. Quite to the contrary, it is a highly original theory of semantics. It describes how logic, the categories of which are deposited in language, displays a deep bond with the latter. This entails that logic, rather than being simply concerned with the principles of proof, must also explain the conditions of the possibility of the universe of meaning that we, as linguistic beings, create. More than this, however, it also explains how we, in the very act of giving meaning to the world, place demands for intelligibility that the latter cannot meet. As such, it explains how spirit is driven to break from nature and produce a world of its own, thereby offering us as yet unexcavated resources for comprehending the relationship between first and second nature.

Locating Marxism within the spectrum of critical approaches to international political economy (IPE) invites us to reflect on the very idea of critical political economy. Marx could claim copyright on it, since he named his intellectual project the critique of political economy from the mid-1840s onwards. The object of this critique is dual: at once the concepts and theories of especially those whom Marx describes as the classical political economists (above all, Adam Smith and David Ricardo) and the capitalist mode of production that these categories simultaneously reveal and conceal. Marx takes the notion of critique itself from the classical idealist tradition in German philosophy. Here the relevant figure is less G.W.F. Hegel (deconstructing whose political thought represented the starting point of Marx’s trajectory towards materialism and communism) than Immanuel Kant. Kant sought precisely to develop a critical philosophy—hence the titles of his three major works—the Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgement. Kant understood critique not so much as the demolition of an opponent’s position, the exposure of falsehoods and fallacies, than as the establishing of limits. Thus the mistake of metaphysics, Kant argued, was to try to arrive at truths by reason alone, going beyond the boundaries of sense experience.

Written about 200 years ago, the early quote of Hegel shown above demonstrates that Hegel’s philosophy remains timeless. But such a claim would be highly un-Hegelian because in Hegelian terms philosophy is always linked to time. Hegel has warned us against what he called Zeitgeist. In Hegel’s understanding, as expressed in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Zeitgeist denotes something like ‘the spirit of the time’ or ‘the spirit of the age’. It is a general cultural, intellectual, ethical, philosophical, and political climate within which certain writings and philosophies – along with a general ambience, morals, socio-cultural directions, and moods associated with an era – take place. Zeitgeist combines the German word Zeit [time] with Geist [spirit]. Zeitgeist remains best known in relation to Hegel’s philosophy of history (Houlgate 2009). Nevertheless, the origins of the concept of Zeitgeist go back to one of Hegel’s predecessors: Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). In 1769, Herder introduced the word Zeitgeist into German (spirit of the age). For Hegel Zeitgeist means that one is aware of one’s time but reflects critically on it in order not be asphyxiated by the spirit of that particular time and historical period. In an almost classical form of Hegelian dialectics, Hegel asks us to overcome something to which we are bound. This includes a thesis [Zeitgeist] and an anti-thesis in the form of reflection and overcoming of the Zeitgeist.

For Hegel, the world is thoroughly intelligible, and as such it must realize a rational system of categories. Hegel’s logic lays out what he takes to be this system. His philosophies of nature and spirit aim at explaining how the system is realized in natural and cultural phenomena. His term for the realized system is ‘Idea’ (Idee). The term is appropriate, because Hegel takes something from Plato. The Idea is the inner reason that makes the external reality, the reality of spatiotemporal objects, events, and actions, what it is. Hegel differs from Plato in not understanding the Idea as an intelligible world of forms separate from the sensible world and more real than the latter. He believes that forms are in things, as their immanent soul and essence. In this respect he draws a page from Aristotle. But in another respect he differs from both of these ancient philosophers and is distinctly modern: the realization of the Idea is for Hegel the self-realization of free reason—thought freely structuring itself, giving itself content, and actualizing itself. This process is one in which human beings can be participants; in fact it is only understandable in terms of responsible thinking in inquiry and action. For Hegel, a philosophically adequate account of this process both (1) carries out and completes Kant’s attempted self-vindication of human reason and (2) articulates the actualization of human freedom.

The city in Africa is a problem. The first aspect of the problem, more evident in the past, is the apparent absence of African cities. For those of a Hegelian bent, such an absence would of course be entirely to be expected. If Africa is the continent without history, then it must of necessity be a continent without cities—the onward march of urbanisation constituting from one perspective the visible sign of history on the move. Historically, an absence of African cities would be an altogether natural thing for many, since, for them, Africans, being ‘naturally’ both rural and tribal, did not belong in anything larger than a village. As Freund says, ‘Colonial administrators…took for granted that the African was a naturally rural inhabitant whose urban experience was a danger to the integrity of African society as well as to colonial authority’ (Freund 2007, p. 83).

