within which the natural world and human deeds were ‘parts,’ he also always construed this claim to mean that the subject matter of philosophy was the history of human experience itself. Philosophy was about the real world of human change and development, understood by Hegel to be the collective self-education of the human species about itself. It could be this, and satisfy the more traditional ideals because, in one of his most famous phrases, ‘what is actual is rational,’ or because some full account could be given of the logic or teleological order, even the necessity, for the great conceptual and political changes in human history. We could thereby finally reassure ourselves that the way our species had come to conceptualize and evaluate is not finite or contingent, but is ‘identical’ with ‘what there is, in truth.’ This identity theory or Absolute Knowledge means that we will then be able to be ‘at home’ in the world and so will have understood what philosophers have always tried to understand, ‘how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.’ The way it all hangs together is, finally, ‘due to us,’ in some collective and historical and ‘logical’ sense. (In a much disputed passage in his Philosophy of Religion lectures, Hegel even suggested that with such an understanding, history itself would be over.) Several elements in this general position have inspired a good deal of excitement and controversy. To advance claims such as these Hegel had to argue against a powerful, deeply influential assumption in modern thought: the priority of the individual, self-conscious subject. Such an assumption means, for example, that almost all social relations, almost all our bonds to other human beings, exist because and only because they are made, willed into existence by individuals otherwise naturally unattached to each other. With respect to knowledge claims, while there may be many beliefs in a common tradition that we unreflectively share with others, such shared beliefs are also taken primarily to be the result of individuals continuously affirming such beliefs, however implicitly or unreflectively. Their being shared is simply a consequence of their being simultaneously affirmed or assented to by individuals. Hegel’s account requires a different picture, an insistence on the priority of some kind of collective subject, which he called human ‘spirit’ or Geist. His general theory of conceptual and historical change requires the assumption of such a collective subject, one that even can be said to be ‘coming to self-consciousness’ about itself, and this required that he argue against the view that so much could be understood as the result of individual will and reflection. Rather, he tried in many different ways to show that the formation of what might appear to an individual to be his or her own particular intention or desire or belief already reflected a complex social inheritance that could itself be said to be evolving, even evolving progressively, with a ‘logic’ of its own. The completion of such collective attempts at self-knowledge resulted in what Hegel called the realization of Absolute Spirit, by which he either meant the absolute completion of the human attempt to know itself, or the realization in human affairs of some sort of extrahuman transcendence, or full expression of an infinite God. Hegel tried to advance all such claims about social subjectivity without in some way hypostatizing or reifying such a subject, as if it existed independently of the actions and thoughts of individuals. This claim about the deep dependence of individuals on one another (even for their very identity), even while they maintain their independence, is one of the best-known examples of Hegel’s attempt at a dialectical resolution of many of the traditional oppositions and antinomies of past thought. Hegel often argued that what appeared to be contraries in philosophy, such as mind/body, freedom/determinism, idealism/materialism, universal/particular, the state/the individual, or even God/man, appeared such incompatible alternatives only because of the undeveloped and so incomplete perspective within which the oppositions were formulated.
So, in one of his more famous attacks on such dualisms, human freedom according to Hegel could not be understood coherently as some purely rational self-determination, independent of heteronomous impulses, nor the human being as a perpetual opposition between reason and sensibility. In his moral theory, Kant had argued for the latter view and Hegel regularly returned to such Kantian claims about the opposition of duty and inclination as deeply typical of modern dualism. Hegel claimed that Kant’s version of a rational principle, the ‘categorical imperative,’ was so formal and devoid of content as not to be action-guiding (it could not coherently rule in or rule out the appropriate actions), and that the ‘moral point of view’ rigoristically demanded a pure or dutiful motivation to which no human agent could conform. By contrast, Hegel claimed that the dualisms of morality could be overcome in ethical life (Sittlichkeit), those modern social institutions which, it was claimed, provided the content or true ‘objects’ of a rational will. These institutions, the family, civil society, and the state, did not require duties in potential conflict with our own substantive ends, but were rather experienced as the ‘realization’ of our individual free will. It has remained controversial what for Hegel a truly free, rational self-determination, continuous with, rather than constraining, our desire for happiness and self-actualization, amounted to. Many commentators have noted that, among modern philosophers, only Spinoza, whom Hegel greatly admired, was as insistent on such a thoroughgoing compatibilism, and on a refusal to adopt the Christian view of human beings as permanently divided against themselves.
