Beiser's Hegel (Because Reading Hegel Is Too Bloody Hard)

Frederick C Beiser is a top philosopher. His book on Hegel is a lot easier to understand than Hegel himself. I've got no languages but even reading Hegel in translation is  hard. So I've read Beiser on Hegel instead and written down what I made of it.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, born in Stuttgart in south west Germany in 1770 and who died in Berlin in 1831.  His books are famous for being written in very dense, often unclear prose. Beiser jokes that reading Hegel can feel like chewing gravel, tiring and not very pleasant. 

So a sensible student might ask why anyone should put themselves through that sort of effort when, as one of Hegel’s enemies used to say, life is short.The worry is even stronger if we think about the spirit of today’s world. Beiser quotes the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, who wrote in the early twentieth century in Germany, mainly in Kassel and Frankfurt, and who said that he lived in an age “after the death of Hegel”. 

Beiser says that feels true for us as well. Hegel’s main interests look out of step with our time. Hegel was deeply religious and was hunting for “the absolute”, which you can think of as the deepest possible truth about reality and God. Many people today feel far less religious and are suspicious of grand, all embracing systems. Hegel believed in progress in history, the idea that over time the human world becomes more rational and more free but after two world wars, Stalin’s camps, and the Holocaust, and what's going on now, faith in a simple story of progress looks naive. 

Hegel also wanted something that sounds strange in a very specialised and pluralistic society like ours. He hoped for a restoration of wholeness, meaning a deep unity between ourselves, other people, and nature. Today people are used to living in separate spheres, like school, work, family, online life, and so on, each with its own rules. Many do not expect everything to fit together into a single harmonious pattern. Yet that sort of wholeness lies at the heart of Hegel’s project. So at first glance it looks as if our age has moved past him.

Despite this, Beiser gives several strong reasons not to leave Hegel in the past. The first reason is historical influence. Even if Hegel were completely wrong, he shaped the culture we live in. Beiser points out that all the major philosophical movements of the twentieth century grew out of reactions against Hegel: existentialism, Marxism, pragmatism, phenomenology, and analytic philosophy. Marxism took over some of his ideas about history but pushed them in a different direction, towards class struggle and revolution. Existentialists such as Jean Paul Sartre rejected Hegel’s idea that history has a rational plan and instead stressed the individual’s sense of isolation and choice. Analytic philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, active in Britain in the twentieth century, turned Hegel into the enemy of clarity and scientific method. If we want to understand any of these later thinkers properly, Beiser argues, we need to know what they were reacting against, which means we need to know Hegel.

The second reason is that Hegel is not as dead as people once thought. From around the 1970s there was a “Hegel renaissance” in the English speaking world. There was a big rise in dissertations, books and articles on Hegel, both in Europe and North America. Beiser notes a striking fact. While the reputations of famous anti Hegelians like Popper and Russell have slowly faded, academic interest in Hegel has steadily grown. In the 1970s and 1980s Hegel became the hero of students and scholars who were fed up with what they saw as a narrow, technical style of philosophy in Britain and America known as analytic philosophy. Studying Hegel was a way of joining the “continental” side, more attentive to history, politics and culture. Beiser remarks that Hegel ended up being as important for the philosophical counterculture of the 1970s and 1980s as he had once been for the establishment in the late nineteenth century in England and the United States. 

More recently the old war between analytic and continental philosophy has cooled down, but Hegel’s popularity has not faded. Now some prominent analytic philosophers read Hegel seriously, not just as a museum piece but as someone who can help with live problems. Beiser lists some of these problems and they are worth slowing down over because they explain why Hegel still matters. 

One problem is how to steer between foundationalism and conventionalism in epistemology. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge, for instance what it means to say that we know something and what counts as good evidence.  A foundationalist wants absolute, unshakeable starting points for knowledge, like indubitable sense data or self evident truths, rather like wanting every building in a city to rest on a single huge rock. A conventionalist says that our “truths” are just products of agreements or social rules, like the rules of a board game. Hegel tries to avoid both extremes. He thinks knowledge is rooted in our social practices and history, yet he also thinks there is a real world that pushes back against us. This links to another topic Beiser mentions, social epistemology. This is the idea that knowledge is not just about a lone thinker in an armchair but about communities, institutions and shared practices, a bit like how Wikipedia is written and checked by many people rather than one genius. Beiser notes that Hegel already had a sophisticated view of how thought depends on social life and institutions, so he can still speak to present debates on this subject. 

Beiser also points to political questions. Liberalism, in the modern sense, stresses the freedom and rights of individuals. Communitarianism stresses the value of social ties, traditions and communities. Many people today would like both, individual rights and strong communities, but it is not obvious how to fit them together. Hegel offers a model of the modern state that tries to combine them, where individual freedom is realised in and through ethical institutions such as the family, civil society and the state. Another theme is historicism and relativism. Historicism is the claim that our beliefs and values are deeply shaped by their historical period, for instance that ideas about marriage or democracy look very different in ancient Athens, in medieval Europe and in twenty first century Britain. Relativism is a stronger claim, that there is no way to say one historical outlook is better than another. Beiser says that Hegel helps us see how we can take history seriously without sliding into the view that all standpoints are equally good.

Finally he mentions problems in the philosophy of mind. Dualism says mind and body are two very different kinds of thing, a bit like a ghost inside a machine. Reductive materialism says there is nothing but matter, so everything about mind can be reduced to facts about the brain. Hegel tries to get beyond both views by treating mind and world as aspects of one developing rational structure. Beiser thinks these Hegelian ideas still offer a powerful alternative to popular positions today. 

After answering the “why read Hegel” question, Beiser turns to the “how” question. He says we can approach Hegel in two broad ways. One way is to treat him as “a virtual contemporary”, as if he were taking part in today’s conversations. This is the typical analytic approach. You focus on exactly what the arguments are, clean them up, and ask if they can help us answer current questions about knowledge, language, politics and so on. The advantage is that Hegel feels alive and relevant. The danger, Beiser warns, is anachronism. An anachronism is when you project something from the present back into the past, like drawing a smartphone in a painting of ancient Rome. With this method we risk turning Hegel into a mouthpiece for our own opinions. Beiser jokingly calls this the “ventriloquist” model of the history of philosophy, where the modern interpreter speaks through the old philosopher like a puppet. The second way is the hermeneutical or historical method. Hermeneutics is the art of interpretation, especially of texts. On this approach you try to place Hegel carefully in his own time. You trace how his ideas developed in relation to figures such as Kant, Fichte, Schelling and the early German Romantics in places like Jena, Heidelberg and Berlin. You treat him as a voice in past debates. This method was used by nineteenth and early twentieth century scholars such as Rudolf Haym, Wilhelm Dilthey and Theodor Haering, all working in Germany. The advantage is that you are less likely to distort Hegel. The drawback is antiquarianism. Antiquarianism is when we treat the past as interesting only in the way old coins or fossils are interesting, something to put in a museum rather than something that speaks to present concerns.

Beiser thinks both methods have value, but that each has built in weaknesses. If we work very hard to show how Hegel is relevant now, we risk drifting away from the real historical thinker. If we concentrate on recreating Hegel in exact historical detail, we risk creating a lifelike portrait that nevertheless does not speak much to our own problems. In theory you might try to mix the two approaches, but in practice that is hard. To avoid anachronism, someone using the analytic method would need very precise historical knowledge of Hegel and his period. To avoid antiquarianism, someone using the historical method would need a deep grasp of contemporary philosophy. Few people have both, although Beiser seems to, to be honest.

In the face of this dilemma Beiser says that he has to choose, and he openly chooses the older hermeneutical method for this book, even though the fashion in the English speaking world favours analytic readings of Hegel. He gives two main reasons. First, he thinks that many analytic reconstructions have gone far beyond reasonable updating and have produced a Hegel who hardly resembles the real one. Instead of admitting that they have created a modern Hegel for their own purposes, some writers talk as if this reconstructed figure simply is the historical Hegel. Second, he thinks that current scholarship often fails to individuate Hegel. To individuate here means to pick out clearly what is distinctive about a person compared to others in the same group. As an easy example, think of a football team. If you say “they are good at passing and running”, that describes the whole team, not one player. To individuate a single player you would say something like “this one has a particularly powerful left foot”. Beiser complains that many people call certain ideas “distinctively Hegelian” when, according to recent research on early German Romanticism, these ideas were shared by a whole generation in Jena and Berlin. He mentions scholars such as Dieter Henrich, Manfred Frank, Violetta Waibel, Michael Franz and Marcelo Stamm, who have shown how rich the early Romantic movement was. On the basis of their work we now know that projects like combining liberalism and communitarianism, or joining Spinoza’s naturalism with Fichte’s idealism, were not unique to Hegel. They were part of the shared agenda of early Romantic thinkers. So, Beiser says, if we cannot state clearly how Hegel’s views differ from those of his peers, then we do not really understand him. That is why he insists that we must first situate Hegel inside this movement, showing what he takes from it and where he breaks with it. 

Lastly, Beiser criticises what he calls non metaphysical interpretations of Hegel. Many recent writers have tried to rescue Hegel for a supposedly “non metaphysical age” by stripping away his metaphysics. Metaphysics is the part of philosophy that asks what reality is like at the deepest level, for instance whether there is a God, whether there is only matter or also mind, and whether the world has an overall purpose. A simple way to picture it is to think of the rules of a video game. Physics describes what happens on the screen, while metaphysics asks what kind of game this is and why those rules exist at all. Non metaphysical readers try to recast Hegel as something else, for instance as a theorist of concepts, a social epistemologist, a kind of neo Kantian, a cultural historian or an early hermeneutic thinker, and they treat the metaphysical parts as either unimportant or as disguises for these other projects. Beiser argues that this is deeply unfaithful to Hegel. Hegel himself thought of metaphysics as the very foundation of philosophy and as the basis for every part of his system, including his social and political philosophy, his philosophy of history and his aesthetics. To understand Hegel in his own individuality and integrity, Beiser says, we must restore metaphysics to the centre of the story. This is why almost every chapter of his book will stress the metaphysical side of Hegel’s ideas. He realises that some readers will worry that this makes Hegel obsolete in a time when many philosophers distrust metaphysics. His reply is that this is exactly where Hegel challenges us. Modern objections to metaphysics, he suggests, often take for granted assumptions that Hegel himself would have rejected and argued against. If we engage with Hegel’s metaphysics directly, we may find that our own easy hostility to metaphysics is less secure than we thought. 

So the first section sets up Beiser's whole book. Hegel is hard to read and belongs to a very different age, but he shaped the intellectual world we inhabit and still offers powerful ways of thinking about knowledge, politics, history and mind. To do justice to him we must read him historically, in close relation to his contemporaries and his metaphysical ambitions, rather than turning him into a neat, non metaphysical, twenty first century theorist.

The key background is the German Enlightenment, often called the Aufklärung. You can think of the Enlightenment as the age when many writers and philosophers said: let us stop simply trusting kings, priests and old traditions. Let us test everything by using our own reason. Immanuel Kant, who lived in Königsberg in East Prussia and whose major work Critique of Pure Reason came out in 1781, called his age “the age of criticism”. He meant that every belief must be ready to stand before the court of reason, even religion and the state. 

Beiser explains that this idea of the sovereignty of reason means that nothing is higher than reason when we are asking what is true or right. The Bible, a church, a monarch or an old custom may all claim authority, but in an Enlightenment view reason has the last word on whether we should accept them.  

The crisis of the Enlightenment in the 1790s comes from a very simple and powerful worry. If reason must criticise everything, then it must also criticise itself. Reason cannot say “question everything except me”, because that would be taking itself on blind faith, which is what it objects to in religion and tradition. So the question becomes: can reason itself give a good reason why we should trust it. This is what Beiser calls a meta criticism of reason, criticism of criticism itself. Think of someone whose rule is “I must doubt every belief I have”. At some point they have to ask whether they should also doubt that rule.

In late eighteenth century Germany several big debates pushed this crisis forward. Beiser picks out four main ones and shows how each shaped the young Hegel. These are anti foundationalism, the pantheism controversy, the birth of nihilism and the rise of historicism. At the end he adds the theory practice debate, which links philosophy with the events of the French Revolution. 

Anti foundationalism comes first. Foundationalism is the idea that knowledge must rest on secure first principles, like a house on solid foundations. Different Enlightenment thinkers gave different accounts of these foundations. Empiricists said the secure base is simple sense experiences. Rationalists said it is clear, self evident principles of reason. What they shared was the belief that we can and must find such a base or else fall into total scepticism. 

In the early 1790s, especially in the university town of Jena, a younger generation began to question this whole picture. They asked whether there really could be self evident starting points for philosophy. Because they targeted the idea of basic principles, or Grundsätze in German, their campaign is sometimes called Grundsatzkritik, critique of first principles. Important figures in this movement were students of Karl Reinhold and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, such as Johann Benjamin Erhard, Immanuel Niethammer and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s ally Paul Johann Feuerbach. Romantic writers like Hölderlin, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis also took part. Beiser lists some of their main arguments. They said, for example, that if a first principle is a simple logical truth of the form “A is A”, then it is empty and tells us nothing about the world. If it is a more informative claim, like “every event has a cause”, then it can be denied and so needs support, which means it is not really self evident. They also argued that you cannot finally prove a first principle by appealing to a special inner vision or intuition, because someone else could claim a different intuition with equal force. In simple terms, they thought that any supposed rock bottom starting point either collapses into triviality or stands on something else and so is not really basic. The result of this Grundsatzkritik was what Beiser calls a re Kantianisation of epistemology, meaning that instead of trying to lay everything on one or two basic truths, philosophers began to talk of principles as goals and guiding ideas that we approach but never absolutely secure. They remain regulative ideals rather than foundations. An everyday example would be the ideal of perfect fairness in law. Judges and lawyers may agree that it is their guiding aim, but they also know that no legal system can fully realise it and that they will always be revising their rules.

Hegel arrived in Jena in 1801, after the most intense phase of the Grundsatzkritik was over, but he learned its lessons. Beiser notes that Hegel rejects the search for self evident first principles, prefers to emphasise the systematic interconnection of all parts of philosophy and is wary of turning philosophy into a sort of mathematics that deduces everything from a few axioms. At the same time, he refuses to accept the full anti foundationalist conclusion that there can be no basic science of philosophy at all. He still thinks of metaphysics, a systematic account of what reality is most fundamentally like, as a central task. 

Next Beiser turns to the pantheism controversy. Pantheism is the belief that God is not a separate personal being outside the world but is identical with nature or with the whole of reality. The great seventeenth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who lived in Amsterdam and later The Hague, was often read as a pantheist. In the late 1780s a fierce debate about Spinoza broke out between Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and the older Enlightenment figure Moses Mendelssohn. This debate shook many people, including the young Hegel. The issue was not a minor theological squabble. It cut to the heart of the Enlightenment belief in a natural religion and morality grounded in reason alone. Enlightenment writers had thought that reason could show the same moral and religious truths to everyone, without special revelation or church authority. Jacobi made a sensational attack on this hope. In his 1786 book Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza he argued that if you follow reason consistently you are driven to something like Spinoza’s system, where everything happens by strict necessity according to the principle of sufficient reason. That principle says that for every event there must be a complete reason that explains why it happens and why it could not be otherwise. Jacobi claimed that if we really apply this principle everywhere, there is no room for a free creator God or for human freedom. The world becomes a closed chain of causes with no openings. For him this meant that thorough rationalism leads to atheism and fatalism. He framed it as a stark choice: either accept a rationalist philosophy that destroys freedom and faith, or take a salto mortale, a deadly leap, into belief without reasons. This left Enlightenment thinkers facing a painful dilemma. 

Hegel followed this controversy closely and took it very seriously. Beiser stresses that Hegel did not accept Jacobi’s dismissal of reason, but he also recognised that Jacobi had exposed real problems in the old Enlightenment picture. Hegel’s long term project can be read as an attempt to find a third way between old style rationalism and Jacobi’s appeal to blind faith, a way that would justify moral and religious beliefs rationally without falling into the harsh fatalism Jacobi associated with Spinoza. 

The third strand in the crisis is the birth of nihilism. Here Beiser again gives Jacobi a central role. The word nihilism literally means belief in nothing. Nihilists say that nothing has real value or meaning. In the 1780s a rather strange figure, the mystic J H Obereit, had already accused Kant of nihilism because Kant said that we cannot know things as they are in themselves, only how they appear to us. Obereit thought this meant that everything outside our own mind is unknown and so, in a sense, nothing. Around 1804 an anonymous novel called Nightwatches by Bonaventura portrayed a mad night watchman who preaches a gospel of nothingness, saying that all values and beliefs rest on illusions. Beiser mentions this to show how powerful and frightening the idea of nihilism had become in the culture. Jacobi then linked nihilism directly with mainstream philosophy. In a 1799 open letter to Fichte he argued that if you follow Kant and Fichte’s idealism to the end you land in complete egoism or solipsism, where you only know your own inner states and cannot be sure that there is an external world or even other minds. In that situation it seems that everything outside your momentary impressions is doubtful. For Jacobi this was a kind of nihilism. He feared that modern rationalism, the long tradition of explaining the world through ideas and consciousness, was eating away the reality of God, the world and even the self. Beiser underlines that Hegel met the problem of nihilism in this sharpened form. It was not just a personal mood of despair but a philosophical challenge: how can we defend any stable meaning or value if our best theories of knowledge seem to dissolve the world into sensations or representations? Hegel’s later discussions of topics like the “unhappy consciousness” in the Phenomenology of Spirit and his criticisms of subjectivism are partly a reply to this Jacobi inspired worry.