The question of the relation between material reality and the immaterial subject has been a recurring theme in Western philosophy. This chapter introduces key features of the idealist philosophies of Descartes, Kant, and Hegel pertaining to the subject and its relation to the material world. All three are presented as giving primacy to the ideational, immaterial over the material. The Cartesian subject is introduced to serve as a background before which other conceptualizations of the subject can be characterized, and Kant’s and Hegel’s German idealism is summarized and their notions of subject and materiality explicated.

Understanding phenomena, continual inquiry and search for truth identify central rationales for human existence. Indeed, the very necessity of continual inquiry and searching for understanding provides indication of our limitations; the world we attempt to comprehend is opaque and our inquiries involve uncertainty and limited clarity. ‘Even the self is in many respects unknown and alien to itself; we are often confused and dismayed by our ignorance of our own motives and actions (Dillon 1997, p. 9). Both world and self ‘transcend us’; as we inquire we seek to ‘overcome the world’s otherness and our own self-estrangement’ (ibid.). Phenomenology concentrates on how we understand the world through experience, identifies social engagement and how this develops our understanding and worldviews. Phenomenology focuses on the way we experience certain events and how meaning is created through these experiences rather than the events themselves. ‘Phenomenology concentrates on the life-world and uncovering … what may be considered … trivial elements of human existence when developing interpretations and understanding human experience’ (Howell 2013, p. 56). ‘Consciousness and world are not separate entities but a holistic construction of lived experience … Through our personal histories, culture, language and environment individuals are provided with an understanding of the world’ (ibid.). In addition, we are also representations of others: ‘my own person is object for another and is therefore that other’s representation, and yet … I should exist even without the other representing me in his mind’ (Kant 1788/1997, p. 6). The other whose object I am is not an absolute subject, but a knowing entity, ‘therefore if he … did not exist’ or any other person exist other than myself ‘this would still by no means be the elimination of the subject in whose representation alone all objects exist’ (ibid.). Hegel (1807/1977) identified the naive mind’s emergent comprehension of external reality. ‘Mind becomes aware of itself through subjective and objective self-consciousness. Subjective awareness of self is not enough … self needs an objective recognition of its own consciousness to provide an understanding of its own reality’ (Howell 2013, p. 8). Even though notions of reality become nebulous when assessed in terms of the relationship between subject and object one thing we can surely depend on is the notion of ‘facts’. Surely a fact is a fact and either something exists, something has happened or something has been done that is known about or knowable? However, this is incorrect; for example ‘every actual thing is inexhaustible and … every fact is subject to unlimited interpretation and re-interpretation. If one desires to grasp a fact in a determinate way, he will have to construct it. All facts are already theories’ (Jaspers 1995, p. 67).

In this chapter, I attempt to elaborate the difference between Schelling and Hegel as the key to understanding Schelling’s ontology of kenosis. An ontology of kenosis refuses the closure of system, not out of obscurantist motives or in the interest of a cynical denial of intelligibility (which, in another way, forecloses the range of thinking), but for the sake of clearing space for what is not yet but might be. The kenotic gesture in philosophy images the self-abnegation of the Christian God, who cancels his own divinity so that something else, something other than himself, might be. Schelling’s fusion of the horizons of logic and historical theology allows him to reverse modernity’s founding moment and presents a scientific humility that is still worthy of our consideration.

This paper examines Edward Caird’s theory of experience. Influenced by Kant and Hegel, Caird argues that human experience consists of three distinguishable components. First, there exists an awareness of the world of external objects and events; this is the ‘not-self’ pole of experience. Second, there is, to a greater or lesser extent, an awareness of myself as a finite individual who stands in opposition to the world; this is the ‘self’ pole of experience. And third, there exists an awareness of the unity of myself and the world. This unity, which contains both self and not-self, Caird refers to as the ‘absolute’ or ‘God’. Caird argues that my finite and limited self-consciousness is but a truncated expression of this perfect self-consciousness that constitutes its ultimate ground.

