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El joven Hegel y los problemas de la sociedad capitalista
«La intención básica de esta obra es histórico-filosófica. Ante todo, desde el punto de vista metodológico: mi propósito era rellenar una gran laguna de la historia de la filosofía tal como ésta se ha cultivado hasta el presente. Muy frecuentemente se ha estudiado, en efecto, la relación de importantes sistemas filosóficos con la ciencia natural de la época. Yo quería mostrar el importante papel que ha desempeñado en el pensamiento de Hegel (y también, naturalmente, en el de otros grandes filósofos) la ocupación con los problemas de la economía, tanto con las cuestiones económicas de la época cuanto con las teorías económicas contemporáneas».
(Palabras extraídas del prólogo)
(Palabras extraídas del prólogo)
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First published January 1, 1948
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About the author
György Lukács
447 books400 followersGyörgy Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician, literary historian and critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideological orthodoxy of the Soviet Union. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.
His literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture as part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.
His literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture as part of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 24, 2021
O trabalho histórico-filosófico que o Lukács emprega aqui é coisa de outro mundo. Seu entendimento da dialética como forma filosófica não aparece aqui somente nas exposições que faz da construção do pensamento hegeliano, mas também na própria forma pela qual ele a apresenta e a desvela historicamente. É um trabalho exegético absurdo, ligando e situando o pensamento hegeliano não só dentro das tradições filosóficas, mas dentro do seu tempo histórico de uma maneira muito bem articulada, não retirando de Hegel sua originalidade, mas também não o destacando para fora das limitações do seu tempo e espaço. Em algumas partes, eu só conseguia dar risada de quão bem articulados eram alguns pontos, e sempre muito esclarecedores acerca dessa massa problemática de palavras que são os textos de Hegel. Um exemplo muito importante de como o trabalho de comentar e apreender a história da filosofia pode ser também a construção de uma filosofia mesma.
March 6, 2015
Written in the late 1930's,Lukac's reading of Hegel is certainly engaging. Lukacs returns to the early Hegel to respond to what he sees as a series of substantial misreadings of the work, inspired by the rise of fascism, and on the part of liberals attempting to neutralize the radical potential of the work. Through that process, Lukacs offers a series of very interesting and useful readings of Hegel's early theological and republican period, and how his conceptual framework shifted to a more conservative, albeit much more philosophically rich approach. It's a serious engagement with the work, and I left with a better sense of the project. There are a few clunkers condemning the revisionism of the second international and the superiority of the work of Lenin and Stalin that remind you that you're reading a book written in the Soviet Union in the late 1930's, but Lukacs manages to minimize that rhetorical framework.
April 15, 2025
Divided into four parts and 26 chapters, Lukacs’ The Young Hegel commits to a deep philosophical and biographical-historical study of the evolution of Hegel’s thought from his revolutionary Girondinism in the 1790s to his break with Schelling and completion of The Phenomenology of the Mind in 1807. Although perhaps not as critical of Hegel’s political failings as it could be, Lukacs was correcting the deeply erroneous overcorrection of the 1930s to 1940s in Comintern philosophical circles, which responded to the fascist appropriation of Hegel’s thought with harsh and oftentimes unfounded criticism, surrendering his thought to the fascists. Instead, Lukacs sets out to reclaim the revolutionary portion of Hegel’s thought from his conservative neo-Hegelian heirs, his fascist appropriators, and his existentialist “modernizers” in France like Jean Hyppolyte and Jean Wahl (interestingly, Kojeve is not engaged with at all). Relatively specialized in its character, this work should be read with Stephen Houlgate’s An Introduction to Hegel, which will simplify Hegel’s social philosophy and ethical concept of the state, as well as Domenico Losurdo’s Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns, which reinforces Lukacs’ reclaiming of Hegel for the radical camp. Hegel’s dialectics, as a philosophy of history and analytical tool, remain the basis for Marxist materialism, and Lukacs’ work is a key text in understanding and grasping the necessary study of Hegel that Lenin remarked was necessary to understand Capital.
April 18, 2020
The butler did it.
Lukács was frickin brilliant. Nothing I've read about Hegel's development comes anywhere close to being as clear, especially about what this little number called the dialectic is, where it came from, how Hegel does it, and what he does it for.