The fourth development is the rise of historicism. Historicism, is the idea that all human institutions, beliefs and values are shaped by their history and context. In Germany thinkers such as Johann Georg Hamann in Königsberg, Justus Möser in Osnabrück and Johann Gottfried Herder in Weimar argued against the Enlightenment habit of judging all ages by the standards of their own. Beiser breaks historicism down into three main points. First, everything in social and political life has a history. No law, custom or belief is simply eternal or natural. Second, we must understand each belief or institution in its specific context, which includes the economic, social and cultural conditions of a people. Third, society is like an organism. Its religion, politics, laws and morals are all interconnected and develop together, rather like the organs of a living body. A simple example would be how changes in technology, such as the arrival of the internet, affect not only the economy but also politics, education and family life. Historicists used these ideas to criticise the Enlightenment claim that the principles of reason are universal and timeless. They argued that what Enlightenment writers called universal principles were really products of their own culture and age. Once placed in their historical setting they lose their air of eternity. This leads to a form of relativism. Relativism says that values are always relative to a culture or period and that we have no standpoint outside history from which to judge them. Beiser stresses that Hegel took historicism very seriously, absorbing many of its insights. His later idea that reason itself has a history and that concepts develop over time owes much to these earlier writers. But Hegel also wanted to resist the slide into total relativism. One of his main political aims was to find a way to restore some version of universal principles, like rights and freedom, without ignoring history and context. 

Finally Beiser describes the theory practice debate of the 1790s. The immediate background here is the French Revolution, which began on 14 July 1789 with the storming of the Bastille in Paris. Many in Germany first saw the Revolution as the Enlightenment’s great triumph, a chance to reorganise society on rational principles of liberty and equality. But the Revolution soon brought terror, civil war and Napoleon’s dictatorship. So people asked what had gone wrong. Critics of the Enlightenment argued that reason itself was to blame. They said that if everyone insists on judging everything by their private reason there will be no stable authority and society will fall into chaos. Others said that even if reason can tell us what is right in theory, human beings are mostly driven by passion, self interest and tradition, not by rational insight. The massacres in Paris in September 1792 and religious revolts like the uprising in the Vendée were often cited as examples of how passion and custom can sweep away rational plans. In this climate German writers began a debate about the relation between theory and practice, especially in response to Kant’s moral and political philosophy. Kant, in works like his 1788 Critique of Practical Reason and his essay Theory and Practice, argued that reason is practical, meaning that it not only justifies moral rules but also provides motives for us to act and can even guide us in politics. From the famous moral law he derived principles of a just constitution stressing freedom and equality, which looked very similar to the aims of the French revolutionaries. 

Conservative thinkers such as Justus Möser, Friedrich Gentz and A W Rehberg replied that this picture overrated reason. They made three main points. First, even if reason gives us general moral rules, those rules are too abstract to tell us what kind of detailed constitution a country should have. For that we must study its history and traditions. Second, knowing what is right does not guarantee that people will do it. Human beings are moved by imagination, habit and emotion as much as by principles. Third, a statesman who tried to act purely on rational principles, ignoring power and self interest, would soon lose office or plunge his country into disorder. Beiser ends by saying that this debate revealed two opposed attitudes to the role of reason in politics. Kant and Fichte stood for what he calls a left wing rationalism, insisting that practice should follow theory because the same moral principles bind both individuals and states. Their opponents defended a right wing empiricism, saying that we must take our guidance from historical experience and the accumulated wisdom of previous generations, not from abstract blueprints. Hegel’s own political philosophy grows out of his attempt to find a middle position between these extremes, just as in other areas he seeks a middle path between Enlightenment rationalism and its critics. 

So this whole cultural background chapter shows Hegel as a thinker who enters the scene when belief in reason is under severe pressure from many sides. Anti foundationalism questions the idea of secure starting points. The pantheism controversy raises doubts about rational religion. Debates about nihilism threaten the very meaning of belief. Historicism makes all values look relative to their age. The theory practice dispute suggests that reason may be powerless in politics. Hegel’s philosophy is Beiser’s way of saying: we must see Hegel as someone who responds to all these challenges at once, trying to defend reason while learning from its critics. 

Beiser now turns to what he calls Hegel’s early ideals and he does this by looking at the group of people and ideas that shaped the young Hegel around 1790 to about 1805. The key thought is that Hegel begins life as a kind of romantic. He takes over many of the values of early German Romanticism and then slowly reshapes them into his own more systematic philosophy. First Beiser explains what this romantic legacy is. The movement he has in mind is the early Romantic circle in Jena and Berlin at the end of the eighteenth century sometimes called Frühromantik. It flourished roughly from 1797 to 1802. The main figures were Friedrich Schlegel born 1772, Novalis whose real name was Friedrich von Hardenberg born 1772, Friedrich Schelling born 1775, Friedrich Schleiermacher born 1768, Ludwig Tieck born 1773 and on the edge of the circle Friedrich Hölderlin born 1770. They met in literary salons in Berlin such as those of Rahel Levin and Henriette Herz and in the house of August Wilhelm Schlegel in Jena. Hegel himself did not go to those salons. He arrived in Jena only after the famous literary frenzy was over and he never attended the meetings. But he was close friends with Hölderlin and Schelling and through them he absorbed the romantic atmosphere. Beiser points out that Hegel’s Frankfurt writings from the later 1790s pieces like his Sketches on Religion and Love from 1797 and 1798 and his Spirit of Christianity and its Fate from 1797 to 1799 have that romantic spirit. Some later scholars such as Walter Kaufmann, Shlomo Avineri and Georg Lukács tried to separate Hegel from the Romantics and to say that he was always quite different from them. Beiser thinks this is only partly right. It is true that in his mature Jena period around 1804 to 1807 Hegel reacts against certain romantic ideas and the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807 is in part a farewell letter to Romanticism. But Hegel never entirely frees himself from its influence. Many things we often call distinctively Hegelian such as his organic view of nature, his critique of liberal individualism, his communitarian political ideals and his sympathy for Spinoza are in fact shared by the whole early romantic generation. 

Beiser then asks a very simple sounding but important ethical question. What is the highest good for Hegel and his generation? The highest good is an old idea that goes back at least to Aristotle. It means the ultimate aim of a human life the thing that is good in itself and not just as a means and that is so complete that adding anything else would not improve it. Aristotle spelled this out in the Nicomachean Ethics in the fourth century BCE. 

For Hegel and his romantic contemporaries the answer is what they often called unity of life which is in German Einheit des Lebens. Their highest good is to achieve unity, wholeness and harmony in all dimensions of life. Beiser says this unity has three levels. First, unity with oneself so that your different capacities and desires do not tear you apart. Second, unity with others so that you live in a real community. Third, unity with nature so that you feel at home in the natural world. The opposite of this unity is division or alienation, which in German is Entzweiung or Entfremdung where the self feels split within itself, cut off from other people and opposed to nature. The aim is to overcome these divisions and to feel at home in the world. To make this less abstract you can think of a modern teenager who feels pulled in many directions. At school they are told to specialise for a career. Online they perform different identities for different platforms. At home they may feel disconnected from parents. And climate news makes nature look like something threatened and hostile. For the Romantics that kind of scattered life is the problem to be solved. The ideal is a life in which your talents hang together as a whole, you are part of a genuine community and you experience nature as a living world rather than a dead backdrop.

Where did this ideal come from? Beiser argues that its deepest source is classical Greece, especially Plato and Aristotle. For them a good human life meant harmony between reason and desire inside the person and a polis or city organised as an organic whole where each part serves the whole. They also saw nature itself as a kind of living being rather than a mere machine. In all of this they stand in sharp contrast to the modern view that splits the person into mind and body, treats the state as a contract between competing individuals and sees nature as a mechanical system. According to Beiser the young German Romantics thought of fifth century Athens as their model for unity of life even if this picture of Greece was more myth than historical fact. Beiser then looks separately at three aspects of this highest good which he calls the ethical, political and religious ideals of the young Hegel and his friends.

The ethical ideal concerns unity with oneself. Romantic ethics grows out of the classical ideal of self realisation or human excellence. Here Beiser links Hegel to writers like Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin as well as Schiller, Herder, Goethe, Wieland and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Romantic ethics says that a good life involves three things. First, totality. A person should develop all their distinctively human powers not just one specialised skill. Second, unity. These powers should form a coherent whole rather than a set of unrelated talents. Third, individuality. The whole person should be unique and express a distinctive character. Beiser notes that the Romantics sometimes put this in aesthetic language. We should make our life into a work of art. Like a great novel our life should show unity in variety and the unity should emerge from within rather than being forced from outside. Imagine two students. One spends all their time chasing exam marks in one subject for a job and neglects music, sport, friendships and reflection. The other develops their mind through study, their body through some physical activity, their feelings through friendships and art and then tries to weave these into a life project that is distinctly theirs. Romantic ethics clearly prefers the second student.

Beiser stresses that this romantic ideal is defined against two rivals. On one side is utilitarianism associated with thinkers like Jeremy Bentham, born in 1748 and Claude Adrien Helvétius, born in 1715, which treats the good life as the maximisation of pleasure or happiness. On the other side is the ethics of duty in Immanuel Kant, born 1724, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, born 1762, which makes the highest end obeying moral law for its own sake. The Romantics oppose utilitarianism because it turns human beings into passive pleasure takers and neglects the active development of their powers. They resist a strict duty ethics because it divides us into cold reason and silenced feeling. Instead they put love at the centre. Inspired by Plato’s dialogues the Phaedrus and the Symposium they think love unites the different parts of the soul, reason and desire. When we act from love we do what is right not against our inclinations but with them. The self discovers itself in the other person rather than viewing the other as an obstacle. Hegel in his early Frankfurt essays goes very far with this ethic of love. He even sketches a kind of metaphysics of love where love is the power that reconciles subject and object self and world. 

Yet Hegel will later criticise two features of romantic ethics. First he thinks they overvalue individuality. For Hegel individuality without a place in a shared social order becomes mere self display, which is what Friedrich Schlegel once called 'divine egoism', and Hegel will later attack that. Second he comes to see that love cannot by itself be the basis of law and politics. Feelings of love do not extend reliably to fellow citizens let alone to distant strangers. By the time he writes the Philosophy of Right in the 1820s he confines love to the family as one sphere of ethical life and looks for more stable principles for public morality. 

The political ideal then concerns unity with others. For Hegel and the Romantics this is the organic state. The model again is the ancient republics of Greece and Rome. In an organic state citizens participate directly in public affairs, elect rulers and shape policy. They also enjoy basic rights such as protection of property and freedom of speech and press, and the state takes responsibility for their education and development. This ideal contrasts with two modern types of state. On the one hand is the machine state of enlightened absolutism in the eighteenth century where an all powerful monarch runs everything for the people but never with or by the people. On the other hand is the atomistic state of liberalism where the state is held together by a contract between self interested individuals. The Romantics worry that if everyone follows sheer self interest then they will obey laws only when they fear punishment and the only way to hold such a society together would be total tyranny. Events of the French Revolution in the 1790s force modifications. The early enthusiasm for a simple Greek style republic is shaken by the experience of anarchy and instability in France. Hegel and others begin to emphasise historical continuity, the role of corporate bodies like guilds and estates, a mixed constitution and the importance of a central monarch. The organic state becomes more pluralist and more centralised and they even start to look back to the Middle Ages instead of Greece. But Beiser insists that it still keeps its democratic and constitutional side and its belief in fundamental rights. It seeks a synthesis of ancient community with modern individual freedom. Think of running a school. A pure machine model would be a headteacher who decides everything while pupils and teachers only obey. A pure atomistic model would be lots of individuals thinking only of their own success and treating school rules as annoyances. The romantic organic ideal would be a school where students and staff genuinely help shape the rules, where everyone has rights but also feels responsible for the common life of the school.

The religious ideal concerns unity with nature and with the divine. Here too the young Hegel and his friends are very untraditional. They reject the classical Christian picture where the highest good is an otherworldly salvation after death. Augustine in the City of God had argued that the classical Aristotelian ideal of a fulfilled life on earth was impossible because earthly life is a valley of tears. Hegel and the Romantics break decisively with this. They deny personal immortality and attack the ethic of salvation as self centred. For them the meaning of life should be found in this world particularly in the common life of the community or polis. When people lose political freedom and community they may turn to dreams of another world but that is despair. They are also hostile to two standard ways of understanding God that were common in their time. Theism sees God as a personal being beyond the world and deism sees God as a distant creator who sets up the universe and then leaves it to run on its own. The young Romantics think both views separate God from nature so much that nature becomes a meaningless machine. They want a conception of the divine that is immanent meaning present within the world rather than standing outside it. Their main model here is Baruch Spinoza the seventeenth century Dutch Jewish philosopher whose formula Deus sive natura, God or nature, identifies God with the infinite substance of the universe. In eighteenth century Germany Spinoza is at the centre of a fierce debate known as the pantheism controversy. Many radicals secretly follow him and the poet Heinrich Heine later joked that pantheism was the real underground religion of Germany. For young Romantics Spinoza promises harmony between science and faith because if God is the unity behind natural laws then scientific knowledge is at the same time a kind of religious insight. Spinoza also supports democratic and egalitarian politics because if the divine is equally present in all people then there is no need for a special priestly class. Hegel is drawn into this Spinoza revival. In his early Berne writings in the 1790s he even accepts Kant’s idea of moral faith for a while but then moves to an immanent view of God. In his 1801 Jena essay known as the Differenzschrift he defends the Spinozism of his friend Schelling and later in his lectures on the history of philosophy he famously says that anyone who wants to become a philosopher must first be a Spinozist. 

Finally Beiser describes what he calls the challenge of division. The romantic ideal of a unified life is attractive but it seems almost impossible under modern conditions. Modern society seems to promote division on every level within the self, between individuals and between humanity and nature. Hegel himself says that the need for philosophy arises out of division. In economic life the division of labour pushes each person to specialise in a narrow task to be efficient. The more rationalised production becomes the more individuals are forced to develop only one side of themselves. Beiser quotes Schiller complaining that modern man becomes only a fragment always tied to one little wheel of the social machine. In classical Greece things were different partly because slave labour freed citizens from many economic pressures so they had time to take part in civic life. This does not mean slavery was acceptable but it shows that the conditions for unity of life were very different. In the modern world economic necessity presses on everyone. Division also appears in social and political life. Modern civil society tends towards atomism and anomie, meaning that people feel isolated and norms lose their binding force. Instead of a living community there is a mass of individuals competing in markets. The state appears as a distant and hostile apparatus whose role is to control them. Writers in late eighteenth century Germany already worry about the decline of village communities and increasing urban unemployment. 

Finally the relation to nature changes. The ancients had seen nature as a living whole in which they could feel at home. Modern science and technology instead encourage us to think of nature as a machine we can analyse and control. The engineer does not contemplate forests and rivers as sources of wonder but as resources to be used. If nature is merely a machine it is hard to feel unity with it.

So Beiser ends this section with a question. Given all these pressures towards division how can the romantic ideal of unity of life still be defended? Hegel’s whole later philosophy can be read as an attempt to answer that question. He wants to show how a modern society with complex economies, large states and advanced science might still achieve some form of ethical political and spiritual unity without simply returning to a mythical Greek past. So we can all applaud him for trying this because we still have the challenges of division all around us and it seems hopeless.  

Hegel is often called an "absolute idealist." Beiser explains what people mean when they call Hegel him that and what Hegel’s metaphysics is really about. Metaphysics is the part of philosophy that asks the big “what is reality really like” questions, not just “how do we know things”. Some say either that Hegel is a wild speculative metaphysician who believes in mysterious entities beyond the world or that he is not really doing metaphysics at all but only describing how we think or talk. Beiser says both are wrong. Hegel wants a critical metaphysics that takes Kant’s worries about knowledge seriously but still tells us something about reality itself. His tool for doing this will be the dialectic, the method we see in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic. To explain Hegel’s metaphysics Beiser introduces an important distinction from Aristotle. Aristotle lived in Greece in the fourth century BCE and wrote works like the Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics. He distinguished between what is first in explanation and what is first in existence. Hegel picks this up. Universals are first in explanation, particulars are first in existence. A universal is a general property like “being a triangle” or “being a mammal”. A particular is a concrete thing, like this triangle drawn on the page or your neighbour’s dog. If you want to explain what a dog is, you have to use universals such as “mammal” and “animal”. So universals come first in explanation. But in the real world only individual dogs exist. You never meet “dogness” walking down the street. So particulars come first in existence. This helps Hegel avoid two bad extremes. On one side some people read him as if he were a Platonist, like Plato in ancient Athens, who thought universals inhabit a separate realm beyond the physical world. On the other side some read him as a strict nominalist who thinks universals are nothing over and above the collection of particular things. Hegel thinks both are wrong. Universals are real and basic for explanation but they only exist in and through particular things. There is no ghostly world of “ideas” hovering above reality, but there is also more to reality than a pile of disconnected individuals. A simple example is a game like chess. The universal “chess” does not exist as a separate thing, but it is more than just this or that wooden piece. It is a pattern of rules that is realised whenever people play. 