Concentrating on Hegel’s controversial Naturphilosophie (1830), I interpret Hegelian nature in terms of a ‘constitutive lack.’ Insofar as the natural register is predominantly understood in terms of exteriority, I contend that it must lack the interiority, precision, and necessity immanent within the dialectical developments of conceptual thought as it unfolds, say, in the domain of logic. I establish this thesis by way of a careful reconstruction of Hegel’s speculative analysis of the animal organism’s biological economy: assimilation, reproduction, violence, and death. Extrapolating from this reconstruction, I conclude with an overview of the sophisticated metaphysical implications of Hegel’s writings on nature. I suggest, moreover, that Hegel might have untimely purchase for our contemporary world and its demand for a new order of critical-speculative ontology.

Not long before his death in 1956, Brecht expressed dissatisfaction with the terminology ‘epic theatre’ that had long described his dramaturgical aesthetic and advocated a shift to what he termed ‘dialectical theatre’ (1964, 281–2). Brecht’s use of the term dialectics invokes a long philosophical history that can be traced to the pre-Socratic Greek thinkers such as Heraclitus, through to German idealists such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and nineteenth-century materialist philosophers like Karl Marx. The influence of historical materialist thought and dialectics on Brecht’s theory for the theatre has long been acknowledged by Brechtian scholars including, most notably, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Fredric Jameson, Peter Brooker, Antony Tatlow, David Barnett and Sean Carney. This book surveys this scholarship and builds upon it by offering a detailed reading of Brechtian dialectics in a late capitalist or post-Marxist context.

One of the red threads of Slavoj Žižek’s entire intellectual career up through the present is the enactment of a ‘return to Hegel’ partly modeled on Jacques Lacan’s ‘return to Freud.’ In diametrical opposition to received exegetical wisdom about Hegelian philosophy, Žižek maintains that Hegel’s is the philosophy of contingency par excellence. Furthermore, in his defenses of Hegel against commonplace objections and caricatures, Žižek turns the very features of Hegelian thought provoking these objections and caricatures into the precise means of debunking them. Herein, I focus on Žižek’s handling of the interrelated issues of the end-of-history closure and apparently fatalistic-teleological character of Hegel’s System. In so doing, I develop an immanent critique of these Žižekian efforts, presenting Hegelian criticisms of Žižek’s Hegelianism, ways that point to how Hegel remains relevant for contemporary Marxism.

This chapter introduces the concept of the social recognition of rights through the work of the nineteenth-century British philosopher Thomas Hill Green. It introduces Green’s work on rights in the twin contexts of Hegel’s work on recognition and the natural rights tradition, and argues that one of his crucial achievements was to combine these two literatures. The chapter argues that, within Green’s work, there are two forms of recognition: the recognition of persons and the recognition of rights. It further argues that human rights require recognition, and that this recognition can only occur in a society; there can be no rights outside of a society.

This chapter draws several conclusions covering all previous chapters and discusses the contradiction resulting from an application of Hegel’s Sittlichkeit to business corporations. It is a dilemma of two diverging norms: business corporations versus sittliche corporations. Hegel outlined sittliche corporations in his Philosophy of Right (1821) and Phenomenology (1807) after having initially drawn up rudimentary parameters for Sittlichkeit in the System of Ethical Life.719 Hegel’s ‘critical humanism’720 developed into a comprehensive ‘system of Sittlichkeit inside which corporations represent one form of moral life. For Hegel, moral life denotes that ‘the supreme purpose of man is to be moral’ (Dickey 1987:192). But he also used the term Sittlichkeit to differentiate his social, collective, and institutional form of ethics from Kant’s individualistic formalism. In contrast to Kant, Hegel’s moral life [Sittlichkeit] is about creating morality, not abstract formulas. It does not exclude people from the process of creating sittliche norms. In Sittlichkeit, people create institutions for moral life and in that way Sittlichkeit fulfils Hegel’s self-actualisation by establishing moral rules that are created and carried out by those to whom they apply. This is not a mere utopian request for human freedom. Hegelian institutions are institutions of freedom: ‘This is not about the principles of a possible freedom, but about the concrete freedom of the people in his society.’721

