Hegel: A Biography
Cambridge University Press £25, pp800
Buy it at BOL
To Lenin, to Sartre, his was quite simply the most powerful systematic intellect of which Western history has record. To Bertrand Russell, he was the font of nebulous confusion and was to be all but omitted from any responsible History of Western Philosophy. Whichever view one takes, and whether or not we do so consciously, our modern world is, at numerous points, heir to Hegel.
There are few departments in the life of the mind untouched by Hegel's influence and idiom. These include not only philosophy itself but political theory, the study of law and legal institutions, aesthetics, the history and philosophy of religion. Our notions of theory and of history, of logical arguments and aesthetic judgment, of academic pedagogy and society are permeated, directly or indirectly, by Hegelian values.
These values informed Marxism as well as some of the most reactionary and 'statist' models of public affairs. Today, Hegel's Phenomenology is acknowledged to be one of the most seminal masterpieces in the entire chronicle of philosophic thought, a work whose complex energy and originality of 'plot' invite comparison with the summits of nineteenth-century literature and music.
Terry Pinkard's biography is of the first rank. This is a paradox. It brings virtually nothing that is new or which has been unavailable to those capable of reading French and German. Even the anecdotes are long familiar. But the known material has never been marshalled with more spacious clarity.
This is, moreover, more than the re-telling of an often uneventful and cloistered existence. Professor Pinkard dwells at authoritative length on the surrounding history, on the public events which make the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a watershed. He outlines, with telling detail, the twofold background of revolution: that of the French revolution, and that of the overwhelming revolution in philosophy which followed on Kant.
The turbulent creativities of romanticism and reaction, incarnate in Napoleon, but also in Goethe and in Beethoven, give to Pinkard's narrative its tidal motion. A new age for Western man emerges from the precise coincidence (a touch mythical) of Napoleon's gallop on the way to the battle of Iena under Hegel's windows and the latter's completion of the monumental preface to the Phenomenology. Though mesmerised by Napoleon, as later Hegelians were by Stalin, the author sensed that his might be the more consequential of the two happenings.
The road to that dawn had been slow. Amid a constellation of meteoric genius, Hegel had ripened only haltingly, his tenacious Swabian sensibility uncertain of its strengths and reach. At school, in the famous ecclesiastical Stift in Tübingen, he had shared quarters with Hölderlin and the precocious, wildly gifted Schelling. As Pinkard underlines, the metaphysical-lyric genius of Hölderlin was to be a life-long stimulus; Schelling would be the initial guide, the generous supporter of a seemingly lesser light, the defeated rival and, by eminent irony, the successor to Hegel's chair at the University of Berlin.
While others forged ahead, Hegel spent laborious, though innerly productive years, as a house tutor, school-teacher, journalist and man of political letters in a series of more or less marginal posts. He ached for academic acceptance and preferment even after the publication of the Phenomenology. Hegel was 46 when appointed to a professorship at Heidelberg in 1816. Two years later followed the call to Berlin, where he would teach and exercise a formidable influence until his death in November 1832. Inevitably, a biography of Hegel is a saga of academic imbroglios and successive publications.
Minutiae of professional intrigues, of the polemics between theological-political authorities and the nascent ideals of academic freedom, are Pinkard's meat. The reader is spared no detail. More rewarding is the emphasis, greater than in any previous biography, on Hegel's conviviality. His unforgiving abstruseness, the anti-charismatic technique of his lectures, an ill-disguised condescension towards even the most gifted of women, had made Hegel legend.
Yet Pinkard shows how vividly he valued social contacts, the joy he took in theatre and opera and, above all, the almost childish delight this provincial universalist derived from his late visits to Holland and to France. The thought does haunt one that Hegel was in the same audience as Berlioz when a troupe of visiting Shakespearean actors performed in Paris.
But what matters is the philosophic writing, much of it published only posthumously and from notes taken by ardent disciples (the analogy with Martin Heidegger is arresting). Having previously expounded the Phenomenology, Pinkard passes over it summarily in this biography. He is admirably lucid on the Logic and the Encyclopedia, showing how these monumental texts grow out of Hegel's determination to overcome the innocent discriminations between subject and object, between the ego and the world which, he felt, flawed German idealism and left crucial irresolutions in the edifice of Kant.
At his best, Hegel has a sense of the 'density of being', of the dialectical interplay between consciousness and the existential tenacity of things unrivalled. Both Marxism and Sartrian existentialism derived their facticity, their suspicions of the immaterial, from Hegel's stubborn realism, where 'realism' is, however, an inadequate term. The general and the English-language reader could find no better introduction than Pinkard's.
As his authority grew, Hegel developed a passionate trust in philosophic reason and the sciences. Nothing would surpass the inheritance of the classic arts and of religion. A new era, however, was at hand, an era of radical critique and positive knowledge. 'The modern age belonged, Hegel seemed to be saying, to Hegel, not to Hölderlin.' It is, moreover, this essential modernity which tempers, which complicates Hegel's notorious political conservatism, his rage for order as embodied in the Prussian state.
Such were the power and provocation of Hegel's doctrines that they have generated commentaries which are themselves classics of philosophic discourse. Not one of these figures either in the bibliography or index.
It was as if the famous readings by Kojève, by Lukács and others simply did not exist. Is this some obscure academic jest? The cautionary label, therefore, must be: 'Book to be read, bibliography to be discarded.' A strange case.