With that background Beiser turns to the label “absolute idealism”. Hegel himself did not like slogans very much and did not often use this exact phrase, although he did sometimes describe his philosophy as a kind of idealism. The term “absolute idealism” came into circulation in the 1790s. Friedrich Schlegel seems to have been the first to use it, and Hegel’s friend Friedrich Schelling used it as a name for his own position in Jena around 1800. Later it became a standard label for Hegel’s philosophy among British and American philosophers in the nineteenth century. Hegel did not disown the term, but he insisted that such phrases only have a clear sense inside a full system and are not magic keys on their own. The word “absolute” is Hegel’s name for the ultimate subject matter of philosophy, the most basic reality. In his early Jena essay called the Differenzschrift he says that the task of philosophy is to know the absolute. In his lectures on the philosophy of religion he tells his students that philosophy and religion share the same object, namely God, and that “absolute” is essentially a philosophical way of saying “God”. But he does not want philosophy to start by assuming that God exists. The absolute should be the end result of philosophical inquiry, not something simply taken for granted at the start. We begin instead from a very simple question: what is reality in itself, apart from how it appears to us and apart from its relations to other things? The Phenomenology of Spirit and the Logic both begin from this question. 

Hegel’s understanding of the word “absolute” grows out of earlier thinkers. Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781 in Königsberg, says that “absolute” can mean “considered in itself, internally” or “true without exceptions in all relations”. Hegel combines both ideas and says that when you consider reality fully in itself it includes its relations within itself. Schelling, working in Jena in the late 1790s, defined the absolute as “that which is in itself and through itself”, something whose existence does not depend on anything else. This echoes the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who in his Ethics defined “substance” as that which is in itself and conceived through itself. For Spinoza that substance is God or nature. Hegel and Schelling both take this Spinozist picture as their starting point, though Hegel will later criticise parts of it. So one way to put things is that, for Hegel, the absolute is the all inclusive reality that depends on nothing else and includes everything in itself. But philosophy should not begin with a proof that such a thing exists. Instead it should start from the question “what is reality in itself” and gradually come to see that its object has all along been the absolute or God. 

Beiser then explains a method that Hegel and Schelling used in their Jena years, which they called “construction”. The idea was that reason should grasp each thing “in itself” by stripping away its special properties. Imagine taking a specific oak tree. You remove from your description everything that makes it different from other things, such as “having this number of leaves” or “standing next to this road”. What you are left with is a very bare concept like “being a living thing”, and if you abstract even more you get to “being” itself. The thought is that when you take away all the differences between things, what is left is something the same in them all, which reason can then study. Hegel later dropped the name “construction” because it sounded too artificial, but he kept the basic aim of understanding things as they are in themselves. Next Beiser turns to what many people think is the heart of absolute idealism, the idea of “subject and object identity”. “Subject” here means the knowing self or mind. “Object” means the thing known, the world we think about. Schelling had described absolute idealism as the doctrine that subject and object are identical at the deepest level. In early nineteenth century Jena he and Hegel tried to defend this idea together. The main model for them was again Spinoza. Spinoza had argued that mind and body are simply two “attributes” of one and the same substance. The order of ideas and the order of things are one and the same because both express a single underlying reality. 

For Hegel the principle of subject and object identity captures something important but it cannot be the whole story. The absolute must also contain difference, not only identity. In our experience we clearly feel a difference between ourselves as subjects and the world as object. Hegel thinks this difference is not an illusion to be erased but a necessary moment in the life of the absolute. The absolute realises itself by dividing itself into subject and object and then overcoming this division. A simple analogy would be a person learning a language. At first the language feels external and strange, then they gradually master it, and finally it becomes part of their own thinking. The “otherness” was real and necessary but not the final word. 

Beiser then asks what “idealism” means for Hegel. Many people think idealism means denying the reality of the external world and saying that only minds or ideas exist. That is true of some forms of idealism, such as the subjective idealism of the Irish philosopher George Berkeley in the early eighteenth century, or some aspects of Fichte’s early work in Jena. Subjective idealism says that the world is rational only to the extent that we impose our own concepts on it, and whatever lies beyond that is an unknowable “thing in itself”. Hegel rejects this kind of idealism.  Hegel’s absolute idealism is different. He takes the “idea” to mean not a private thought but something like an Aristotelian “form” and “final cause”. Aristotle spoke of the form of a thing as its organising structure and of a final cause as its goal or purpose. Hegel says that saying “everything is an appearance of the idea” means that everything has some internal structure and some direction or goal. For example, the idea of an oak tree is realised in an acorn that grows, puts out branches and roots, and strives to become a mature tree. In that process you can see both a form and a purpose at work. For Hegel the absolute idea is like the ultimate form and ultimate goal that is at work in all things. 

This does not mean Hegel denies the independent existence of nature. In his philosophy of nature he assumes that natural processes existed long before human consciousness evolved. Absolute idealism is compatible with realism in the sense that it accepts that objects exist independently of our awareness. It is also compatible with naturalism understood as the view that everything in nature happens according to laws. Hegel does not reject mechanical explanations in physics or biology. What he rejects is a narrow version of naturalism that says everything can only be explained by blind mechanical causes with no place for purposes or ends. So absolute idealism, as Beiser explains it, tries to go beyond the usual fight between materialism and idealism. Materialism says everything is fundamentally matter. Idealism in the narrow sense says everything is fundamentally mind. Hegel says both are one sided. The absolute idea is the form or structure that is present in both mind and matter. You cannot reduce mind to mere matter, but you also cannot reduce matter to mere mind. Both are real, and both express the same underlying rational structure.

A further ambition of Hegel’s absolute idealism is to reconcile two great figures from his time, Fichte and Spinoza. Fichte made freedom central. For him the human self or “I” creates its own world through its activity. Spinoza made nature and necessity central. For him everything follows from the nature of God or substance with strict logical necessity. Hegel and his romantic contemporaries wanted to combine Fichte’s stress on freedom with Spinoza’s unified lawful nature, so that the world would be both free and ordered, both historical and lawful. In Hegel’s version the absolute is like a living process that unfolds in nature and in history. Human freedom is the highest stage of this process, not its starting point. Beiser also uses Hegel’s ideas to criticise what he calls the “myth of panlogicism”. This is the belief that Hegel thought reality is nothing but pure logic, that every single fact can be deduced by reasoning without any reference to experience. On this caricature Hegel thinks the world is made out of concepts in the same way that a mathematical system is made out of axioms and theorems. Beiser says this is not Hegel’s view. Hegel holds that reality is rationally structured and that we can understand it through concepts, but he does not deny the richness of nature, history, feeling and will. Logic for him gives the most general forms of thought and being, but it has to be filled out by actual science, history and culture.

You could think of the absolute idea as something like the rules of a very complex game that is being played out in the universe. The rules do not exist before or outside the game, floating in space, yet you can only make sense of what happens in the game by seeing how it realises those rules. Hegel thinks that philosophy’s task is to work out these deepest rules of reality. Absolute idealism is his name for the view that such rules exist, that they have the character of reasons and purposes, and that they are realised in both nature and human history.

Then Beiser explains Hegel’s “organic worldview”. The idea is that Hegel thinks of reality not as a machine but as something like a living organism, and he tries to show how this way of thinking grew out of both science and philosophy around 1800. Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770 and studied theology at the Tübinger Stift in Tübingen in the south of Germany, alongside his friends Schelling and Hölderlin. Beiser says that from quite early on Hegel looked at the universe as “one great living being” so the universe is less a huge factory of separate parts and more as a gigantic evolving ecosystem where everything hangs together, like a rainforest or a coral reef. That is how Hegel sees reality as a whole. Beiser first explains what he calls the organic dimension in Hegel’s thinking. Hegel uses organic images everywhere. He talks about growth, life, development and organisms, not only when he writes about nature but also when he talks about logic, ethics, politics and art. For him, a good society is not like a machine that you can take apart and reassemble at will, it is more like a living body where the different organs and functions depend on one another. A good artwork is not just a pile of pleasing bits, it is a whole in which each part plays a role. 

Beiser gives a simple model Hegel uses for organic growth. There are three moments. First there is an undivided unity, like a seed where everything is packed together. Second there is difference, where the seed unfolds into stem, leaves, roots, flowers and so on. Third there is unity in difference, where all those different parts work together to keep the plant alive. Hegel thinks the absolute, which is his word for ultimate reality or God, develops in a similar way. It begins as a simple unity, divides into many forms, and then comes to itself again in a higher kind of unity. This organic picture shapes Hegel’s basic vocabulary. When he says something is “in itself”, in German an sich, he partly means that it exists in a merely potential way, a bit like a talent you have but have never used, or a musical instrument in a cupboard. When he says something is “for itself”, in German für sich, he means that it has become conscious and active and organised, like someone who has trained their talent and is now using it in a deliberate way. His key word “concept”, or Begriff, does not mean just a definition in a dictionary, it means something like the inner plan or point of a thing, what Aristotle would have called its form and final cause, for example the pattern and purpose that makes an acorn tend to become an oak tree. Beiser then explains why this organic way of thinking mattered so much for Hegel’s absolute idealism. Hegel’s monism, his claim that reality ultimately forms one whole rather than two separate realms, rests on an organic idea. The mental and the physical, mind and body, are for him not totally different substances but different stages in the organisation of one living force. His idealism, his claim that things have purposes and forms, also relies on an organic picture, because he thinks everything in nature and history can be understood through the ends it serves inside larger wholes. 

To see where this came from Beiser looks at the rise of organicism in the late seventeen hundreds. If you grow up with modern physics it is easy to think of Hegel’s language as poetic fantasy. But Beiser insists that around 1800 many scientists and philosophers saw the organic view as the best science available. It grew as a reaction against mechanism, the older model associated with René Descartes who published his Principles of Philosophy in Latin in 1644. Mechanism said roughly the following. First, matter is just extended stuff, it takes up space and has length, breadth and depth. Second, matter is inert, which means it stays as it is unless something else pushes or pulls it. Third, all causes are impacts, one body bumping into another and changing its motion. Fourth, a good explanation uses only this kind of cause, called efficient causality, where earlier events push later ones, without talking about purposes or goals. Fifth, mechanism usually goes with atomism, the view that matter is made of tiny hard particles moving in empty space. A simple example is billiard balls on a table, you explain everything in terms of pushes and movements and never ask what any of it is for.  By the late seventeen hundreds this mechanical picture was in crisis. Beiser lists several reasons. Gravity in Isaac Newton’s physics involved attraction at a distance, one body affecting another without direct contact, which did not fit the simple push and pull story. New discoveries in magnetism and electricity also involved attraction and repulsion that did not look like collisions of hard particles. In chemistry it started to look as if forces like electrical charge were basic, not just shapes and sizes of atoms. In biology the old theory of preformation, which said embryos contained tiny fully formed organisms that only had to unfold, was undermined by experiments, for example by Caspar Wolff, born 1733, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, born 1752, in Göttingen. Their work supported the theory of epigenesis, which says that organisms develop from a more primitive state into a structured form through their own inner powers. You can picture this by thinking of a simple fertilised egg gradually producing organs and limbs. Mechanism also struggled to explain human beings. If all causes are pushes in space, how can a thought cause a bodily movement, or a bodily state cause a feeling, when thoughts are not little objects in space that bump into things. If you make the mind something completely outside nature you end up with dualism, two realms that cannot truly interact. If you insist that the mind is inside nature but still use only mechanical pushes, you risk treating people as nothing more than complicated machines. Either way you do not explain human action in a satisfying natural way. 

Against this background the organic approach looked very attractive. Instead of seeing the world as a heap of atoms, it sees things as parts of wholes, and it explains events by how they fit into the life of that whole. This is what Beiser calls a holistic explanation. Think of the beating of your heart. A mechanic might describe it just as a lump of tissue contracting and relaxing. An organic view explains it by showing how that movement serves the life of the whole body, supplying blood and oxygen. The organic model also looked naturalistic in the sense that it still appealed to laws and regular patterns, it did not rely on magic or mysterious forces, but its laws described how parts relate to wholes rather than just how one event follows another. Beiser then turns to the classical and Christian roots of this organic picture. When Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin were theology students at the Tübinger Stift in the 1790s they read Plato with great enthusiasm, especially the dialogue Timaeus. In that work Plato describes the world as a single living creature that contains all living creatures within itself. Nature is compared to a kind of giant human, a macro person. This ancient image of the cosmos as a living animal strongly shaped how the young men thought. 

Hegel first worked out his own organic metaphysics during his Frankfurt years in the late seventeen nineties. Beiser mentions his fragments on love from 1797, his manuscript The Spirit of Christianity written around 1798 and a System fragment around 1800. In these texts Hegel talks about the divine life, the unity of the individual and the universe, and the reconciliation of human beings with nature, all in organic terms. He was not alone. Friedrich Schiller in his Philosophical Letters from 1786 writes about nature and freedom in an almost rhapsodic organic style. Johann Gottfried Herder in his book God, Some Conversations from 1787 uses dialogues to sketch a living cosmos. The biologist C F Kielmeyer gave a famous lecture in Stuttgart in 1793 on the relations among organic powers. Friedrich Schlegel, Hölderlin and Novalis all played with similar ideas in their fragments. Schelling gave a systematic version in his work On the World Soul in 1799. There was also a Christian source. In The Spirit of Christianity Hegel links his organic vision to the Gospel of John, especially the opening verses which talk about the divine word and life. He sees the Trinity as something like an organism in which each person is distinct but all are parts of one life. At this stage Hegel is still a romantic mystic. He thinks that the infinite whole cannot really be grasped in concepts and arguments. It can only be felt in love and faith, in an experience of oneness with others and with nature. Philosophy in this period has the more modest job of criticising narrow and finite ways of thinking so that room is left for faith. Around 1800 however Hegel changes his mind about reason. In a letter from Frankfurt to Schelling dated 2 November 1800 he says that he has had to transform the ideal of his youth into the form of reflection, meaning into a system of concepts. The organic vision of a reconciled life must be expressed in a philosophical system if it is to influence real social and political life. He even sketches a first idea of dialectic, a way of criticising partial forms of life by showing their inner contradictions and then including them as parts of a larger whole. 

Beiser next describes what he calls the Spinoza legacy. Baruch Spinoza lived in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, from 1632 to 1677, and wrote the Ethics. He argued that there is only one substance which is both God and nature and that individual things are modes or expressions of this one substance. This raises the problem of how the one and the many are related. How can finite things be both real and nothing more than modes. Schelling and Hegel tried to develop a “philosophy of identity” in Jena around 1800 to answer this. Schelling’s early view was that the absolute is an identity of subject and object, but when he tried to explain how finite things arise, he ended up saying they are the result of a kind of inexplicable fall or leap, almost a new version of original sin, which he could not really explain. Hegel thought this meant failure. Hegel’s solution is to treat the absolute not as a static block but as life. A living being develops by producing differences within itself and then integrating them. A simple way to see this is to think of a person who grows from childhood into adulthood. The adult self contains many developed powers and roles that did not exist in the child, yet there is still one life that stretches through all that change. Hegel says that reason does not want to abolish opposition entirely, because opposition is one factor of life; what it wants is to overcome fixed oppositions by including them in a larger movement. In this way he transforms Spinoza’s substance into a living organism that is always in development. 

After Spinoza comes the Kantian legacy and challenge. Immanuel Kant in Königsberg wrote the Critique of Judgment, first published in 1790. In sections sixty four and sixty five he gives a careful analysis of what he calls a “natural purpose” or organism. For Kant, a genuine organism is a whole where the parts exist for the sake of the whole and also produce one another. A tree, for example, produces seeds that grow into trees, repairs itself and keeps the whole structure going. In such a case the whole precedes the parts and gives them their identity. Kant contrasts this with a mere heap or machine, where you can in principle understand the whole by listing its parts and their local interactions. Kant therefore gives the organic concept a precise technical meaning. He also introduces a useful distinction between two kinds of universal. An analytic universal or compositum is like the word “pile of stones” where the parts come first and you can add or remove stones without changing the basic idea. A synthetic universal or totum is like “organism” where the whole comes first and decides what counts as a part. Hegel later uses a similar distinction between an abstract universal, which is thin and indifferent to its instances, and a concrete universal, which is rich and realised through its parts. However, Kant also places strict limits on how we may use the organic concept. He says we have no secure way to know whether natural things are really purposive or whether they only look that way to us. So he allows us to use the idea of organisms as a regulative principle, a guide for our research, but not as a constitutive description of how the world actually is in itself. We may speak as if nature were an organism, but we must not assume that it truly is. He also argues against hylozoism, the idea that matter itself is alive, because his own physics is built on the law of inertia which says matter moves only when something external acts on it. 