Hegel’s sittliche corporation is a non-self-interested altruistic corporation that has virtually no interest beyond ethical life. In order to achieve this, corporate management would need to recognise this while management studies simultaneously would need to refocus attention on researching and teaching it because this is what defines corporations, corporate management, and management studies itself. In other words, corporations are dedicated to Sittlichkeit when they engage in socio-economic activities. This means that management studies would need to teach the role of corporations not merely as businesses but predominantly as moral institutions. A very different picture of corporations emerges once examined from the standpoint of Hegelian ethics. Hegel’s ethical-normative picture of moral corporations (thesis) represents a truly Hegelian contradiction to what is perceived to be the norm for business corporations (anti-thesis). This is the non-conceptualised moral problem of management ethics, management studies, corporate governance, and, above all, Managerialism. Such contradictions are not even visualised in the standard academic literature of management studies and never taught in the prime institution that trains managers who then manage corporations: the business school.194

With the neuroturn sexuality has lost the determining status it had within classical Freudian theory; today, when it comes to causality, the brain has usurped it. Does such a shift not produce a paradoxical desexualisation, which can be traced back to cultural phenomena such as Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response? To understand this I engage with the work of Catherine Malabou, who, through her reworking of the Hegelian notion of plasticity rejects any Kantian transcendentality to the brain. Hereto, Malabou, firstly, inevitably has to reproduce a heavily anti-psychoanalytic discourse (rejecting its understandings of sexuality and trauma), and, secondly, is forced to buttress her strong ontological claim with psychology, which is where, I claim, she is subsumed by the very transcendental spectres she attempted to ward off.

Foucault once wondered, “What philosopher has not tried to refute Plato”, and then he proceeded to add his name to the list. Sartre might well have echoed that thought, substituting ‘Kant’ for ‘Plato’ in the process. Having passed what he recalled were some of the happiest years of his life at the Ecole normale superieure, rue d’Ulm (ENS), where he studied philosophy among the neo-Kantians at the Sorbonne, Sartre was clearly imbued with the Critical attitude, even if he spent the rest of his life trying to redefine or escape it. One could say of the Kantian aspect of Sartre’s thought what John Locke said of the sense origin of our abstract ideas, that they bore “the tang of the cask they came in”. Of course, Sartre’s “cask” retained the flavours of Cartesian, Bergsonian, Husserlian, Hegelian, Marxian and many other philosophical elixirs that the bright normalien imbibed in the ensuing years, each with its proper trace. While my point is not to uncover an unprincipled eclectic — such was not the case — it serves to underscore the claim that Kant’s thought provided an enduring component of Sartre’s philosophical thought throughout his life.

Hegel’s central issue of the Philosophy of Right (1821) is Sittlichkeit or ethical life, clearly emphasising that corporations are part of Sittlichkeit.603 For Hegel, Sittlichkeit represents ‘the institutional reality of human selfhood’.604 When ethical selfhood is applied to business corporations, it becomes apparent that a reversal of much of what is found in today’s corporations is required.605 For example, Hegelian ethics demands a return to a situation where the actuality of ethical life occupies a prime position ‘over’ business corporations and management. The demand for a turnaround of today’s corporations starts with the place where today’s corporate managers are trained, namely, business schools.606 Governed by Managerialism, these business schools are located inside universities. Instead of teaching ethics, the managerial university prefers to train people in vocational and useful knowledge to be used by corporations rather than teaching academic, scholarly, intellectual, and perhaps even critical subjects. Non-revenue-creating academic subjects are often marginalised and excluded. The marginalisation of philosophy in favour of managerial subjects supports a university’s economic success, leadership, profit-margins, market share, competitive advantage, wealth accumulation, shareholder-values, profit-maximisation, and so on.607

In Section 3.6 we examined Marx’s critique of Hegel’s integrationist conception of the relation between civil society and the state. We noted the implication of that critique that Hegel’s proposals are incapable of overcoming the estrangement he finds in abstract right and the moral will. To appreciate how Marx develops the concept of economic estrangement, we need to note a second criticism of Hegel’s political philosophy that one finds in Marx’s early work, namely that Hegel’s doctrine contains an ‘inversion’ that amounts to a mysticism of reason. My concern in this section is not to defend this criticism but to explain its role in the genesis of Marx’s conception of economic estrangement.