Of course, Lukács has the benefit of looking backwards from Marx' critique, and he does do some reverse-engineering, I believe, to interpret Hegel's "method" (assuming there is a coherent method) as being an idealist version of the more-or-less-the-same dialectic as in dialectical materialism. He also claims with uncertain provenance that the English word alienation is the origin of the German Entäusserung and Entfremdung--translated into German from the context of political economy and widely extended in usage and meaning by our boy G.W.F.
Whether that's just Lukács using a sonic screwdriver or not, his etymology leads to an interpretation of the movement of the Phenomenology of Spirit that is (a) intelligible, and (2) non-magical, both of which are great advances over most interpretations, and over almost all bourgeois readings. It places human work at the center of the development of Spirit/self-consciousness, right up until Hegel falls victim to his own idealist mystifications in the Absolute Knowing section of the book.
Genius on every page.
Lukács was frickin brilliant. Nothing I've read about Hegel's development comes anywhere close to being as clear, especially about what this little number called the dialectic is, where it came from, how Hegel does it, and what he does it for.
Of course, Lukács has the benefit of looking backwards from Marx' critique, and he does do some reverse-engineering, I believe, to interpret Hegel's "method" (assuming there is a coherent method) as being an idealist version of the more-or-less-the-same dialectic as in dialectical materialism. He also claims with uncertain provenance that the English word alienation is the origin of the German Entäusserung and Entfremdung--translated into German from the context of political economy and widely extended in usage and meaning by our boy G.W.F.
Whether that's just Lukács using a sonic screwdriver or not, his etymology leads to an interpretation of the movement of the Phenomenology of Spirit that is (a) intelligible, and (2) non-magical, both of which are great advances over most interpretations, and over almost all bourgeois readings. It places human work at the center of the development of Spirit/self-consciousness, right up until Hegel falls victim to his own idealist mystifications in the Absolute Knowing section of the book.
Genius on every page.
September 10, 2019
'Like most German idealists Hegel regarded the moral regeneration of the people less as the product than as the prerequisite of revolution. Schiller had already put forward a similar view in the Aesthetic Letters which, as we have seen, made a great impression on Hegel. ... Even so it is noteworthy that Schiller dismissed the idea that the state could bring about the regeneration of the people through education. The young Hegel parts company with Schiller here since he is much more sanguine about the prospects for the regeneration of mankind and the onset of a revolutionary period in which humanity and freedom celebrate their rebirth. It is for this reason that religion plays such a major role in his early idealism' (p. 15).
'"For it is a false principles which maintains that the shackles of law and freedom can be cast off without a liberation of conscience, or that there can be a revolution without a reformation"' (Hegel, Berlin Lectures, quoted p. 16).
'It is important to avoid the impression that the early Hegel had no real philosophical problems that his biography consists in the awakening of his philosophical instincts. ... But problems of epistemology only become acute for Hegel and move to the forefront of his attention when the contradictions in his original view appear as the objective contradictions of social reality, i.e. when epistemology becomes the dialectics of reality itself' (p. 22).
'[Hegel's] new starting-point [in Frankfurt] is the life of the individual. The individual lives in a society which abounds in positive institutions, positive relations between men and indeed men who have been deadened by positivity and transformed into objects. Hence the question has ceased to be: how can this positive society be smashed and replaced by a radically different type of society? On the contrary, the question he now poses is this: how can the individual in this society lead a human life, i.e. how can the positivity in himself, in other people and in his relations to people and things be eliminated? Thus the social problem is transformed into one of individual morality, into the problem of what shall we do? How shall we live? And the underlying aim here is to bring about a reconciliation with bourgeois society and a (perhaps partial) abolition of its positive character' (p. 112).
And 'since [in Frankfurt] Hegel's starting-point is the fate of the individual, it is natural that Christianity should have a much more immediate appeal for him than it had done earlier on. Hence the question of how an individual's life should be shaped and conducted was bound to lead to a reconsideration of Christian ethics' (p. 179).
'By the time he comes to Jena, the general social perspective prevails over that of the individual. From this time on the individual is no more than a member of society, his individual problems are consistently treated in the light of general social ones' (p. 179) - really?