For Hegel and for Schelling this is not good enough. They think Kant’s restrictions undermine his own project of explaining knowledge. Kant wants to overcome the gap between mind and world, subject and object, yet if he treats the idea of an organism as only a useful fiction, the deep unity of mind and nature is left hanging in the air. Hegel and Schelling argue that if we are really to explain how thinking and nature connect, we have to treat the organic structure of reality as something real, not just as a way of speaking. They go so far as to say that the concept of an organism is itself a necessary condition of experience, in other words we can only make sense of experience if we assume that reality has an organic structure. Beiser then asks how Hegel and other thinkers of nature replied to Kant’s arguments more concretely. One move was to distance themselves from crude vitalism, the view that there is some mysterious life force floating around. Another was to appeal to the best natural science of their day, in physics, chemistry and biology, to show that purely mechanical explanations were failing and that organic ideas were needed. A third move was more philosophical. If you stick to mechanism you either split mind off from nature, which leaves the relation between them a mystery, or you reduce mind to matter in a way that seems to deny its distinctive features. Organicism promised a middle path, a single nature that is continuous but has different levels from inert matter up to conscious life. 

In the last part of the section Beiser talks about Hegel’s defence of Naturphilosophie, the philosophy of nature. Around 1800 Schelling in Jena had become famous for his lectures on Naturphilosophie, where he tried to interpret the newest scientific discoveries within an organic framework. At the same time he was breaking with Fichte, who was very sceptical about the possibility of a serious philosophy of nature. Hegel, who had just left Frankfurt for Jena, joined forces with Schelling. In his 1801 essay often called the Differenzschrift, written in Jena, Hegel argues that a philosophy of nature is necessary and that only an organic concept of nature can overcome the dualism that still haunts the systems of Kant and Fichte. Finally Beiser addresses some common myths about Naturphilosophie. Many later critics, including some neo Kantian philosophers in the late nineteenth century, treated Hegel’s work on nature as the worst, most outdated part of his system, full of speculative fantasies and wrong claims about planets, elements and evolution. Beiser admits that Hegel made serious errors and sometimes forced facts into a preconceived pattern. But he says we should separate the practice from the project. Hegel never thought that conceptual reasoning could replace observation or experiment. Rather, he saw the conceptual side as organising the results of the sciences into a systematic picture and asking about their deeper meaning. The organic worldview was his attempt to do that, to see the world not as a dead machine but as a living whole in which mind and nature belong together.

Beiser says that to understand Hegel you have to understand how religion runs through his whole philosophy. Was Hegel trying to defend Christianity or to get rid of it and put philosophy in its place? Soon after Hegel died in Berlin in 1831 his followers split into camps. On one side were the left wing Hegelians in places like Berlin and later Zurich and Paris. They said that Hegel was really an atheist or at best a pantheist which means someone who says that God is just another name for the universe. On the other side were the right wing Hegelians many of them in Prussia who said that Hegel was the great defender of Protestant Christianity and of the Prussian state church rather like Thomas Aquinas in thirteenth century Paris was the great defender of medieval Catholicism. Both sides had evidence. The left could point out that Hegel’s God is not a distant being outside the world but is present inside nature and history. They said that he did not believe in miracles or in the Bible as a special supernatural book and that he described Christianity in some places as a kind of alienation where the believer feels cut off from the world. They even liked to quote the shocking line where Hegel speaks of the death of God. The right could answer that Hegel devoted huge energy to trying to show that key Christian doctrines like the Trinity and the incarnation have a rational meaning. They also stressed that Hegel often said openly that he was a Lutheran and that he thought there is reason at work in the actual institutions of Prussia including the church. Beiser says this dispute is not just a side issue about religion. It affects how we read the whole of Hegel. Are his big ideas meant to support the Christian tradition or to transform and replace it? He argues that both simple readings are wrong. Hegel is neither a straightforward church theologian nor a simple humanist atheist. Instead he is trying to steer a middle course between them and to create a new way of thinking about God and religion. 

To show this Beiser walks through Hegel’s life and writings and tracks the changes in his religious outlook. He begins with Hegel’s early manuscripts from his student and young adult years. From 1788 to 1793 Hegel studied theology at the famous Tübinger Stift, a Protestant seminary in Tübingen in south west Germany. There he wrote what scholars call the Tübingen Essay and some short pieces known as the Tübingen and Berne fragments. From 1793 to 1797 he worked as a private tutor near Berne in Switzerland and wrote The Life of Jesus and an essay called The Positivity of the Christian Religion. From 1797 to 1800 he lived in Frankfurt where he wrote Sketches on Religion and Love, The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate and a Fragment of a System. Some nineteenth century scholars like Karl Rosenkranz and Wilhelm Dilthey read these early writings and said that Hegel in his youth was mainly a religious and even mystical thinker. Dilthey classed him with the tradition of mystical pantheism where God is seen as the life of the whole world. Others like Georg Lukács later described these same early writings as strongly critical of Christianity and even anti theological because they attack many church doctrines and practices. So the argument about Hegel’s religion starts right at the beginning of his career.  Beiser makes a careful distinction. He says it is fair to call the young Hegel’s interests religious but not in the narrow sense of church dogma. In the Tübingen Essay Hegel distinguishes between objective religion and subjective religion. Objective religion means the official side of religion. It is doctrine, creeds and church law, how religion is organised in institutions. Subjective religion means religion as it is lived by an individual person, their feelings, actions and way of life. A simple example today would be the difference between memorising the Nicene Creed in church, which is objective religion, and quietly helping a neighbour because you feel called to love them, which is subjective religion. Hegel says clearly that what really matters is subjective religion and he mocks theologians who argue endlessly about official doctrines. Because he cares about inner life and practice more than church rules some writers have called the young Hegel an early existentialist. Beiser thinks this is misleading. Unlike the later Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard Hegel is not obsessed with the salvation of the individual soul. He is mainly interested in how religion can support life in a community. For him subjective religion matters because it helps citizens act well in the state. In modern terms you might say he is asking what kind of religious feelings and attitudes can support a healthy public life in a modern society. So were these early writings Christian or anti Christian? Beiser shows that they are mixed. On the one hand Hegel criticises many aspects of traditional Christianity, especially its legalism and its demand for blind belief. He calls this the positivity of the Christian religion. Positivity here means that people accept dogmas only because some authority says so, just as someone obeys a law simply because the state commands it. On the other hand he also says that the core of Christianity is rational and that the figure of Jesus can be seen as a model of moral virtue. In The Life of Jesus he retells the gospel as if Jesus were teaching the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant who had published his Critique of Practical Reason in Königsberg in 1788. Hegel is trying to turn Christianity into a religion of pure moral reason but he is not yet ready to throw it away. 

Beiser then describes a turning point in the Frankfurt years around 1797 to 1800. In Frankfurt Hegel met again his old friend the poet Friedrich Hölderlin who was already exploring mystical ideas about God and nature. In this period Hegel wrote The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate. In that manuscript he moves away from the cool rationalist line of Kant and starts to defend religious experience and traditional symbols in a new way. He now says that faith is based on the experience of love which goes beyond rational proof. Hegel here sounds very much like a religious mystic for whom love is the way to the infinite. Why this reversal? Beiser explains it by pointing to a problem that was troubling Hegel during the Tübingen and Berne years. Hegel wanted to design a modern civic religion that would support a free and rational state. This civic religion had to meet three conditions. It had to be grounded in reason. It had to touch the heart and the imagination. And it had to speak to all areas of public life not just to private salvation. Christianity was the religion people actually had in Europe so he felt he had to work with it. But Christianity as he knew it also clashed with his aims because it stressed personal salvation and obedience to positive dogma. In Berne he tried to solve this by reading Christianity through Kant. That is why he wrote The Life of Jesus as the story of a teacher of moral law. But Hegel himself found this picture unconvincing. He realised that the Bible gives more support to another image of Jesus that of the preacher of love, especially in the Gospel of John. In Frankfurt he therefore reinterprets Christianity as the religion of divine love. This lets him take doctrines like the incarnation and the Trinity more seriously as symbols of a loving God rather than as bare dogmas. At the same time he sees that a pure gospel of love is too inward and gentle to form the basis of a big modern state. It is more suitable to a small community of believers than to a whole society. So his mystical phase both deepens his sympathy for Christianity and prepares the way for a later more rational theology. Next Beiser moves to Hegel’s years in Jena from about 1801 to 1806 where Hegel wrote works like the Differenzschrift ,the early System sketches and the Phenomenology of Spirit. Here the religious dimension is everywhere. In his essay Faith and Knowledge he criticises the split between reason and faith in Kant and in the philosopher Friedrich Jacobi and says that philosophy must heal this divide. He sometimes speaks of wanting a speculative Good Friday where reason dies and rises again at a higher level. Yet Hegel now also speaks about the need for a new religion that is neither Catholic nor Protestant. In a summary of his System of Ethical Life and in a joint article with his friend Friedrich Schelling for their Critical Journal he says that both Christianity and paganism are only partial standpoints. Pagan religion starts from nature and tries to rise to the divine. Christianity starts from the divine and descends to the human and the earthly. Philosophy should unite these two directions. It should see the divine in nature correcting paganism and also see nature as present in the divine correcting Christianity. 

A key text for Beiser is the famous section on the unhappy consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit published in Jena in 1807. Hegel describes here a kind of believer who feels split between a sinful self and a perfect God far away in heaven. The believer sees life on earth as a mere pilgrimage and hopes only for salvation after death. Hegel has in mind especially the view expressed by Saint Augustine in book nineteen of The City of God written in early fifth century North Africa. Beiser shows how sharply Hegel criticises this stance. He thinks it leads people to despise the world and their own powers and to live in permanent guilt and self contempt. For Hegel true reconciliation with God must affirm this world not turn away from it. Beiser then explains the famous phrase death of God which appears both in the Phenomenology and in Hegel’s later lectures on the philosophy of religion in Berlin. Hegel does not mean what later writers like Ludwig Feuerbach or Friedrich Nietzsche meant, namely that belief in God has become empty in a secular age. He is referring more literally to the death of Christ on the cross and to a line from a German hymn by Johann Rist which says God himself is dead, he has died on the cross. Hegel interprets this as a symbol for a moment in the life of spirit where all support seems to vanish and the believer feels abandoned. But this moment of loss is followed by resurrection and new life. In ordinary terms you could compare it to a person who loses their familiar identity perhaps when they leave home or lose a job and then eventually finds a deeper and freer self through that crisis. 

After going through these stages Beiser sums up Hegel’s attitude to Christianity in the Jena and Berlin years as deeply ambivalent. On the one hand Hegel secularises and rationalises Christian ideas. He makes God immanent which means present within nature and history rather than being a supernatural ruler outside them. He explains doctrines like incarnation and Trinity in philosophical terms rather than as literal supernatural events. On the other hand he does not simply reduce God to the sum total of natural events. He thinks that the divine is the inner structure and aim of the whole process of nature and history. An image might help. If you think of a novel, the events in the story are like nature and history. The plot that ties them all together is like the divine. The plot is not a separate thing floating above the book yet it is also more than a simple list of events. This brings Beiser to Hegel’s explicit concept of God. Hegel keeps the old definition of God as the infinite but he understands the infinite in a new way. Many religious thinkers had imagined the infinite as the opposite of the finite as if you have God on one side and the world on the other like two separate regions. Hegel argues in his Science of Logic that this makes no sense. If the infinite is placed over against the finite then the relation between them a unity that embraces both would in fact be greater than the infinite. So the true infinite must include the finite. For Hegel the divine must therefore include the world and work through it. This is why he can make the shocking claim Without the world God is not God. That line does not mean that God is nothing but the world. It means that God is a living reality that expresses itself only through nature and history.Think of electricity and an electrical system. Electricity only appears through circuits devices and lights yet it is also something more than any one lamp or phone. In a somewhat similar way God for Hegel appears through natural and historical processes yet is also the inner life that makes them possible. This is what Beiser means when he says that Hegel both naturalises the divine and divinises nature. God is brought into the world and history but at the same time the world and history become the place where something divine is at work. Beiser then turns to Hegel’s relationship to Lutheranism. Hegel often said that he was a Lutheran and in his Berlin lectures he defended Martin Luther as the great figure who introduced what Hegel calls the principle of subjectivity. This principle says simply that I should accept no belief that goes against my conscience. Hegel sees this idea as central to the modern world and to his own philosophy. So when he calls himself Lutheran he is mainly affirming this principle and also a form of worship centred on the mass or communion. He is not promising loyalty to all the details of Lutheran dogma. To understand Hegel’s mature stance Beiser looks at what he calls the identity thesis. This is Hegel’s basic claim about the relation between philosophy and religion. In his Berlin lectures Hegel says very clearly that both philosophy and religion have exactly the same object which is God and God alone. He even says philosophy is theology and that when philosophy truly understands itself it understands religion and vice versa. At first this might sound as if Hegel is simply turning philosophy into church doctrine.  But Hegel immediately adds an important distinction. Philosophy and religion have the same content yet they differ in form. Religion knows God through images, feelings and stories. Hegel calls these representations. For example when a believer imagines God as a father or as a king on a throne that is a representation. It is a picture drawn from human experience. Philosophy knows God through concepts. A concept is like a precise definition that tries to capture the structure of something. For instance instead of picturing God as a father the philosopher might define God as the absolute spirit that realises itself in nature and history. Hegel thinks that philosophy should take the content of religious representations and translate it into this conceptual form without losing the content. This translation project raised immediate worries. Romantic thinkers like Friedrich Schleiermacher in Berlin argued that religious intuition and feeling cannot be captured in discursive language. Intuition for them sees things as a living whole while analysis breaks them into parts and kills their life. Hegel was very aware of this objection. In the Encyclopaedia he spends time analysing the difference between sensation, representation and thought. Sensation is immediate awareness of something particular, for example the taste of an apple. Representation is when we form an image or memory of something and already bring some general ideas to it, like thinking of that apple as food or as a symbol in a story. Thought goes further by linking many representations together in a system, for example when a botanist classifies apple trees in a whole science of plants. Hegel says that religious representation is already a kind of thinking because it uses general ideas and connects things together even if not in a fully systematic way. This is why he believes that translation into concepts can preserve the content of religion while organising it more clearly. 

Still there is a problem. When philosophy becomes fully rational Hegel admits it can no longer accept some traditional beliefs such as miracles in the literal sense. Reason cannot simply prove that water once turned into wine at a wedding in a village in Galilee. Does this not break the identity between philosophy and religion? Beiser explains Hegel’s answer. The identity thesis he says is not about specific beliefs but about the basic content of intuition and feeling. Philosophy is allowed to reject some religious beliefs as false interpretations of that content while still claiming to grasp the same deep object that religion points to. So Hegel could say that the miracle stories express an intuition of divine power at work in the world but that the literal story is an immature way of expressing that truth. Beiser notes that this can look like cheating. You might suspect that Hegel simply selects the religious feelings and images that fit his system and discards the rest while calling what remains the true content of faith. Hegel would reply that his reading is the only one that gives those intuitions a coherent place in a rational view of reality. In other words his system does not mirror every belief that Christians actually hold but claims to show the rational core in their experiences of dependence forgiveness community and so on. 

Beiser returns to the political question. Hegel famously said that the actual is rational and the rational is actual. Some have taken this to mean that whatever exists is justified. Beiser reminds us that Hegel adds an important qualification. Not everything that exists counts as truly actual. Something is actual only if it meets the standards of reason. Applied to the church this means that while there is some rationality in the existing institutions they may still need major reform in order to realise the idea of a rational religious community. His philosophy of religion is therefore both an apology and a critique. It tries to justify the Christian tradition by rationalising it yet it also strips away many elements that are hostile to reason and human freedom. So the picture that Beiser gives is this. Hegel spends his life wrestling with Christianity. In Tübingen and Berne he criticises its legalism but still sees Jesus as a moral teacher. In Frankfurt he discovers the power of Christian love and sounds like a mystic. In Jena and Berlin he tries to build a new philosophical religion that unites pagan love of nature with Christian concern for the infinite and that reconciles faith and reason. He never simply dumps Christianity nor does he simply repeat it. Instead he takes many of its ideas and symbols and rewrites them in terms of a single living reality that he calls God or the absolute spirit, a reality that is at work in the world and in history and that human beings can come to know through both faith and philosophy.

Then Beiser explains what Hegel means by “the dialectic” and why it matters. He wants to show that the dialectic is not a mysterious magic trick, and not an excuse to ignore Kant, but Hegel’s serious attempt to give metaphysics a solid and critical basis after Kant’s attack on it in the Critique of Pure Reason of 1781, written in Königsberg. First Beiser restates the problem. Hegel’s system is very ambitious. He wants to use pure thinking to say something about reality itself, about the absolute, the unconditioned whole of things. That is exactly what Kant said we could not do. Kant thought that whenever we try to think beyond possible experience we get into illusions and contradictions. Neo Kantians in the late nineteenth century called Hegel a throwback to older rationalists like Leibniz, Malebranche and Spinoza who had tried to describe the world in itself by pure reason. They said philosophy must be modest and only study the limits of knowledge and help the sciences, and on that view Hegel looks reckless. Beiser says this is unfair. Hegel actually applauds Kant for criticising the old metaphysics. In the introduction to his Encyclopaedia Hegel says that one of Kant’s great achievements was to subject the older theories to criticism. Hegel accepts several Kantian points. He thinks we must not simply assume that reason can know everything. We must examine our own concepts. He also accepts that we cannot demand a standard of knowledge outside thinking itself because that leads to an infinite regress. If you say first we need a criterion for knowledge before we can know anything, then you also need a criterion for that criterion, and so on without end. Hegel compares Kant to someone who wants to learn to swim before going into the water. You cannot examine logic without already using logical forms. So Hegel agrees that criticism is necessary, but he says it has to be internal, using the forms of thought on themselves, not external, applying a fixed test from outside. 