Marx argued that our character as human beings was embodied in an ensemble of relations such that tension and uncertainty were endemic to human nature. In this chapter, I argue that this renders the need to ‘make’ sense of that pain an equally essential feature of our nature. For Marx, this explained the functionality of ‘religious beliefs’. They were, as Feuerbach argued, a ‘flight’ from mortality and limitation, which were so painful that these beliefs were not readily overturned. It was only in the extremity of corporeal pain that these rationalisations could be overcome. On this point, Marx agreed with Epicurus, Lucretius, Feuerbach, and Hegel. This, I argue, was the foundation for Marx’s interest in Hegel’s Phenomenology, especially the ‘master-servant’ dialectic and the ‘unhappy consciousness’. That is, he located the possibility of surrendering one’s prior sense of self and recognising one’s dependence on the ‘external’ in the face of extreme corporeal pain. I argue that the centrality of the idea of corporeality for Marx, together with his dialectical account of objective and ‘species being’, provided the foundations for his confidence that a more ‘human language’ would be adopted.

This chapter provides an account of G. W. F. Hegel’s treatment of judgment in the Science of Logic. I focus on what Hegel calls the judgment of reflection. The judgment of reflection is what Hegel refers to when he deals with the different quantifiers possible in the relation of the subject and the predicate in judgments. It is on the basis of Hegel’s metaphysical commitments that his discussion of quantity in judgment can be distinguished most clearly from Immanuel Kant’s. I will argue that these commitments are manifest in the assumptions, method, and standpoint in accordance with which Hegel’s Science of Logic unfolds.

Hegel claimed that ‘one must first be a Spinozist’ in order to engage in philosophy (cited in Beiser 1993, 4). Spinoza’s work is central to my argument, as it provides insights into the totalising concept of substance that subsequently shaped Hegel’s and Marx’s thought. Equally importantly, it is through Spinoza’s work that the debate about human nature shifts from the concept of substance to that of essence — the term Marx used to consider human nature. Spinoza’s influence, however, is not immediately obvious.

In Kant, transcendental philosophy and general and pure logic are two distinct disciplines. They each have distinct modes of exposition, objects, and goals. General logic treats of the rules of cognition independent of any relation to an object — it consists of the rules of thought in general. Logic is composed of a set of determinations that correspond to the form of thinking. Transcendental logic, especially the Transcendental Analytic, concerns the conditions for the possibility of thinking an object. As such, the transcendental philosophy is concerned with the relation of thought to objects given in space and time. Transcendental logic is also formal, but it is the form of thought in relation to an object. If the transcendental logic takes as its task understanding the conditions for the possibility of thought thinking an object given in experience, then it seeks an understanding of the condition for truth itself. For without the possibility of the relation of thought to an object, the material conditions of truth could never be achieved. General and pure logic is considered by Immanuel Kant as laying out the negative conditions for the possibility of truth. Logical validity is a necessary condition for determinate truth, but is insufficient because it has no way to determine the material correspondence of an object to what is thought of it.

The following is a study of two of G. W. F. Hegel’s major works of the Jena period. The essay The Difference between the Fichtean and Schellingian Systems of Philosophy (1801) and the book Faith and Knowledge (1803) both provide us with insights into what Hegel takes to be the project of philosophy in Germany after the emergence of the Kantian philosophy. A careful study of both of these early texts is necessary for understanding the general epistemological ambitions of Hegel’s mature philosophy. The critique of Immanuel Kant in Faith and Knowledge is especially important because it shows the way in which Hegel anticipates the nature of his mature thought as something that directly answers to the impasses of the Kantian philosophy. Yet such a study of Faith and Knowledge remains incomplete without first laying out the orientation to his contemporaries that Hegel establishes in the Differenzschrift. A study of these two texts makes clear the way in which Kant’s philosophy stands as a backdrop against which Hegel sees German Idealism develop.

For Lenin (cited in Fine 2001, 72), Hegel’s influence on Marx was so obvious that he claimed ‘it is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital… without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of [Hegel’s] … Logic’. However, the extent of this influence has been and continues to be the focus of much debate, as evidenced by the works of Althusser (1996), Arthur (2004b), Colletti (1973), Levine (2012), and Reuten (2000). I argue that an exploration of Marx’s theory of human nature necessarily involves a consideration of Hegel’s work and that Marx drew on Hegel’s thought throughout his life in two respects. Firstly, Marx’s dialectic was founded in Hegel’s works on logic: in particular, Marx’s references to ‘objective being’ in his early works (1975e, 390) and to an ‘ensemble of relations’ in the theses on Feuerbach (1975g, 423) are best understood with reference to Hegel’s concept of being. Scholars such as Arthur (2003, 2004a, 2004b) and Levine (2012) have only recently concentrated on the influence of the earlier parts of the Science of Logic, where Hegel reviewed the traditional arguments regarding substance. No one, excepting Ollman (1976, 2003), appears to have closely read Marx’s approach with regard to those parts of Hegel’s works. In the second instance, I argue that key passages in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit — namely, the ‘master/servant’ dialectic and the ‘unhappy consciousness’ — suggest the foundations for Marx’s confidence that the experience of alienation would promote ‘species consciousness’ (i.e., a more interdependent understanding of the self).

