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1. The Hegel Controversy
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1 The Hegel Controversy The philosophy of Hegel is the crystal of the universe. —James Hutchison Stirling, The Secret of Hegel The Hegelian farce has done enough harm. We must stop it. —Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies The seminal commentaries on, reflections on, and critiques of Hegel are by no means exhaustive, yet they provide a glimpse of how Hegel was both appropriated and rejected during his time and afterward by different philosophical strands. In Praise of Hegel There is a voluminous literature on Hegel that one simply cannot exhaust. It seems that Hegel is getting more attention as time goes by. As Songsuk Susan Hahn puts it in Contradiction in Motion: Hegel’s Organic Concept of Life and Value, “I feel privileged to have been born into a time that is witnessing an explosion of interest in Hegel. The wave of interest on the Anglo-American continents and in Germany , spreading as far as the shores of Korea, Japan, and China, amounts to an exciting Hegel renaissance in our own time” (2007, 198). Adriaan Peperzak calls to notice “the flood of studies on Hegel that were published in the last fifty years” (2001, 37). With such notice, I now turn to some of the seminal commentaries on Hegel’s works available in English. In his famous work The Secret of Hegel, James Stirling writes, “The secret of Hegelmaybeindicatedatshortestthus:AsAristotle—withconsiderableassistance from Plato—made explicit the abstract Universal that was implicit in Socrates, so Hegel—with less considerable assistance from Fichte and Schelling—made 2 Hegel and the Third World explicit the concrete Universal that was implicit in Kant.”1 In Stirling’s estimation , “probably no man has ever studied more deeply than Hegel the progress of humanity in regard to those questions which it puts for the procurement of explanations as respects its own existence, that of its world, and the constituent phenomena of both.” For Stirling, “Hegel has said what will prove for many a day almost the last word on all the great concrete interests for which alone humanity lives, and to which alone it strives.” Indeed, “there cannot be a doubt of it, the most momentous questions that have interested or interest humanity, all lie in the pages of Hegel apparently in ultimate discussion; and this ultimate discussion has been attained only through the Notion” (1898, xxii, 690, 686). In Hegel, Stirling argues, philosophy becomes science. It was Hegel’s one object “to find an ultimate expression in terms of exact thought, for the entire universe both as a whole and in detail.” Hegel “holds the whole huge concrete under the stream of thought, he neglects no side of it, he leaves no nook of it unvisited; and he holds up at last, as it were, the resultant and explanatory diamond ” (1898, 701, 105). Regarding God, Stirling writes, “there is for Hegel nothing but God; and this God is a personal God, and no mere Pantheistic Substance that just passively undergoes a mutation of necessity.” Hegel’s system is “but the process of this construing, in which all finite categories show their untruth and their finitude, and pass into their truth and their infinitude, the Absolute Spirit.” In his handling of Christianity, Hegel is “perhaps, at his greatest, at his truest, at the greatest and truest of thought itself.” And it “is the doctrine of the trinity which constitutes to Hegel the central and vital principle of Christianity.” Hegel, “indeed, has no object but reconciliation and neutralizing atomism—once again to restore to us—and in the new light and the new thought—Immortality and Free-will, Christianity and God.” In Stirling’s superlative praise, “Hegel, indeed, so far as abstract thought is concerned, and so far as one can see at this moment, seems to have closed an era, and has named the all of things in such terms of thought as will, perhaps, remain essentially the same for the next thousand years. To all present outward appearance, at least, what Aristotle was to ancient Greece, 1. In citations, I note emphasis only where I have added it. Otherwise, emphasis is as given in the original in all cases. [34.237.140.238] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:53 GMT) The Hegel Controversy 3 Hegel is to modern Europe.” For Stirling, Hegel is the Aristotle of modernity. He boldly declares, “In short, the philosophy of Hegel is the crystal of the universe: it is the universe thought, or the thought of...