This leads Beiser to a key shift in Hegel’s development. In the late seventeen nineties Hegel and his friend Schelling in Jena believed in what they called “intellectual intuition”. They thought that to know the absolute you need a direct immediate vision of it, like a kind of intellectual mystical experience, not an argument. This fitted the romantic mood of that time, which distrusted discursive reason. Around about 1804 Hegel began to see a problem. If someone claims to have such a special intuition and another person denies it, how can you decide who is right? The intuition is private and cannot be checked by common reasoning. That makes it dogmatic. It asks us to throw away the critical principle that we should accept only what can stand before our own reason. So Hegel slowly gives up this route and looks for another way to ground metaphysics that ordinary understanding can follow. That other way is the dialectic. Beiser stresses that Hegel’s dialectic is meant to be a critical foundation for metaphysics, not a way to dodge criticism. The basic idea is simple if you take it slowly. Hegel starts from the ordinary understanding and lets it examine its own concepts. He looks for the contradictions that arise when the understanding tries to think about things like the absolute, the unconditioned, the whole. He then shows how these contradictions force the understanding to a new standpoint. Reason is not an extra magic faculty, it is what you get when the understanding follows out its own implications. 

Before explaining what the dialectic is, Beiser clears away some myths. Many people think Hegel had a fixed three step recipe, often summarised as thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Hegel never presents his dialectic that way. He does not write his books by picking a topic and then mechanically forcing it into that three step pattern. Another myth is that the dialectic is a sort of private method that the philosopher brings to the topic from outside, a set of rules decided beforehand and then imposed on reality. Hegel actually attacks that attitude. He criticises Kant for applying an external standard of knowledge and criticises Schelling’s philosophy of nature when it seems to apply fixed schemes to phenomena. Hegel wants the philosopher to bracket pre set rules and listen to the subject matter. Beiser explains two key terms in Hegel. One is “method” in the usual sense, which means rules and guidelines you choose in advance and then use to investigate something. Hegel is wary of that kind of method. The other is “the concept”, in German der Begriff. For Hegel this means the inner form or point of a thing, its built in purpose or structure. For example, as we've already seen, the concept of a heart is not only “that pumping muscle in the chest” but “the organ that keeps blood moving so the organism stays alive”. The job of philosophy is to uncover that sort of inner plan in whatever it studies.  From this angle the dialectic is not a trick the philosopher uses on the subject. It is the self movement of the subject matter itself. Hegel uses phrases like the “self organisation” of the object, its “inner necessity” and “inherent movement”. The dialectic is just what follows from the concept of the thing when you think it through. A philosopher who decides in advance how reality must develop is more like a novelist who has already fixed the plot. Hegel wants to be more like a naturalist studying a plant, watching how it actually grows from seed to flower and only at the end describing the pattern of its growth. 

Still, Beiser says, Hegel does think there is a general pattern that shows up once you have followed out many particular dialectical developments. At the end of the Science of Logic Hegel reflects on what has happened and gives a sketch of the method. That is where we get his three “moments” of the dialectic. These are not rigid steps he follows at the start, they are a summary of what has already happened. The three moments are the understanding, the negative or dialectical moment, and the speculative or positive moment. Beiser now links the dialectic with something from Kant you may have seen before, the antinomies. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant devotes a whole section called the Transcendental Dialectic to puzzles that arise when reason tries to think about things like the beginning of the world, the smallest parts of matter, or freedom. Each puzzle has two sides. On the one hand, reason seems to need an unconditioned first term, for example a first cause, otherwise explanation never gets started. On the other hand, reason also insists that for every event we can always ask for a cause, which gives us an endless chain. So it both demands and forbids a stop. Kant concludes that reason falls into unavoidable conflict when it goes beyond possible experience. Hegel admires Kant for seeing that contradictions in thought are necessary, not just silly mistakes. The understanding has to go beyond experience in search of the unconditioned. It is driven to think about the whole. But Hegel does not accept Kant’s solution, which is to divide reality into two realms, noumena and phenomena, things in themselves and things as they appear. For Kant the thesis about the unconditioned holds only for things in themselves, while the antithesis about everything being conditioned holds for appearances. Hegel thinks this splits reality in a way that makes the conflict worse. His own aim is to show how the conditioned and unconditioned form parts of one whole. 

Beiser then lays out Hegel’s model in everyday terms. First comes the understanding. It picks out a unit of analysis, some basic thing it treats as self sufficient. In science that might be an atom, in economics it might be an individual consumer, in moral thought it might be a single free choice. The understanding treats this unit as if it can be fully understood all by itself. But at the same time the understanding is committed to the principle of sufficient reason, which says that for every event there is a cause and for every condition there are further conditions. So it keeps explaining the unit by referring to other things, other atoms, other people, other causes. It both separates and connects. 

This leads to the second, negative moment. We now have a contradiction. The unit is supposed to be independent and unconditioned, yet our explanations make it dependent and conditioned. Think, for example, of the way we might first say that the price of an item in a shop is simply what the shopkeeper decides. But when we ask why the shopkeeper chose that price we start talking about costs, wages, rent, competition and so on, and we soon see that the price depends on a whole network. It is not a self sufficient starting point. The understanding cannot simply ignore this. It feels the clash between its wish for something independent and the fact of dependence. 

Then comes the speculative or positive moment. The understanding finds that the only way to save what is true in both sides is to change its view. Instead of treating one part as absolute, it has to view the whole system as what is unconditioned, and each part as conditioned. In the shop example, you stop thinking of the price as an isolated choice and start thinking of the market as a whole. In Hegel’s terms you still keep the thesis, that there is something unconditioned, but you identify it with the whole, and you keep the antithesis, that each particular thing is conditioned, by applying it to the parts. Of course this is not the end. You can now treat that wider whole as a unit and ask what it depends on, which generates a new contradiction and a new ascent. The dialectic continues, moving towards an absolute whole that contains everything and so does not depend on anything outside itself because there is nothing outside it. At that point the system would be complete and we would have knowledge of the absolute. Beiser notes that this is very abstract, but the simple picture is of thought being driven from narrow partial views to more inclusive ones whenever it runs into its own contradictions. 

Beiser then explains why Hegel thinks this answers Kant’s and Jacobi’s worries about metaphysics. Kant and the philosopher Friedrich Jacobi had argued that the understanding cannot know the absolute because its way of thinking is always finite and divisive. It always wants a cause before a cause and cannot grasp what is self caused. It always divides wholes into parts and damages whatever is indivisible. It always relies on finite concepts that define things by excluding their opposites, and so cannot grasp the infinite. Hegel agrees that this is how the understanding behaves at first. But he says the dialectic shows that the understanding itself generates a new standpoint where it sees the need for the whole. Reason is just this self transcending movement. Next Beiser looks at how this picture appears in Hegel’s two main works, the Science of Logic and the Phenomenology of Spirit. In the Logic the dialectic is used directly to describe the most general structure of reality. This is why Beiser says that the dialectic there has the form of a metaphysics, not of a formal logic that lays down rules for every valid inference. It tries to say what the world must be like if our most basic concepts are to make sense. It is not a rival to logic with its laws of non contradiction and excluded middle. Hegel does not reject those logical laws, he criticises only a certain metaphysical reading of them that says reality as a whole must have one single property rather than a range of different aspects in different parts. In the Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807 written in Jena Hegel uses the dialectic in a different way. Here the task is to give metaphysics a critical foundation. Hegel now speaks of a “science of the experience of consciousness”. The idea is that we start from the standpoint of ordinary consciousness and let it test its own claims to knowledge. Consciousness compares what it takes to be true with what actually happens in experience. When there is a mismatch, it revises its picture of itself and the world. Each stage of consciousness claims to grasp reality, then finds that its claim breaks down, and moves to a higher stage. 

Beiser notes that in this work Hegel is deliberately using a Kantian tool, the transcendental deduction, but turning it to his own ends. Kant in the first Critique argued that certain basic concepts, the categories, must be valid because without them there could be no experience at all. He began from a simple fact, such as that we can be aware of our own representations, and then asked what must be true for that fact to be possible. In a similar spirit Hegel starts from the fact that we have rich forms of experience, including moral, social and religious experience, and tries to show that certain metaphysical ideas are necessary conditions of this. If the arguments in the Phenomenology succeed, then far from being beyond experience, metaphysics would be rooted in it. This raises the question of what Hegel means by “experience”. Kant often uses the word in a narrow way, to mean sense experience, like seeing that there is a lighter here and a tobacco tin there. Hegel complains that this is too thin. For him experience, in the German word Erfahrung, is more like a journey you live through, where you try things out, suffer disappointments, correct yourself and learn. In the Phenomenology the experience of consciousness is this story like process where each shape of consciousness tests itself, fails and moves on. Hegel insists that this is not a special technical meaning, but close to the ordinary sense in which we say that someone has a lot of experience of life. Beiser also stresses that Hegel has a more intellectual concept of experience than empiricists like Hume. For Hegel what we experience always depends on the concepts and laws by which we organise it. The data of the senses do not present themselves as a raw stream. They already come shaped by our ways of thinking. If you change your concepts, you change what you experience. A child and a physicist looking at the same night sky do not have the same experience, because the physicist sees stars, galaxies and laws, not just bright dots. This is why reflecting on the conditions of experience can expand and deepen it. 

The whole dialectical journey of the Phenomenology can therefore be seen as a long extension of experience. At each new stage, consciousness discovers that what it took for granted before in fact depends on hidden assumptions. It comes to see that its previous object is inseparable from its way of judging. As it learns this, it reshapes both its object and itself. The end point, what Hegel calls absolute knowing, is not some strange extra fact beyond the world. It is the recollection of the whole path, the insight into how each stand point leads to the next and how all belong together in one story. 

Beiser finishes the section by returning to the big interpretive issue. Is Hegel a dogmatic metaphysician who ignores Kant or a non metaphysical thinker who really only does epistemology? The answer, he says, is neither. Hegel has a grand metaphysical vision of absolute idealism and the organic whole, but he tries to ground it critically by letting the understanding test itself through the dialectic. The dialectic is not a slogan or a three step trick. It is the name for the way our concepts develop when we take them seriously and follow their consequences, and it is Hegel’s main tool for defending a metaphysics that is both ambitious and self critical.

This is a question I'm sure we've all faced and Hegel did too. How can a lonely self ever be sure that anything outside itself is real especially other people? Beiser calls this the problem of solipsism and intersubjectivity. Solipsism is the view that only my own mind is real. The word comes from Latin solus which means alone and ipse which means self. Someone in a solipsist mood thinks maybe there is no world out there and no other people. Maybe there is only my stream of thoughts and feelings. A woman once wrote to Bertrand Russell saying that she was convinced by the arguments for solipsism which is a strange thing to do. 

Intersubjectivity is almost the opposite idea. It means the shared world that exists between subjects that is between persons. It is the network of mutual recognition talk and action that makes up social life. Beiser says that Hegel’s famous pages on self consciousness and on Lordship and Bondage in the Phenomenology of Spirit written in Jena and published in 1807 are really about solving this problem. 

He starts by talking about what he calls the spectre of nihilism. Nihilism literally means belief in nothing. Around 1800 in German philosophy it meant radical doubt about the existence or value of everything, God, the external world, other people. Earlier Beiser has already told the story of how this worry grew in Germany in the 1780s and 1790s. A strange figure called Johann Heinrich Obereit, a friend of Goethe and Fichte, said that Immanuel Kant’s philosophy leads to nihilism because it limits knowledge to appearances which are only representations in us.  Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, born in 1743 near Düsseldorf, went further. In the 1780s and 1790s he argued that the entire modern way of ideas since Descartes makes us doubt everything beyond our own passing impressions. He used the word nihilism for this situation where we cannot rationally justify belief in God, the world, or even other minds. In David Lynch's Twin Peaks one of the main characters is called Jacobi. Was he thinking of this philosopher when he made his character up? I shall investigate that later. 

Beiser says that when Hegel begins to work on the Phenomenology he is acutely aware of nihilism. If Hegel wants to put metaphysics on a critical basis using the examination of knowledge as Kant demanded then he has to answer nihilism from inside that examination. He cannot simply declare that an external world and other persons exist. He has to show how a self driven only by its own need for certainty is led to acknowledge them. Here Beiser brings in another important background figure, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, born in 1762, in the village of Rammenau in Saxony. Fichte taught in Jena in the 1790s and wrote the Wissenschaftslehre or Doctrine of Science in 1794. I once did an art exhibition and walked around a church in Bethnal Green for a month dressed as Fichte making enigmatic gestures and being a personification of Fichte’s system where the basic reality is the I or ego which posits itself and also posits the not I which is nature. The ego’s vocation is infinite striving to make nature conform to the laws of its own activity. So I spent a month infinitely striving. Beiser notes that Hegel and his friend Schelling thought Fichte ended up in a kind of solipsist dilemma. On one side the Fichtean ego seems trapped in the circle of its own consciousness because everything it knows is shaped by its own activity. On the other side nature can still resist the ego and so remains an unknowable thing in itself. The ego strives for absolute independence but always finds something outside it that it cannot master. Hegel and Schelling saw this as the result of Fichte’s principle of subject object identity which makes the self the source of the world but cannot successfully include the world within the self. When I had done being Fichte I put all the art in a big rubbish bin because the world wouldn't include itself in myself. So I think Hegel and Schelling might have been right.

So Beiser says Hegel faces a double challenge. He must answer Jacobi and the nihilists who doubt the reality of anything beyond impressions and he must also answer Fichte whose radical idealism threatens to leave the self alone with its own activity. Hegel needs to break out of what he calls the circle of consciousness and show that knowledge of a real world and of other selves is possible.This is the context for the chapters on self consciousness in the Phenomenology especially the parts called The Truth of Self Certainty and Lordship and Bondage. These pages became very famous in the twentieth century especially through the lectures of Alexandre Kojève in Paris in the nineteen thirties which influenced writers such as Jean Paul Sartre and later many Marxists feminists and theorists of race.  But Beiser warns that many later readings concentrate on themes like class struggle or gender and do not pay enough attention to the original epistemological and metaphysical task that Hegel sets himself. He is trying to answer nihilism and solipsism. The whole movement from solipsism to intersubjectivity is what Beiser wants to display. 

To see how this works Beiser first explains what Hegel means by self consciousness. Consciousness in general is awareness of something other than oneself like a chair, a tree, a sound. Self consciousness is awareness of oneself. It is the I that says I. For Hegel the striking fact is that the I wants to be absolutely independent. It does not want to feel like a mere thing pushed around by forces outside it. It wants to be the source of its own thoughts and actions. However the I also seems to be surrounded by objects that are not under its control. How can it be absolutely independent if there is a world outside it that resists it. This is where Hegel begins the dialectic of desire. Desire in Hegel means a basic drive to take something that is other than us and make it part of us. The simplest example is eating. When you eat an apple you remove its independence. You turn it into part of your own body. Beiser points out that in the early stages of Hegel’s story the self treats the world as something to be consumed or used up. In that way it tries to prove its independence. 

But this does not work. First the satisfaction of desire is always temporary. You eat one apple and soon get hungry again. Second, the very fact that you must constantly consume shows that the world has an independence and richness of its own. No matter how much you take in there is always more outside you. Desire cannot truly make the world disappear. So pure consumption cannot give the self the certainty that there is nothing independent of it. Beiser shows how Hegel turns this into a more abstract problem. Idealists say that reality for us is our representations,  things as they appear in consciousness. To avoid nihilism they must still explain why we experience these representations as belonging to an organised independent world. Hegel frames this as the problem of uniting identity and non identity. The self must show that what appears other than it is at some level identical with it while still recognising that it is not simply an invention of imagination.  At this point Hegel has a key insight. Beiser sums it up in Hegel’s sentence self consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self consciousness.  Imagine you win a computer game that you have secretly set on the easiest level. You know the game is giving you fake flattery. The victory does not really satisfy you. But if you play a friend of equal skill and they congratulate you on a hard won win, that recognition feels real. The difference is that the second case involves another free subject with their own point of view. Hegel’s thought is similar. The self will never be convinced of its own reality and worth if the so called other is only a thing or a puppet. It needs recognition from another being that it takes to be as independent and free as itself. Only then does it feel that its claim to be a rational agent is confirmed. Recognition here is a technical term. It means more than simply noticing someone. It means actively taking them to be a person with rights and a point of view like one’s own. Many interpreters assume at this point that Hegel has already proved that other selves are real. Beiser says that would be too quick. Hegel has shown only that self consciousness needs recognition from an other. He has not yet shown that this other really is equal and independent. If the self still secretly treats the other as a tool or as a shadow then the old solipsist worry returns. Our relationship to AI is raising this Hegelian issue.  