In this chapter I will develop the argument that German philosophical Romanticism and Hegelian speculative philosophy offer an interesting space in which to undertake re-readings of English Romanticism. Starting from a Hegelian stance, I argue that Romanticism can be re-read in terms of a vacillation between two positions: one of imaginative autonomy and one of necessary receptivity. I argue that what I term symbiotic alterity of autonomy and receptivity reaches a pivotal historical stage in romantic metaphysics and is something that at the same time remains implicit in Hegel’s dialectic — thus making Hegel a major romantic thinker. I would like to situate my argument in a teleological context, integrating Hegel’s social philosophy with his philosophy of art. Furthermore, I briefly outline some current readings of German romantic metaphysics, in order to help contextualise Hegelian aesthetics with regard to Romanticism as an overall movement. I conclude the chapter by examining a number of current readings of Hegelian aesthetics and assessing how these readings can be appropriated in part for my own project of a rereading of English romantic poetry.

Recognition is an unusually rich concept, and it evokes an equally unusual and vital activity, or style of activity — one which is both moral and perceptual (perception often is moral). Our word is directly adapted from the Latin recognitio, which had the twin senses of ‘knowing all over again’ (recollecting, recalling) and ‘taking another or closer look at’ (authenticating, validating). But ‘recognition’ is also our closest approximation, as it was Latin’s, to the ancient Greek anagnorisis, a critical term invented by Aristotle to denote an essential and familiar device in Western literary practice from Homer to the present. The first of the two Latin senses above is the closer to this original Greek meaning: something like ‘rediscovery’.

Analytic philosophers are no storytellers. Provocatively asking whether one does real philosophy or whether one is rather more interested in the history of philosophy (and thus in such utterly unreadable texts as Hegel’s Phenomenology), they consider intellectual history and its sweeping stories to be negligible or even a nuisance. Consequently, one often gets the impression that analytic philosophers, with a few exceptions, are inclined to hold that the history of American philosophy, culminating in pragmatism, should be left to their theoretically interested colleagues in the American Studies department (or the department of History, for that matter). This is also one of the reasons why John Dewey’s reputation almost immediately waned after his death in 1952.1 It was not only Dewey’s theory of logic and inquiry, his concept of experience, or his naturalist epistemology that bothered many analytic philosophers, but also books such as Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920) and The Quest for Certainty (1929). These works, elegantly combining philosophy and intellectual history, tell antifoundationalist stories of progress. From today’s perspective, the two books are among Dewey’s most valuable, thought-provoking, and illuminating texts. These antifoundationalist stories of progress and emancipation — and this makes them so valuable for our purposes — demonstrate how pragmatism, humanism, anti-authoritarianism, and postmetaphysics are interlinked.

A characteristic of metaphysical systems is that they purport to give a true account of “what is”. In doing so, they ascribe it necessity: “what is” is necessarily so and cannot be otherwise. In this manner, the Leibnizian account of the world describes it as necessary due to a combination of God’s goodness and omnipotence, despite the fact that from our human, finite perspective, truths of fact are racked with contingency. The Spinozist substance “exists from the necessity of its nature alone.”1 Regarding the absolute idea Hegel says of it that “its essential nature is to return to itself through its self-determination or particularization,” and in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy he asserts that to know it in its necessity is the present standpoint of philosophy. It would not seem uncharitable to establish a running metaphysical thread between Spinoza’s substance, Leibniz’s monad of monads, and Hegel’s absolute idea as attempts to reveal the necessity of “what is” or of reality. However, in Hegel’s case, the underpinning concept of necessity requires a closer look. Since it is in the Science of Logic where we find the exhibition and explanation of the concepts by means of which philosophical thinking has thought “what is,” this text will reveal what Hegel understands by necessity and what role it plays—what contradictions it resolves—in the attempt to think “what is.”