In his most ambitious analysis of such oppositions Hegel went so far as to claim that, not only could alternatives be shown to be ultimately compatible when thought together within some higher-order ‘Notion’ (Begriff) that resolved or ‘sublated’ the opposition, but that one term in such opposition could actually be said to imply or require its contrary, that a ‘positing’ of such a notion would, to maintain consistency, require its own ‘negating,’ and that it was this sort of dialectical opposition that could be shown to require a sublation, or Aufhebung (a term of art in Hegel that simultaneously means in German ‘to cancel’, ‘to preserve’, and ‘to raise up’). This claim for a dialectical development of our fundamental notions has been the most severely criticized in Hegel’s philosophy. Many critics have doubted that so much basic conceptual change can be accounted for by an internal critique, one that merely develops the presuppositions inherent in the affirmation of some notion or position or related practice. This issue has especially attracted critics of Hegel’s Science of Logic, where he tries first to show that the attempt to categorize anything that is, simply and immediately, as ‘Being,’ is an attempt that both ‘negates itself,’ or ends up categorizing everything as ‘Nothing,’ and then that this self-negation requires a resolution in the higher-order category of ‘Becoming.’ This analysis continues into an extended argument that purports to show that any attempt to categorize anything at all must ultimately make use of the distinctions of ‘essence’ and ‘appearance,’ and elements of syllogistic and finally Hegel’s own dialectical logic, and both the details and the grand design of that project have been the subject of a good deal of controversy. (Unfortunately, much of this controversy has been greatly confused by the popular association of the terms ‘thesis,’ ‘antithesis,’ and ‘synthesis’ with Hegel’s theory of dialectic. These crude, mechanical notions were invented in 1837 by a less-than-sensitive Hegel expositor, Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, and were never used as terms of art by Hegel.) Others have argued that the tensions Hegel does identify in various positions and practices require a much broader analysis of the historical, especially economic, context within which positions are formulated and become important, or some more detailed attention to the empirical discoveries or paradoxes that, at the very least, contribute to basic conceptual change. Those worried about the latter problem have also raised questions about the logical relation between universal and particular implied in Hegel’s account. Hegel, following Fichte, radicalizes a Kantian claim about the inaccessibility of pure particularity in sensations (Kant had written that ‘intuitions without concepts are blind’). Hegel charges that Kant did not draw sufficiently radical conclusions from such an antiempiricist claim, that he should have completely rethought the traditional distinction between ‘what was given to the mind’ and ‘what the mind did with the given.’ By contrast Hegel is confident that he has a theory of a ‘concrete universal,’ concepts that cannot be understood as pale generalizations or abstract representations of given particulars, because they are required for particulars to be apprehended in the first place. They are not originally dependent on an immediate acquaintance with particulars; there is no such acquaintance. Critics wonder if Hegel has much of a theory of particularity left, if he does not claim rather that particulars, or whatever now corresponds to them, are only interrelations of concepts, and in which the actual details of the organization of the natural world and human history are deduced as conceptual necessities in Hegel’s Encyclopedia. (This interpretation of Hegel, that he believes all entities are really the thoughts, expressions, or modes of a single underlying mental substance, and that this mind develops and posits itself with some sort of conceptual necessity, has been termed a panlogicism, a term of art coined by Hermann Glockner, a Hegel commentator in the first half of the twentieth century. It is a much-disputed reading.)
Such critics are especially concerned with the implications of this issue in Hegel’s political theory,