This is where the famous story of Lordship and Bondage comes in. Beiser reads it as the next step in Hegel’s attempt to reach genuine intersubjectivity. Hegel imagines two self conscious beings meeting. Each wants to prove its absolute independence. Each wants the other to recognise it as the one who is in charge. This leads to what Hegel calls a life and death struggle. Each is prepared to risk its own life rather than submit.  Here Beiser brings in Thomas Hobbes the English philosopher who wrote Leviathan in 1651. Hobbes had claimed that the most basic drive in human beings is self preservation. Hegel quietly challenges this. The fact that people are sometimes willing to die for freedom or honour shows that for them freedom can matter more than life itself. A person on a protest march who willingly faces prison or death to oppose a dictator provides an everyday image of what Hegel has in mind. The readiness to risk life shows how deeply the need for recognition and freedom runs. However this struggle cannot end with both parties dead. If one kills the other there is no one left to recognise the victor. A corpse cannot salute as Beiser nicely paraphrases Hegel. So the struggle usually ends another way. One party gives in, fearing death, and accepts the role of slave or bondsman. The other becomes lord or master. At first this seems to solve the problem for the master. He now has a living other who bows down to him. But recognition from an inferior turns out to be hollow. If the other is entirely under my control their praise is no better than flattery from a machine. Think again of winning against a computer game that you know is programmed to lose. The old problem returns. The master’s sense of self still depends on something he treats as less than fully real. Meanwhile the slave begins to change. Out of fear of the master and of death she works on the world. Through labour she shapes things according to plans, makes tools, builds houses, cooks food. In this process she gains a concrete sense of an objective world that resists and yet yields to rational form. She also learns self discipline and delayed satisfaction. Paradoxically the slave’s relation to the world is more real and more rational than the master’s idle enjoyment. Many later writers such as Karl Marx used this part of Hegel to think about how labour transforms both the worker and society. 

Beiser stresses that for Hegel the real lesson is about mutual recognition. The master must discover that he only gets genuine recognition if he treats the slave as an equal person. Recognition from an inferior is not enough. To be confirmed as a free and rational being the master must recognise the other as a free and rational being. He must see the other as an end in itself not merely as a means to his desires. So the story of Lordship and Bondage is not simply a tale about domination. It shows that a one sided relation where one dominates and the other submits fails to satisfy the deepest need of self consciousness. The only stable form of recognition is mutual recognition where each person grants the other the same status that it wants the other to grant to itself. This mutual recognition is what Hegel later calls spirit that is the shared social world in which individuals see one another as free and responsible.

How does all this answer nihilism and solipsism? Beiser’s answer is that Hegel’s solution is mainly practical and moral rather than purely theoretical. Logically speaking the radical nihilist can still say that perhaps the other is only an automaton, perhaps there is no world apart from my consciousness. Hegel cannot refute this by a strict proof. Instead he shows that we cannot live as if this were true. We cannot act as if other people are mere things if at the same time we want to see ourselves as free and rational beings. To secure our own status we must in practice recognise the equal and independent reality of others. The very project of being a free I forces us into a world of intersubjectivity. 

You could compare this to the golden rule that appears in many moral traditions which says treat others as you would have them treat you. Hegel’s twist is to say that this is not only a moral rule but a condition for having a stable sense of self at all. If I demand that others treat me as a person I must be prepared to treat them as persons. Beiser ends by saying that Hegel has not given a knock down argument that nihilism is impossible. A stubborn sceptic can still raise doubts in theory. What Hegel has done is to show that a consistent nihilist position is unliveable. We are social beings who need recognition from others. In seeking that recognition we are compelled to grant others the very reality that a solitary sceptic wanted to deny. That is how Hegel moves from solipsism to intersubjectivity and it is why these pages in the Phenomenology are so central to his whole project.

Beiser then explains how Hegel links freedom to law and politics and what that means for things like rights, the state, and revolution. It sits in the part of the book on social and political philosophy, and it leans heavily on Hegel’s main political work, the Philosophy of Right, which was published in Berlin in 1820 when Hegel was a famous professor there. Beiser begins by saying that many modern readers want to keep the interesting bits of Hegel, such as his ideas about freedom and the state, but throw away his heavy metaphysics. Metaphysics is that big picture theory about what reality is like at the deepest level. Beiser argues that Hegel himself did not want that separation. Hegel thought law and politics need a metaphysical foundation. Already in his early essay On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, written in Jena around 1802 to 1803, Hegel complains that earlier thinkers treated natural law on its own and did not ground it in metaphysics. Beiser explains that Hegel is fighting against a kind of legal positivism, the view that law is just whatever rules happen to be laid down by a state at a given time. Hegel thinks if you pretend to avoid metaphysics you only hide the deepest questions. For example, if a government says a particular group has no right to vote, a positivist description would simply record that as a fact. Hegel wants to ask whether such a rule is rationally justified, which already means assuming some standard about what persons are and what they deserve. That is metaphysics in action, even if people pretend otherwise. At the same time Beiser admits that you can understand quite a lot in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right without going into the metaphysics. Hegel observes actual social and political institutions and often just argues in a very down to earth way. The famous three part structure of his book, running through abstract right, morality, and ethical life, follows patterns from his logic, but Beiser says this structure can feel a bit artificial, almost like a frame he lays over the political material. Some of the most interesting insights are simply Hegel thinking carefully about real social practices, not doing high level metaphysics line by line. 

Beiser then turns to Hegel’s concept of freedom. He shows that Hegel uses several connected ideas. First there is autonomy, which means self government. Hegel thinks a free will is one that follows laws it gives to itself, and he stresses that these laws must be rational, that is they must be such that any intelligent person could in principle agree to them. In his lectures on world history Hegel says only a will that obeys the law is free, because in that case the will is obeying itself and is at home with itself. Second, Hegel links freedom with independence. He sometimes defines freedom as being with oneself, which means not being dependent on something outside you in a way that makes you unable to act unless that external thing allows it. In the Philosophy of Right he says the will is free if it relates only to itself so that dependence on other things falls away. Beiser explains that this independence is closely related to autonomy. If you can govern yourself you are not waiting for someone else to tell you what to do. Third, Hegel talks about self determination. This is a technical phrase. Beiser unpacks it in a simple way. Self determination has two sides. One, the self itself decides its actions rather than being pushed into them by outside forces. Two, in deciding and acting the self becomes more definite, it turns its vague possibilities into something real and structured. Think about someone who has a talent for music. If they never practice or perform, that talent remains only potential. When they decide to work on it and make it their life project, they determine themselves. For Hegel that is an example of freedom as self determination, because the person is realizing their rational nature in a necessary way, not just drifting. 

Hegel has a famous technical formula that the will is the will willing itself. This sounds odd, but Beiser says two basic ideas sit behind this formula. One, Hegel thinks that what makes us truly selves is our capacity for freedom in the strong sense, not just having impulses but being able to act on universal principles. Two, he thinks we only really become free when we are conscious of our own freedom and make freedom itself our main goal. A slave who never even suspects that they could be free will not free themselves. Put together, this means that a free person is someone who makes their own freedom the very object of their willing. In a simple example, think of someone who joins a political movement because they want to secure freedom of speech for everyone, not only because they want a job or money. Their will is aiming at the will as free, not just at some private advantage. Beiser then compares Hegel with Kant. Kant, writing in Königsberg in the late eighteenth century, often talks about freedom as reason ruling over desire. That can make it sound as if desire and feeling are something low that must be pushed down. Hegel, influenced by the writer Friedrich Schiller, wants a more unified picture. He thinks that in a mature person reason and desire can be harmonised so that you do your duty with inclination, not against it. Beiser notes that Hegel criticises Kant because if freedom is only acting according to pure reason, then you still have a kind of internal tyranny where reason dominates desires as if they were enemies. Hegel thinks that is not the best picture of a free person. 

Kant also defines freedom as independence from the causality of nature, meaning that your free choices are simply not part of the natural chain of cause and effect. Hegel thinks this is unrealistic. He says our freedom has to be realised in the realm of nature and in the world. It involves acting in accordance with the necessity of our own nature and of the universe as a whole. For this idea of freedom as a kind of necessity, Hegel draws on the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who had argued that true freedom is understanding and affirming the necessity of things. 

In the twentieth century the British thinker Isaiah Berlin made famous a distinction between negative liberty and positive liberty. Negative liberty means simply not being interfered with, for example no one stops you walking where you want or reading what you like, the fewer external blocks the more negatively free you are. Positive liberty means acting in a particular way such as following moral principles or realising your true self. In that sense a person could say you are being forced to be free because someone else claims to know what your true self really is. This is why positive liberty has often been linked to authoritarian politics, where a state claims it is forcing people for their own good. Hegel is often portrayed as a pure champion of positive liberty, so that he becomes a kind of philosophical villain who supposedly prepared the way for totalitarian regimes. Beiser thinks this picture is very unfair. He points out that Hegel actually distinguishes between something like negative liberty and something like positive liberty and strongly supports both. Hegel talks about formal or subjective freedom on the one hand and absolute or objective freedom on the other. Sometimes he even uses the words negative and affirmative freedom. Formal or subjective freedom for him means the right and power of each individual to reflect about different options and choose what suits their judgment or conscience. Absolute or objective freedom means acting and thinking on rational principles that are expressed in public life and law. 

Beiser stresses that Hegel defends subjective freedom and the need for government not to interfere with it. Hegel complains that the ancient Greek city states did not recognise this kind of personal freedom, and he praises modern states precisely for securing individual rights such as freedom of conscience and private property. Hegel had already argued this in his early writings, for example his essay on the Positivity of the Christian Religion written in Berne and Frankfurt in the mid seventeen nineties, where he insists that the state must protect the rights of individuals. In his later political manuscript on the German constitution from Frankfurt and Jena he attacks any state that tries to control everything from the top and leaves no space for local initiatives and free association. 

At the same time Beiser admits there is some reason why people think Hegel downplays negative liberty. In the Philosophy of Right Hegel criticises what he calls arbitrariness, the idea of freedom as simply having lots of choices and picking one for no deeper reason. He argues that such a view makes the will both dependent on and independent of its objects and so undermines itself. Beiser says that whatever we make of this argument, it can sound as if Hegel is throwing away negative liberty in favour of some higher notion. The key point for Beiser is that we should read Hegel as trying to show that mere choice is not enough for full freedom, not as denying the value of having options at all. 

Next Beiser looks at Hegel’s views on the foundation of law. He sets up three traditional ways of thinking. Voluntarism bases law on will, usually the will of a ruler or a people. Think of Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century who says law is what the sovereign commands. Rationalism in natural law bases law on reason, so laws are rational norms that hold whether or not any ruler has commanded them, as in Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas. Historicism grounds law in the history and culture of a people, like Montesquieu, Johann Möser or Johann Gottfried Herder, who saw law as part of a national spirit. 

Hegel has been read in all three ways. Some see him as a voluntarist in the modern line from Hobbes and Hugo Grotius through Jean Jacques Rousseau and Kant, because he emphasises will. Others see him as a rationalist natural law thinker because he often appeals to reason and universal principles. Others again see him as a historicist because he often talks about the spirit of a people and the role of history in shaping institutions. Beiser says that all these readings are partly right and partly wrong. Hegel is deliberately trying to combine their good sides and drop their bad sides. Beiser calls his result a rational historicism and also a rational voluntarism, which means that for Hegel law expresses the will of a people but only where this will has been shaped by reason and history. Beiser notes that Hegel rejects pure historicism because it can lead to relativism. If you justify a law only by saying it plays a role in a culture, then you are stuck accepting any law if it happens to fit a culture, even slavery. Hegel explicitly mentions slavery as a case where you must reject a practice even if it has historical support. By contrast Hegel insists that there are universal principles of morality and politics that hold for all people just because they are human and free. For example in the Philosophy of Right he says that everyone deserves basic rights regardless of whether they are Catholic, Protestant or Jewish, and that there are certain goods such as religious freedom and the right to own property that cannot rightly be taken away from any person. In a later essay he praises the king of Württemberg for introducing a rational constitution with equality before the law, taxation only with consent of the estates, and representation of the people. 

To explain how Hegel can be universalist and historicist at once, Beiser brings in his Aristotelian metaphysics. Universals, for Hegel, do not float in a separate world. They exist in things. A simple example (again) is the universal of being a heart. You do not find a heart somewhere outside bodies. You find it as a certain function within organisms, for example pumping blood. Aristotle called this kind of explanation a formal and final cause, meaning the structure and purpose built into a thing. Hegel extends this idea. He thinks we can apply such formal and final causes to living organisms in nature and also to social and political organisms, like families, civil societies and states. A good state has a purpose, such as securing the freedom and rights of its citizens, and its laws and institutions should be understood as structures that serve that purpose. This is part of what Hegel calls absolute idealism, the view that reason and purpose are built into reality itself. 

Beiser then moves to Machiavelli’s challenge. Niccolò Machiavelli, writing in Florence in the early sixteenth century, had argued that princes cannot always act according to moral rules, because strict moral behaviour can destroy the state. Hegel takes this challenge very seriously, especially after his political disillusionment in the late seventeen nineties. As a young man in the mid seventeen nineties in Tübingen and then in Berne and Frankfurt, Hegel had been enthusiastic about the French Revolution that began with the storming of the Bastille in Paris in July 1789. He even wrote to his friend Schelling in April 1795 that he expected a revolution in Germany inspired by Kant’s philosophy. He saw himself as a teacher of the people who would spread the idea of natural rights so that people would demand them. These hopes were badly disappointed during the Congress of Rastatt, a peace conference between France and the German Empire held from December 1797 to April 1799 in the town of Rastatt in south west Germany. Hegel’s friends Friedrich Hölderlin and Isaak von Sinclair were present and kept him informed. They found that the French were mainly interested in power and territory, not in spreading liberty, and that the German princes also pursued only their own advantage. For Hegel this confirmed that ideal talk about rights was not guiding political reality. There was no true German empire, only many small states working for themselves. 

Hegel’s response is complex. In his early political text on the German constitution he says harsh things about moral idealists who tell the world what it ought to be like and ignore how it actually works. He says that the real task is to understand why events must be as they are and that this understanding will lead to a kind of calm acceptance. That sounds very pessimistic. It anticipates his later remark in the Philosophy of Right that philosophy does not tell the world how it ought to be but explains why it must be as it is. However Beiser insists that Hegel does not drop idealism altogether. Instead he changes its form. He rejects the type of idealism that simply preaches moral demands at reality. He keeps an idealism that looks for the goals within historical development itself. This leads to one of his most famous ideas, the cunning of reason. This is the thought that even if politicians act only from self interest, they still serve a higher rational purpose without fully knowing it. For Hegel that higher purpose is the gradual realisation of human freedom, especially the principle that people should share in government through representation. He writes that the principle of representation emerged in the forests of Germany and will ultimately spread through the modern world. So even the messy and selfish actions of statesmen become means by which reason advances. This way of thinking helps Hegel answer the old theory and practice dispute. Rationalists such as Kant and Fichte held that practice should follow theory, that is, that we should remodel the world to fit the ideals of reason. Empiricists such as Möser, August Rehberg and Friedrich Gentz replied that theory should follow practice and that laws should be shaped by tradition and experience. Hegel thinks each side misses something. Rationalists underestimate the weight of history. Empiricists underestimate the critical role of reason. His middle view is that there is reason within history, not outside it. The ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity from the French Revolution are not just abstract dreams, they are also the long term aims of world history. 

From here Beiser explains Hegel’s famous double saying in the preface to the Philosophy of Right. Hegel writes that what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational. This sentence has often been taken to mean that whatever exists is justified simply because it exists. Beiser shows that for Hegel this would be a misunderstanding. The first half, what is rational is actual, means that rational principles are not mere ideas, they tend to realise themselves in the world. The second half, what is actual is rational, means that genuine actuality is not mere existence but existence that successfully expresses an inner rational essence. Later in his Encyclopedia Hegel carefully distinguishes actuality from simple reality or existence. A tyrannical regime may exist but it is not actual in this strict sense because it does not realize any rational idea of right. Beiser concludes by situating Hegel politically. Hegel worked in Prussia in the years after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. Later critics often claimed he was the court philosopher of a conservative restoration. Beiser uses historical details to show that this is wrong. Hegel’s connections were with reformers such as the ministers Baron vom Stein, Karl Hardenberg and Karl Altenstein, who wanted to modernise Prussia. Altenstein invited Hegel to the University of Berlin in 1818 because of Hegel’s reformist ideas. Conservative circles in the Prussian court distrusted Hegel and even spied on him and his students. Many features of Hegel’s ideal state, such as a constitutional monarchy, an elected assembly, strong local self government, and a professional civil service, did not yet exist in Prussia in 1820. So Hegel’s political stance is that of a reforming realist, not a defender of every aspect of the status quo. If we put the whole section together, Beiser’s main message for a reader is that you cannot understand Hegel’s ideas about freedom and law if you strip away his metaphysics. For Hegel freedom is not just doing what you like. It is self determination, autonomy and independence achieved in and through social and historical life. Law is not just a pile of commands or a list of old customs. It is the way in which free rational beings give stable form to their shared life. Hegel wants to protect negative liberty, such as freedom of speech and conscience, but also insists that true freedom requires participating in rational public institutions. At the same time he faces up to Machiavelli’s warning that politics is about power and self interest. His answer is that reason uses these forces as instruments over time.  So for Hegel a good society is one where people are left alone in many areas of life, are helped to develop their capacities, and live under laws that they can recognise as the product of their own reasoned will, not just as orders from above or blind habits from the past.