The syllogism is of fundamental importance for Hegel insofar as it is intimately connected to our rationality. As the third and last chapter on the section on subjectivity it works as the portal to the constitution of objectivity. It is the moment at which objectivity is born, so to speak. Dealing with the section on the syllogism shall reveal what type of object constitutes “what is.” The inferential process at work in the syllogism will reveal it to be the only adequate site for the objectivity of the object to become. The constitution of this object is social; it occurs in Spirit, in the “we” of the community. Thus, it occurs in the syllogism insofar as only by means of it are we capable of holding each other accountable for and entitled or not to the commitments undertaken. We are beings that give and expect reasons for our actions and beliefs. This is what makes us rational.

This essay will consider Shaftesbury’s 1711 Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, particularly his ‘The Moralists, A Philosophical Rhapsody’, as the first influential instance of the aesthetic revolution in European Romantic thought. Philosophical discourse on the arts goes as far back as Plato’s dialogues (notably, Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus, Ion), while the Greek treatise Peri Hypsous [On the Sublime], attributed to a Longinus living in the first century of the present era,1 was known throughout the Middle Ages but acquires no less than cult status as a modern classic in European literary, artistic and philosophical circles when translated into French in the seventeenth century, most famously by the poet Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux in 1674.2 Yet the actual modern sense of the term ‘aesthetics’ was developed by Alexander Baumgarten in the mid-eighteenth century (Aesthetica, Part 1, 1750; Part 2, 1758). Until then, such discourses were understood as dealing with questions of ‘taste’. Following Baumgarten’s work, aesthetics, as the developing science of taste, embarked on a distinct philosophical trajectory by significant German works, such as J.G. Hamann’s Aesthetica in nuce: A Rhapsody in Cabbalistic Prose in 1762, G.E. Lessing’s Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry in 1766 and the famous ‘Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism’ (of uncertain authorship: Holderlin, Schelling or Hegel) in 1796.

In the previous chapter I presented a critical overview of three contemporary theories of recognition. Despite the significant differences between each account, Taylor, Honneth and Fraser all agree that recognition has a fundamental and irreplaceable role to play in establishing a just society. The question to be explored now in more depth is why recognition is seen as so important. Why, to quote Taylor (1994: 26), is it a ‘vital human need’? In order to understand the value placed on recognition by many contemporary theorists, it is necessary to take a historical over-view of how the subject has been conceptualised by Western philosophers. This will reveal how the idea of recognition has become a central explanatory tool for understanding the formation of the subject, and thus why it is something which we, as subjects, cannot live without. I also address how recognition shapes the self—other relationship — that is, how our understanding of one another is underpinned by relations of recognition — and the implications that recognition has for how we understand freedom and autonomy.

Recognition of recognition’s importance has only come recently, and belatedly, to International Relations (IR) theory. The concept has been around for two centuries. G. W. F. Hegel had associated recognition and reciprocity among individuals in System of Ethical Life (Hegel, [1802–3] 1979, p. 111), held that Herr and Knecht (lord and servant, master and slave) ‘recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another’ in Phenomenology of Spirit, §184 (Hegel, [1807] 1977, p. 112), and argued in Philosophy of Right, §331 (Hegel, [1821] 1992, p. 367) that states have an ‘absolute entitlement’ to be recognized by other states. By that time states had engaged in express acts of recognition for several years as Spain’s American colonies achieved independence. Contrary to Hegel, Henry Wheaton (1836) declared in his Elements of International Law— the leading treatise of its time—that the recognition of a newly independent state’s sovereignty was, for other states, ‘a question of prudence and policy only’ (Wheaton, 1836, p. 98; also 1866, p. 40).

A chapter of a book is barely sufficient to provide comprehensive and comparative analysis of the place of the subject in the moral philosophy of two of the most important figures in modern philosophy. So, it is important to note from the outset that what is attempted here is only a concise yet explicit analysis. Such a task is however a daunting one. I begin by summarizing the basic difference in Hegel and Bradley’s treatment of the modern subject that necessitates the conclusions reached in this chapter.

In Marx’s Discourse with Hegel I discussed the extinction of two texts of Marx, The Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology. For a more detailed discussion of this vanishing I refer the reader to pages 2–3 and pages 205–206 of that book.

Truth is a matter of peculiar disciplinary significance for both philosophers and logicians. Of course, every science and inquiry seeks to say something true about ‘what is’. Theologians, scientists, and artists seek to discern the true, whether this truth concerns the highest being, the nature of depression, or social justice, and so forth. The logician and the philosopher, however, are unique in their efforts to mark out the conditions of truth. They both share the tasks of determining the boundaries of intelligibility, separating formal from material conditions of truth, and striving for a language of utmost precision. Both disciplines are thus concerned, in contrast to the particular sciences and arts, with conditions by which truth happens.

