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UnderstandingHegelToday WILLIAM MAKER CAN THEaZ BE any justification for studying Hegel today? Or is Marx's comment on Hegel---that he had come to suffer the fate even in his own country of being treated as a "dead dog"--as appropriate for our times and our philosophical atmosphere as it was thirty years after Hegel's death?' Certainly Hegel scholars have found little or no need to raise or answer this question." Where it is cultivated, Hegel scholarship blossoms in an environment where the study of the history of philosophy is regarded as an end in itself, with no need for further justification. Looking at the question from a different perspective, those outside of the narrow confines of Hegel studies could perhaps find grounds for looking at Hegel analogous to those which brought Carnap to read and analyze Heidegger: as a paramount example of what not to do in philosophy.3 I would like to suggest possible grounds for an interest in Hegel other than those rooted in historical-philosophical curiosity on the one hand or those motivated out of a desire to avoid the erroneous excesses of the past on the other. What I would like to offer is the unusual suggestion that Hegel has formulated certain arguments--specifically along the lines of a critique ' Karl Marx, Das Kapital, ed. Friedrich Engels, 4th ed., 3 vols. 0890; Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1975), vol. l, Nachwort zur zweiten Auflage, p. 27. "Aber gerade als Ich den ersten Band des 'Kapital' ausarbeitete, gefiel sich das verdriessliche, anmassliche und mittelm~issige Epigonentuna , welchesjetzt im gebildeten Deutschland das grosse Wort fiihrt, darin, Hegel zu behandlen, wie der brave Moses Mendelssohn zu Lessings Zeit den Spinoza handeh hat, n~,mlich ais 'toten Hund'." Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penquin Books, 1976), vol. t, Postface to 2nd ed., p. 1o2. "But when I was working at the first volume of Capital, the ill-humored, arrogant and mediocre epigones who now talk large in educated German circles began to take pleasure in treating Hegel in the same way as Moses Mendelssohn treated Spinoza in Lessing's time, namely, as a 'dead dog'." ' A recent exception to this is Richard Bernstein's article "'Why Hegel Now," Review of Metaphysics 31 0977): 29-6oRudolf Carnap, "Uberwindung der Metaphysic durch die Iogische Analyse der Sprache, Erkenntnis (193~) pp. ~ 19-4 I. Translated and reprinted as "The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language," in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer (Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1959). [3431 344 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY of metaphysics and absolutism in philosophy--which can and should be of interest to philosophers today. My contention is that Hegel has been largely misread by his students and misunderstood or ignored altogether by other philosophers who share certain common interests or themes with him. I say this because I firmly believe that the core and key of his philosophical project are grounded in a thorough-going and decisive critique of metaphysics (to be found in his first work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, hereafter, PhG); further, that this critique has never been made visible in the numerous interpretations of this work which are to be found in the literature, and that as a consequence his subsequent post-critical writings (to be found in the Science of Logic, hereafter, WL, and in the system as presented in the Encyclopedia ) have been consistently--if quite understandably--m/sread as works expounding a powerfully absolutist metaphysics of the idealist sort. 4 In what follows I shall be concerned chiefly with illuminating the PhG as Hegel's attempt at an immanent critique of absolute metaphysics, and I shall deal only briefly with the radically altered understanding of the WL and'the system which this new reading of the PhG demands. (Needless to say, I believe that my reading of the PhG, although it takes issue with the received view of that work, is well grounded in the text itself, for this reading dispels certain troublesome difficulties in Hegel scholarship: specifically, the problem of providing an interpretation of the PhG which accords with Hegel's own self-understanding of it.5 As my aim, however, is to argue for the 4 For a statement...

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