Hegel’s theory of the state sits on top of everything you have already seen about freedom, law and history, and asks a simple question. What should a modern state look like if it is going to respect individual freedom and also give people a real shared community? Beiser starts with Hegel’s own image of philosophy as the owl of Minerva which only flies at dusk. Hegel writes this in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right published in Berlin in 1820 when he was a professor there. The image means that philosophy understands a form of life only when it is already getting old. So it is natural to ask whether Hegel’s political ideas are out of date even for his own time. Beiser’s answer is that some details are indeed dated, but Hegel still helps us pose sharp questions about liberalism and community that are very much alive now. Beiser explains that many people today imagine Hegel as the great anti liberal who stands for community against the rights of individuals. They picture him as the champion of communitarianism, the view that the state should put the common good above private freedom. Hegel is meant to be the opposite of liberal thinkers such as John Locke or Immanuel Kant, who stress private rights and limited government. Beiser thinks this picture is misleading in two ways. First, Hegel was not unique in criticising liberalism. In Germany there were already writers such as Justus Möser, August Rehberg, the poet Novalis and Friedrich Schleiermacher who praised community and attacked individualism. Second, Hegel himself did not want simply to throw liberalism away. He wanted to keep central liberal values such as freedom of conscience, equality of opportunity and the right of dissent, and to combine them with a strong sense of community. 

 Beiser spells out the basic clash between liberalism and communitarianism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Liberal thinkers said that the main purpose of the state is to secure liberty, that is to give citizens space to pursue their own idea of happiness, so long as they do not harm others. A simple example would be a government that protects freedom of religion, so that you can practise your faith or reject all religion, and the state does not tell you which to choose. Communitarian thinkers said that the main purpose of the state is to secure the common good, that is the basic goods that everyone needs as a human being, such as peace, education or a fair legal system. For them it is not enough that the state does not interfere. It must actively shape citizens and institutions. Liberals also tended to see the state as a kind of sum of self contained individuals who make a contract, while communitarians saw it as an organic whole that shapes the identity of those individuals, a bit like a family that deeply influences who its members become. Liberalism, especially in the line from Locke, liked to separate law from morality and religion. Law should only regulate outward actions, for example forbidding theft, while inner belief and conscience should be left to the individual. Communitarians thought this was unrealistic. If a political community needs loyalty, courage and public spirit to survive, then it cannot completely ignore the characters and beliefs of its citizens. Finally, liberals tended to favour a negative idea of liberty, freedom as absence of interference, while communitarians favoured a positive idea, freedom as actually taking part in public life, voting, serving in office and so on. Beiser then shows how Hegel himself was pulled by both traditions from his youth onwards. As a young man in Berne and Frankfurt in the 1790s he admired the ancient Greek and Roman republics because their citizens were ready to live and die for the common good. He also liked an organic picture of society in which history, religion and politics form a tightly connected whole. At the same time he defended very liberal ideas in his Positivity essay on religion, written in the mid 1790s, where he insisted that the state should protect freedom of conscience and speech and should not enforce religious belief. This led him to argue for separation of church and state. So already in his twenties Hegel is both a lover of communal life and a defender of individual rights, and the tension between these sides pushes him to look for a synthesis. 

To get to that synthesis Beiser says you have to understand one of Hegel’s central social concepts, ethical life. The German word is Sittlichkeit. In the Philosophy of Right this topic takes up more than half the book, so it is not a marginal idea. Ethical life is Hegel’s name for a social world where individuals and community are truly joined. It is more than just bare law, which he calls abstract right, and more than the inner conscience of a single person, which he calls morality. Ethical life is the network of institutions and habits in which people grow up and live, and through which their freedom becomes real. The three main institutions of ethical life for Hegel are the family, civil society and the state. A family teaches care and loyalty. Civil society is the world of work, markets and associations. The state is the public power that organises and supports the whole. To see why ethical life matters, Beiser introduces two more of Hegel’s terms, the right of subjectivity and the right of objectivity. The right of subjectivity is basically the right each person has to act according to their own conscience and judgement. This is the heart of the modern principle of subjectivity that Hegel learned from Luther and Kant. It is what lies behind ideas like freedom of belief and the claim that no one should be forced to act against their sense of right and wrong. The problem, Hegel says, is that this principle is only formal. Saying that you should act according to conscience does not yet say whether your conscience is correct. People can sincerely believe very different things, some of them very harmful. 

The right of objectivity says that our judgements should not only be sincere but also true and good. In plain language it says that it is not enough that I feel convinced, what I am convinced of must actually be reasonable and just. So there has to be some content to the good that is more than private opinion. Hegel thinks that ethical life is where the rights of subjectivity and objectivity can be brought together. In a healthy ethical community, the shared institutions and ways of life give people a common sense of what is right, while still allowing scope for personal conscience and criticism. At this point Beiser raises the obvious worry about authoritarianism. If the state claims to know the objective good better than its citizens, will it not simply force them to obey in the name of that good. Hegel does think that there is an objective common good that may sometimes require citizens to act against their private interest, for example paying taxes or doing military service. He also says that what matters is rational assent to the laws, not simply actual assent. A law can be legitimate even if some people reject it, so long as it could be accepted by a reasonable person. That leads to the further question, who decides what counts as rational? Hegel is sceptical about crowd opinion, and he often trusts a professional civil service more than the judgement of ordinary voters. This is where many readers worry that Hegel slides towards paternalism, the idea that officials know better than citizens what is good for them. Beiser notes these worries but says that to judge them fairly we have to look at Hegel’s full picture of the state, including all its checks and balances. 

So Beiser next explains Hegel’s concept of the organic state. Hegel sees the state not as a machine but as an organism. An organism is a living whole where the parts support the whole and the whole supports the parts. Think of a human body. The heart and lungs exist to keep the whole body alive, but the body also supplies them with blood and oxygen. Hegel attributes three basic features to an organic state. First, the whole exists for each part as much as each part exists for the whole. So the individual citizen is not only a tool of the state, the state also exists to secure the freedom and welfare of the citizen. Second, each part of the state, such as the family, local councils, or professional groups, has its own life and relative independence. They should not be mere puppets of the central government. Third, when each part pursues its own proper interest in a reasonable way, it also helps the whole, just as a healthy heart that beats for itself also keeps the rest of the body going. Hegel contrasts this organic model with what he calls the machine state, where everything is controlled from above and local bodies have no real power of their own.  

Within this organic state Beiser places civil society, which Hegel understands as the world of markets, trades, professions and social groups. Civil society is where individuals pursue their private interests through work and exchange. Hegel thinks civil society is necessary because it allows people to develop their skills and to satisfy their particular needs. But it also creates problems. Market competition can lead to poverty, unemployment and insecurity. People can feel alienated, that is cut off from any sense that they belong to a community. Hegel believes the state should not simply leave the market alone. It should regulate it in some ways, for example by helping the poor with public works, supporting education so they can compete for jobs, predicting cycles of supply and demand and investing in public goods such as roads and bridges. At the same time he does not want an all controlling state. He fears both total state control and total laissez faire. So he looks for a middle course that can change over time as circumstances change. Hegel’s special solution to the problems of civil society is the corporation. Here the word does not mean a big private company as it often does today. It is closer to a medieval guild or a modern professional association. A corporation is a legally recognised body of people in the same trade or profession, for example all the carpenters in a city, or all the doctors in a region. It stands between the individual and the state. It supports and represents its members, helps them find work, looks after them in times of need and gives them a sense of belonging, a second family. It also sends delegates to a political assembly, so that ordinary people have a voice in law making through their trade bodies. Beiser points out that this is Hegel’s pluralist side. He wants many independent groups and associations to share power so that neither the state nor the market dominates everything. 

Finally Beiser turns to Hegel’s account of the structure and powers of the state. In the Philosophy of Right Hegel argues that the rational form of the modern state is a constitutional monarchy. At first this can sound like a defence of old fashioned royal power. Beiser sets it in context. In the early eighteen hundreds many reformers in Prussia and other German lands thought that the best way to modernise older kingdoms was to give them constitutions and representative institutions while keeping a monarch at the top. This reformist position stood against reactionary defenders of absolute monarchy such as Karl Ludwig von Haller, whose book Restoration of State Science argued that the monarch should be the sole source of law. Hegel sharply attacks Haller in the Philosophy of Right and sides with the reformers around Baron vom Stein, Karl Hardenberg and Karl von Stein zum Altenstein, who wanted constitutions, local self government and the abolition of feudal privileges. 

Why does Hegel favour constitutional monarchy rather than for example a pure republic. One practical reason is his fear of radical democracy. Like Kant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Jacobi and Schiller he worries that giving unlimited power to a majority can lead to violations of basic rights. The example he likes is the trial and execution of Socrates in Athens in 399 before the common era. A political community can vote to silence its best critic. A constitutional monarchy, Hegel thinks, is a mixed constitution that combines the strengths of three classic forms of government. It has one sovereign who enacts laws, an executive that applies and enforces laws and a legislature that debates and makes laws. These three powers correspond to monarchy one, aristocracy a few, and democracy many. The important point is that power is divided. No single element can dominate completely. Hegel praises Montesquieu’s doctrine of the division of powers as a key safeguard of public freedom.  Beiser then looks in more detail at the three powers. The sovereign is the monarch. Hegel wants a single person as the formal head of state because this gives a clear centre of sovereignty and helps the state act with unity. He supports hereditary monarchy for the sake of a stable chain of succession and because a royal family can stand above the conflicts of ordinary political parties. He even gives his own philosophical version of a divine right doctrine, saying that the monarch represents the divine on earth. All this sounds very grand, but Hegel immediately limits it. In a rational state, he says, the person of the monarch should be almost irrelevant. The monarch’s main powers are to pardon criminals and to appoint and dismiss ministers. He must act within a constitution and follow the advice of his ministers. In practice Hegel says the monarch does little more than say yes and sign his name to measures that others have prepared. Responsibility rests with ministers, not with the monarch’s private will. So the monarch plays a symbolic and formal role, representing the unity and culture of the people, rather than ruling them in a personal way. 

The executive power includes the civil service, the courts and the police. The civil service is very important for Hegel. He thinks of it as the universal estate in his language, the body that is trained to understand the general interest of the state and to mediate between particular groups and the common good. This is where the worry about bureaucracy arises. Hegel often speaks as if officials know the true interest of corporations and citizens better than they themselves do. Beiser notes that Hegel is not blind to the dangers here. He talks about the risk of corruption and the danger of the civil service becoming too powerful. That is why he places the bureaucracy inside a whole system of divided powers and representative bodies.The legislative power is the estates assembly. It includes representatives from the corporations and other estates, and it debates and passes laws. Through this assembly Hegel wants ordinary citizens to have a voice in government, although he is thinking more of estates and organised bodies than of one person one vote in a modern sense. The legislature, the executive and the monarch all check one another. For Hegel this complex structure is how freedom appears at the level of the state.

Beiser ends by returning to the big question about Hegel’s political stance. Is he really an enemy of liberty? His answer is that Hegel is best seen as a reforming thinker who tries to join liberal rights and communal life. Hegel defends freedom of conscience, private property and the need for individuals to choose their own life plans. He also stresses that real freedom is not only having options but living in institutions that you can rationally identify with, institutions that embody a common good. His state is pluralist, full of intermediate bodies and local powers, and he wants to avoid both the machine state of centralised absolutism and the chaos of pure market or crowd rule. Hegel imagines a good state as a living community where you keep your personal rights, are supported by families and associations, work in a fair though not perfect market, and live under a constitutional framework in which power is shared and controlled, and where the laws can be seen as expressions of your own reason, not just commands from above.

Next Beiser talks about Hegel’s philosophy of history and what that means for questions like whether history has a purpose, why terrible things happen, and what gives a single human life meaning. Beiser is explaining this mainly through Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of world history that he gave in Berlin in the eighteen twenties, just a few years before he died in 1831. Beiser begins with the label that many people give Hegel. They call him the philosopher of historicism. Hegel published only a short treatment of history in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences of 1830. He gave only five paragraphs to world history there, and even those paragraphs are partly about the relation between church and state. Yet in Berlin he lectured on world history five times, and those lectures became very famous. So people began to see him as the thinker who most clearly said that everything human is historical and develops over time. 

Beiser explains that the word historicism has at least two meanings, and Hegel fits one of them but not the other. In the first and broad sense, historicism means the view that everything in the human world has a history, that societies grow and change like living organisms, and that beliefs and practices make sense only when you see the specific historical setting in which they arose. Beiser reminds us that earlier writers such as Montesquieu in France, and Hamann and Moser in Germany, had already described cultures as organic wholes and stressed the uniqueness of each historical context. If you think of how fashions in clothes or music only really make sense within their own time and culture, that gives you a simple picture of this first form of historicism. Hegel clearly accepts this broad version. In a second, narrower sense, historicism becomes a moral and legal doctrine. Here it means that there are no universal moral rules or legal principles at all. Everything right or wrong is right or wrong only inside its own culture and period, and nothing can be judged from the outside. This relativist view was developed by thinkers such as Moser and Herder and later became the basis for the historical school of law in the early nineteenth century, with people like Friedrich Carl von Savigny in Prussia. In that school, the law was taken to grow out of the spirit of a people, not out of rational principles. Beiser stresses that Hegel is an enemy of this second form of historicism. He wants to say that history shapes everything, but he also wants to keep the idea that there are universal standards of reason by which we can criticise customs and laws. He insists that one of his central aims is to defend reason against relativism. 

From here Beiser turns to Hegel’s famous thesis that there is reason in history. In his lectures on world history in Berlin, Hegel says that the basic idea philosophy brings to history is that reason governs the world and that therefore world history is a rational process. This comes straight from his absolute idealism, his view that everything that exists is in some way an expression of the absolute idea or absolute mind. Applying this to history, Hegel says that events are not just random or chaotic. They follow laws and move toward an end. Beiser explains a key technical word here, teleology. A teleological explanation explains events by their purpose or goal, not only by earlier causes. Hegel thinks that understanding history is a bit like understanding a football tournament. You can explain each match by the immediate causes, who was injured, who made a mistake, who scored. That is like what he calls mechanical explanation. But you also need to see that all those matches are stages in a larger competition whose aim is to produce a champion. That larger aim is like the teleological side. For Hegel, to say there is reason in history means that we should not be satisfied with local causes and accidents. We should ask what larger purpose is being worked out through them. Hegel thinks that history is not just any old development but specifically the development of the awareness of freedom. Beiser notes that Hegel divides world history into three big epochs. In the Oriental world only one person is free, the absolute ruler. In the Greek and Roman world some are free, the male citizens, but slaves and many others are excluded. In the Germanic Christian world, which for Hegel includes modern Europe, the principle emerges that all humans as such are free. Hegel uses this three stage pattern, one, some, all, because in his logical writings those are the basic forms of quantity. Hegel thinks history moves through something like that pattern at the level of whole cultures, though today many people rightly criticise the Eurocentric and idealised nature of his scheme. This takes Beiser to one of the most striking ideas in the section, the cunning of reason. Two obvious objections to Hegel’s view of reason in history are these. First, most people do not act because they want to realise freedom in the abstract. They act out of self interest, fear, love, ambition and so on. Second, if everything in history happens by necessity, it sounds as if there is no room for human freedom at all. Hegel’s answer is that reason is cunning. By this he means that reason uses the self seeking actions of individuals as tools to realise its own ends. People follow their desires and personal plans, and out of the mix something larger and more rational emerges that they never intended. Beiser notes that Hegel even says that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion, and by passion he does not mean noble feeling but any intense pursuit of a particular goal, including selfish ones. A simple example is a business person who only wants to become rich by inventing a new device. In the process they create something that makes life easier for millions of people. Their private aim and the wider social benefit are different, yet the wider benefit comes about through their action.

Linked to this is Hegel’s idea of the world historical individual. Beiser explains that Hegel has in mind figures such as Socrates in ancient Athens, Julius Caesar in Rome, Martin Luther in Reformation Germany, and Napoleon who Hegel saw in person in Jena in 1806. These people are not saints but they have an exceptional sense of where their age is heading and what needs to be done. They identify themselves with some universal cause and push history into a new stage. Hegel says that such individuals often have to trample many innocent flowers underfoot, meaning they cause suffering and break old structures. They are driven by passion and do not allow ordinary moral rules to block their mission. Beiser points out that this makes Hegel sound like a defender of harsh power politics, and raises questions about whether ordinary moral demands are being sacrificed to some abstract historical purpose. 