If, as Hegel states in the Encyclopaedia, the true infinite is “the basic concept of philosophy,”1 then much turns on how this concept is to be understood. Its interpretation might strengthen the view of Hegelian philosophy as undermining and subsuming difference within an all-encompassing totality that reduces all things to a mere moment of the whole that grants them their identity. Hegelian philosophy in this view would represent the pinnacle of the absoluteness of reason, where being is being thought (logocentrism). It is a philosophy of identity (between being and thinking), sameness, and presence. What gets lost in this picture would be particularity, difference, otherness, alterity. There would be no place for an other to thinking that is not already absorbed by thought. A reaction to this logocentrism is the impulse behind the philosophy of many post-Hegelian thinkers, among them Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Adorno, Levinas, Deleuze, and Derrida.

Like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Dewey, Rorty tells a story of human emancipation. According to this story, as we have seen, humans find themselves in a godless universe, deprived of forms of transcendence and incapable of discovering absolute truths about the world. In a world of practice, they finally come to understand that achieving full maturity means that they must no longer strive to get in touch with something nonhuman out there, and that instead of submitting to standards constituted by the things themselves, they should realize the possibilities offered by inventing new and creative ways of speaking about the world. An antifoundationalist story of progress, as I have sought to demonstrate, highlights the significance of poetic self-creation in a literary culture and, moreover, it shows how pragmatism, humanism, postmetaphysics, and anti-authoritarianism are linked. No longer deifying anything, a Rortyan literary intellectual answers the questions “What can I do with my aloneness?” and “How can I contribute to humanity’s never-ending conversation about what to do with itself?” by placing books into new contexts, by creatively combining various vocabularies and inventing new ways of speaking (or writing poems), and by letting her fellow human beings see that a culture that stresses the importance of creativity, imagination, novelty, and future orientation is clearly preferable to one dominated by religion, philosophy, or the natural sciences.

Several other thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contributed to the development of modern concepts of the unconscious and unconscious thought. Their philosophical expositions are not elaborate, so their theories are briefly summarized in this chapter, in chronological order. The thinkers are: Christian Wolff, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Johann Georg Sulzer, Ernst Platner, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Johann Friedrich Herbart, Carl Gustav Carus, Gustav Fechner, Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann, and Theodor Lipps. Each of these writers contributed to concepts of unconscious thought in psychoanalytic theory, while basing their concepts in the classical and medieval philosophical traditions, linking the ancient and modern.

Hegel’s writings from the Jena period present the reader, whether student or scholar, with a complex assortment of writings that vary considerably in the degree to which they have been edited: short fragments in which Hegel sketches a plan for an article or lecture; summaries of works he has read and intends to refer to later; notes for seminars or lectures at the University of Jena; and polished works that Hegel edited and published — mainly articles that appeared in the journal he put out together with Schelling, the Critical Journal of Philosophy.1 The latter, which have long been accessible to Hegel scholars, have been taken to represent Hegel’s philosophical thinking during this period, but offer only a partial picture of his philosophical intentions and nascent projects. Now that the former materials have received scholarly attention, a fuller picture has begun to emerge, a picture that reveals Hegel’s first attempt to construct a methodical philosophical system.

The dense network of positions summarized under the label German Idealism unites not only some of the most significant philosophers of this period, namely Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. A number of poets are also part of this constellation, foremost among them Schiller, Goethe, and Holderlin. Into the same context belongs the Romantic movement with its main philosophers Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Together with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and the somewhat younger Friedrich Wilhelm Josef Schelling (1775–1854), Friedrich Holderlin (1770–1843) pursued first a two-year study of philosophy, followed by a three-year study of theology, which ended in the fall of 1793 (for Schelling in the fall of 1795). Both during this time together in Tubingen and afterwards, the young men worked through Immanuel Kant’s new critical philosophy. The Hegel biographer Karl Rosenkranz reports that, in Tubingen, they read “Plato..., Kant, Jacobi’s Woldemar and Allwill, the letters concerning Spinoza, and Hippel’s life, in ascending order.”1 These shared studies, in which Holderlin participated from the beginning, formed a basis for philosophical discussion.