From here Beiser moves to the problem of evil. Hegel compares his claim that reason rules history with the Christian belief in providence, the idea that God governs the world and that history unfolds according to a divine plan. At the same time, he does not accept the old picture of a world here and a better world beyond. He wants to say that any redemption or justification of history must happen within this world and its history. That makes the problem of evil very sharp. Hegel does not deny evil. He famously says that history is like a slaughter bench, a place where animals are killed, on which countless human lives and happiness have been sacrificed. He even says that the happy periods of history are blank pages because they do not tell us much about development. So he has to answer the question: if a good and rational order governs history, why is there so much horror and suffering?  Beiser explains Hegel’s attempt at a theodicy, which is the technical name for an explanation that justifies God or providence in the face of evil. Hegel says that evil is a necessary stage in the development of spirit, that is in the gradual growth of human self awareness and freedom. He adapts the Christian pattern of innocence, fall, and redemption to secular history. In his story the Greek world is a kind of innocence where the individual feels at one with community and nature. Christianity brings a fall, because it gives absolute value to the individual soul over against the world and community. This creates division and conflict. Redemption is then supposed to come in the modern Germanic world, where unity with others is restored at a higher level, one that preserves individual rights. In this story, evil comes with the separation and inner division of spirit, but that division is necessary if human beings are to learn to think for themselves and claim freedom. Beiser notes that for Hegel even God or the absolute itself must go through a moment of inner division and negativity in order to realise itself.

However, Beiser also details serious problems with this theodicy. At the level of individual ethics Hegel wants to say that evil comes from human choices, when someone follows mere desire instead of the moral law of reason. At the cosmic level he wants to say evil is a necessary part of the divine self development. These two explanations do not sit easily together. Worse, Beiser brings in later critics such as the American philosopher William James and the German Jewish thinker Emile Fackenheim. Fackenheim asks how any amount of progress or higher purpose could possibly redeem the horrors of the twentieth century, especially the murder of Jews at Auschwitz. For a modern reader, it is hard not to feel that the optimism of Hegel’s view of history has been shattered by such events. Beiser then turns to the question of the meaning of life. Hegel thinks the idea of providence is crucial here too. Traditionally, providence meant that God had a purpose in creating each person and that we find meaning by fulfilling our role in God’s plan, for example through our duties in family, church, and state. Hegel drops the idea of a God beyond the world but keeps the thought that meaning comes from serving a larger rational order. He rejects later existentialist ideas that life could have meaning even if the universe were absurd or without purpose. For him the individual cannot simply invent meaning out of nothing by an act of choice. Meaning is given by larger wholes such as society, the state, and history which assign each person a place and function. An example is a teacher in a public school who sees their life as meaningful because they are helping educate the next generation of citizens, not because they have simply decided in isolation that teaching matters. 

Beiser links this to Hegel’s admiration for the ancient Greek city state and the Roman republic. In his early writings from the seventeen nineties, when he lived in Berne and Frankfurt, Hegel says that citizens of those republics saw the whole point of their lives in serving the state and were ready to die for it. Only when these political forms decayed and became instruments of private interest did people start to seek their highest good in an otherworldly salvation. Hegel never gave up the idea that the true purpose of life must be found within the political community. What changes in his mature work is that he now sees the state as part of the working out of a divine or rational plan within history. Beiser stages a debate between Hegel and later existentialist thinkers, especially Soren Kierkegaard from Denmark and Friedrich Nietzsche from Germany. Kierkegaard, writing in the eighteen forties, and Nietzsche, writing in the eighteen seventies, both attack what they see as Hegel’s heavy stress on history and social roles. In books like Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Untimely Meditations they complain that Hegel’s approach encourages people to lose themselves in the study of the past and in social roles, instead of facing their own personal questions about faith, suffering, love, and death. They insist that the self is more than its role in history and that each person must choose their own path and values. Beiser shows that there is some truth in their charge. Hegel often says that the worth of an individual lies in how well they perform their duties in society and state, and he sometimes writes as if individuals are simply means to the ends of reason. He even says that reason cannot stop to count the sufferings of particular people when aiming at universal purposes. Yet there are also passages where Hegel insists that individuality has an infinite right, that every person must be treated as an end in themselves, and that even the simple moral and religious life of a shepherd or peasant has a worth that world history cannot touch. Hegel says that the inner centre of morality and religion is protected from the noise of great historical events. This creates a tension in his thought. On the one hand he wants individuality to be integrated into history. On the other hand he admits that some of the deepest questions of personal value and faith lie outside the sphere of public history altogether, which is exactly what his critics say. 

Beiser ends by imagining how Hegel might reply. Hegel could say that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche rely on an abstract and unrealistic picture of the individual, as if a person could exist outside all social and historical contexts. In reality, he would argue, a person’s identity and even the questions that trouble them are shaped by their time and place. For example, Kierkegaard’s questions about salvation and thankfulness to God only make sense within a Christian culture at a particular moment. Hegel might say that the more concrete we make an individual, the more clearly we see that they are a social and historical being.  Beiser shows Hegel trying to hold together three things at once. He wants to say that history is not chaos but has a rational direction, that this direction is the growth of human freedom, and that our own lives find meaning by taking part in this story through our roles in society and the state. At the same time he has to confront the terrible cost of history and the stubborn sense many of us have that some questions about meaning and suffering go beyond any story about progress. 

The last section of Beiser’s book is about Hegel on art and beauty, on what philosophers call aesthetics and it tries to sort out a puzzle. On the one hand Hegel seems to love art. In Berlin in the eighteen twenties he gives famous lectures on the arts to large audiences. These lectures are then written up after his death using his manuscripts and students notes and published as the Lectures on Aesthetics. The result is huge in German editions it runs to roughly three volumes and more than fifteen hundred pages which is more than his big summary of the whole system the Encyclopedia. On the other hand inside this same work Hegel says two apparently depressing things. First that art is lower than religion and philosophy as a way of knowing truth. Second that art belongs to the past and cannot play its old central role in modern life. So the puzzle is this. Why does someone who writes so much and so passionately about art also say that it is second class and that its great age is over? Beiser calls this the paradox of Hegel’s aesthetics and he tries to untangle it. He begins by reminding us that Hegel is not some cold abstract thinker who secretly dislikes paintings and music. Karl Rosenkranz who was Hegel’s first biographer says that Hegel loved going to galleries concerts and theatres. When he visited a new city he would rush to the opera or the museum. He admired particular singers and actresses enough to try to meet them. In his big book on art Hegel writes with obvious enthusiasm about Greek sculpture, about tragedies by Sophocles, for example Antigone and about modern works such as Diderot’s dialogue Rameau’s Nephew which he sees as expressing the cynical spirit of French society just before the Revolution in seventeen eighty nine. Beiser says that historically Hegel has had a huge impact on the way people write the history of art. He takes over and updates the work of Johann Winckelmann an eighteenth century German scholar of Greek sculpture who lived much of his life in Rome and who argued that classical Greek art expressed a special calm dignity. Hegel agrees with Winckelmann that art can express something deep about reality and that you understand a work best if you place it in its cultural setting, for example, a Greek statue in the life of the Greek city state. He also agrees that classical Greek art represents a high point. Where he differs is that he does not think we can simply imitate the Greeks in the modern world because their religion and way of life are gone. To state the puzzle clearly Beiser sums up two key theses. First the subordination thesis. Second the death of art thesis. Then he shows why Hegel still thinks art matters very much.

The subordination thesis says that art is lower than religion and philosophy as a way of grasping truth. Here Beiser introduces one of Hegel’s big ideas, the three forms of what Hegel calls absolute spirit. Absolute spirit just means the ways in which mind or spirit fully comes to understand itself. These three forms are art, religion and philosophy. They all try to show the same ultimate reality or idea but they do so in different ways. Art shows truth in images that we can see or hear. Religion shows truth in stories and pictures of the imagination, for example the story of Christ or the image of heaven and hell. Philosophy tries to show the same truth using clear concepts and arguments. Hegel places these in an order: art first then religion then philosophy. It is a ranking but all three belong to the same family and all three are modes of what he calls absolute knowledge. To explain this ranking Beiser introduces some Hegelian vocabulary but he keeps it simple. Hegel distinguishes intuition, representation and concept. Intuition here does not mean a gut feeling. It means direct sensory presentation. An intuition is for example the way you see a particular red apple right in front of you. Representation is more like an image or a mental picture or a story, for example thinking the word apple or imagining an apple without one in front of you. A concept is a general idea with structure, for example the concept of fruit which includes apples oranges and so on and also includes their relations and functions. Hegel thinks art mainly works with intuitions because it gives us concrete shapes sounds and colours that we can sense. Religion works with representations because it uses pictures and stories in the mind. Philosophy works with concepts because it tries to think things through in a systematic way. 

Beiser uses an everyday example. Suppose we want to understand justice. A tragedy by Sophocles might present a concrete clash about justice such as Antigone being torn between obeying the city and burying her brother. That is the artistic level intuition made visible. A religion might tell a story about divine judgement and reward and punishment. That is the level of representation. A philosopher like Plato or Kant tries to spell out in concepts what justice is and how it applies to many cases. This is the conceptual level. Hegel does not say that concepts are useful but dry while art is deep and mysterious. He actually thinks the opposite. He thinks good philosophy does not strip away richness from experience but gathers it up and understands it. He calls this concrete universality. A concrete universal is a general idea that also includes its many specific shapes. Think of the idea of a game, for example tennis or chess or football. A concrete grasp of this idea is not just the bare word game but an understanding of how the many kinds of games hang together. For Hegel the highest form of knowledge is when you can see both the whole and how its parts fit together. That is why he places philosophy above religion and art. Art shows a rich whole but does not fully explain it. Religion explains more but still in images. Philosophy aims to do both. 

Beiser then turns to another important question. Can art really give us knowledge of reality or is it only about feelings and pleasure? From the late eighteenth century philosophy of art in Germany had moved toward subjectivism. Subjectivism here means the view that an artwork is mainly about the feelings of the artist or the pleasure of the viewer and does not truly tell us anything about the world. Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgement  says that a judgement of beauty is based on a feeling of pleasure that claims to be shared by everyone but does not claim to tell us any factual property of the object. Art is about how we feel not about what the thing really is. 

Hegel rejects this subjectivist turn. He thinks art does give us knowledge and Beiser shows how Hegel argues for this. Hegel defines beauty as the sensible appearance of the idea. The word appearance can mean illusion, something that hides the truth, but it can also mean manifestation, something that shows the truth. Hegel says that beauty belongs to the second sense. In a beautiful painting or piece of music the inner structure or idea of something comes out and becomes visible or audible. Beiser gives the example of a sculptor making a statue of a god. The statue does not just copy an ordinary human body. It idealises it, that is, it reshapes the body to express dignity power and calm. This idealisation is not a lie. It is a way of showing the inner essence or concept of the god in a visible form.  Hegel therefore criticises the old view of art as mere imitation. Imitation means copying a thing as it appears to the senses like painting a bowl of fruit that looks exactly like the one on the table. Hegel thinks that if this were all art did then it would be pointless since a mirror or a photograph could do the same job. Good art does not simply repeat what the eye sees. It reveals the deeper structure or character of its object. A portrait by Rembrandt for example does more than record a face, it brings out the personality and life experience of the sitter. In this sense for Hegel the artist does not give up knowledge by using imagination. On the contrary because the artist shapes and selects and idealises he can reveal what is essential rather than what is accidental. 

Beiser then shows how all this depends on Hegel’s overall picture of reality as an organic whole. Hegel sees nature and history as one living process in which higher forms grow out of lower ones rather like a plant growing from root to stem to flower. Human minds and their creative powers are part of this whole, not separate from it. The artist then is not a lonely mind standing over against an alien world. The artist is the way nature and history reach a higher level of self awareness. When an artist creates a work that truly captures the spirit of an age, for example, a Greek sculptor creating a statue of Athena or a nineteenth century novelist like Balzac depicting French society, what is revealed is not only the artists personal fantasy but also what Beiser calls the powers of nature and history themselves. In Hegel’s words the work of art is a stage in the self awareness of spirit. 

This same organic view lets Hegel combine two things that might seem opposed. One is the cognitive status of art, the idea that it tells us truths. The other is aesthetic autonomy, the idea that a work of art should be judged on its own terms not by some fixed model outside it. If art really copies an outside model then its standard would lie elsewhere and it would lose autonomy. But if the artwork is the way the whole of reality appears to itself in that particular medium then its meaning and truth lie inside it. You do not check a tragedy against some external template. You ask whether within its own world the play makes the spirit of its time intelligible and alive.

Beiser then turns to what has probably made Hegel most notorious among later critics, his theory of the end or death of art. In the introduction to his lectures Hegel says that art in its highest vocation is a thing of the past and that in our modern world it no longer gives us the kind of truth that most deeply satisfies us. This has often been misunderstood as the silly claim that there will be no more paintings, music or novels. Beiser stresses that this is not what Hegel means. Hegel thinks that people will go on producing art. What he doubts is that art can still stand at the centre of culture as it once did in classical Greece. Instead it will become mainly a form of individual self expression.  To understand why Hegel thinks this Beiser explains his threefold history of art. Hegel divides art history into three main epochs; symbolic, classical and romantic and links these to big religious and cultural forms. Symbolic art belongs mainly to ancient cultures such as Egypt,  Persia and India according to Hegel. Here people sense the divine or the absolute as something very great but very vague and abstract. Because their idea of the divine is unclear they make huge strange images such as gigantic animal human statues or complex temple shapes. The symbol here is a picture that has some features of the divine but also many random features. This means there is a gap between inner idea and outer form. Hegel says symbolic art is really pre art because it does not yet achieve a good match between content and form.

Classical art belongs above all to ancient Greece. Here Hegel thinks there is a deep harmony between gods and human form and between religion and public life. The Greek gods appear as beautiful human figures. The inner idea of divine spirit matches the human body as its outer form. This for Hegel is where art reaches a perfect unity of content and form and therefore its highest point.

Romantic art belongs to the Christian era. Christianity teaches a God who is pure spirit beyond the senses and who demands inward faith of the heart. This intense inwardness no longer fits well with physical images or statues. You cannot really represent infinite spirit in marble or paint. So there is again a gap between the highest content and the sensible form. For that reason Hegel says that in the romantic age art begins to go beyond itself and points toward religion and philosophy as better media for that spiritual content. 

Beiser is critical here. He says that Hegel is assuming three debatable things. First that Greek classical art really is the highest possible form of art. Second that art must be tied to religion and its main job is to present a people’s religion. Third that Christianity will always be the guiding worldview of Europe. Schiller and the early romantics in Jena around seventeen ninety argued the opposite. They thought that because traditional Christianity had weakened under the sharp questioning of the Enlightenment art had become more rather than less important. For them art should take over the role of religion in speaking to the hearts of ordinary people. Beiser then digs deeper and says that the more basic reason for Hegel’s end of art thesis lies in his diagnosis of modern culture. Hegel thinks that modern Europe, especially in cities such as Berlin, is a reflection culture. By this he means a culture in which people constantly use their power of reflection, that is, critical thinking. They do not simply accept customs and religious stories. They ask whether these are reasonable. In such a world people want explanations, laws and arguments rather than myths and images. They want a constitution, not a sacred sculpture, to justify political authority. So Hegel says that the modern age is more suited to aesthetics that is thinking about art than to great art itself. The rise of philosophy of art is itself a sign that the classical age of art is over.  But the real problem for Hegel is what this reflective culture does to the artist. In ancient Athens the tragic poet was still deeply at one with the religion and laws of the city and could speak for it. In modern Berlin or Paris the artist is often estranged from church and state and doubts many public values. The modern artist chooses subject matter freely and often treats it playfully or ironically. Beiser uses Hegel’s example of romantic irony which he connects especially with writers like Friedrich Schlegel. The ironic artist keeps a distance from everything, laughs at every serious commitment and treats anything whatever as a possible theme for art. That makes art clever but also detached. It no longer expresses the shared beliefs and hopes of a people. It becomes mainly a vehicle for personal expression.

In this situation Hegel thinks art loses its central cultural role. It still exists but it no longer gives a society its main pictures of truth and the good. Those tasks move to religion and especially to philosophy and critical public debate. When Hegel says that art has died he means that it has died in this older role of being the main language in which a civilisation understands itself. It has become fragmented and private.

Beiser ends by noting that this diagnosis is tied to Hegel’s broader worries about modern alienation. In earlier sections we saw that Hegel thinks modern individuals insist on their right of subjectivity, their right to judge everything for themselves. This right is precious but it also separates people from traditional communities. The same force separates the artist from their culture. The right of subjectivity which was central for Hegel’s account of modern freedom thus also fuels his pessimism about art. Hegel thinks art once stood at the very centre of human life, especially in ancient Greece. There it gave people a shared image of the divine and of their own ethical world. In the modern age art is still vital and meaningful but it cannot carry that central burden any longer. Our world is too reflective, too critical and too individual for that. So Hegel honours art by giving it a huge place in his system and by treating it as the first way in which human beings come to know themselves. Yet he also hands the final task of self understanding to philosophy and predicts that modern art will be more private and less tied to a common public spirit. Beiser guides you through this complicated mix of admiration and doubt and helps you see both how powerful and how questionable Hegel’s view still is when we think about art today.