'We may therefore venture the paradoxical statement, which, however, really does sum up the contradictory course of Hegel's development, that the more he is driven to abandon the revolutionary ideals of his youth, the more resolutely he "reconciles" himself to the rule of bourgeois society and the less his thought reaches out to new possibilities - then the more powerfully and consciously the dialectician in him awakens. Given the existing historical conditions, the dialectical view of human progress which is given its first comprehensive and philosophically significant shape in The Phenomenology of Mind could only have been constructed from such a contradictory position' (p. 234).
'The true idealist contradiction in Hegel's early thought is that he who had discovered the new teleology of human activity was neither able nor willing to perceive the tragic teleology of his own age. He inverts the relationship of ends to means. Whereas in reality all the heroic efforts of the French people, the deeds of all the great heroes from Marat to Napoleon only resulted in the establishment of capitalism on the ruins of feudalism, Hegel is concerned to formulate a philosophy of history that shows how the unleashing of the forces of production by capitalism and the rise of a triumphant bourgeois society will provide the basis for a new heroic age, a new glorious era of human culture' (p. 401).
'"It is remarkable how Darwin can examine the world of plants and animals and discover there his own English society with its division of labour, competition, the opening up of new markets, 'inventions', and Malthus' 'struggle for existence'. It is Hobbes' bellum omnium contra omnes and reminds one of Hegel in the Phenomenology where bourgeois society appears as the 'animal kingdom of the spirit', whereas in Darwin the animal kingdom appears as bourgeois society"' (Marx, Letter to Engels, quoted p. 417).
'The greatness of the age in which Hegel lived and worked is manifest in many ways; one of them is that there is scarcely any possible problem and solution which did not find an advocate to argue it out at the highest level' (p. 418).
'In brief, Hegel's position [in 1806] was that after the great crisis of the French Revolution in the Napoleonic regime a new epoch was about to dawn. His philosophy was to be its intellectual expression. The specific value that Hegel puts on his own philosophy is that it is the philosophical synthesis of the birth of this new historical epoch. Rosenkranz has published the words with which Hegel concluded his lectures on phenomenology in the autumn of 1806: "This, Gentlemen, is speculative philosophy as far as I have been able to construct it. Look upon it as the beginnings of the philosophy which you will carry forward. We find ourselves in an important epoch in world history, in a ferment, when spirit has taken a leap forward, where it has sloughed off its old form and is acquiring a new one. The whole mass of existing ideas and concepts, the very bonds of the world have fallen apart and dissolved like a dream. A new product of the spirit is being prepared. The chief task of philosophy is welcome it and grant it recognition, while others, impotently resisting, cling to the past and the majority unconsciously constitute the masses in which it manifests itself. Recognizing it as the eternal, it falls to philosophy to pay it reverence"' (p. 454).
'Whereas Hegel had thought of the Phenomenology as a guide to a *completely new* world, he later [in the Philosophy of Right] gives an *entirely opposed picture* of the relation between his philosophy and the present, even though he is operating from the same general methodological base. ... [Writes Hegel:] "As the *thought* of the world, [philosophy] appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed. ... When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old." ... The extraordinary vividness with which Hegel expresses his ideas in each passage points up the contrast in his views even more sharply. In the first case [i.e., the Phenomenology Preface] he speaks of the dawn, in the second, of the dusk; the *birth* of a new epoch in the first case, the end of an era of human history in the second' (p. 456).
'The really incisive change in his later philosophy of history affects his view of the modern world: in Jena the French Revolution and its supersession (in all three senses) by Napoleon was the decisive turning-point. It had provided the historical foundation for the picture he gives of the philosophical situation of the present and the indispensable tasks of a modern scientific system. However, in his later lectures on the philosophy of history we find that the place formerly assigned to the French Revolution and Napoleon has now been given to the Reformation. ... The conception of philosophy as the "owl of Minerva" is just the necessary consequence of his later view of the modern world as having begun with the Reformation and which in his own words has as its sole task to shape the whole world in accordance with the principle embodied in it ... Hegel's further elucidations make it quite clear that ... all subsequent events are but the development and concretization of that major turning-point and cannot produce anything radically new' (pp. 457-58).
'Thus in Hegel's later philosophy of history revolutions on the French pattern represent vain efforts to achieve through secular means, the reconciliation of reason with reality, that had already been brought about in Germany by the Reformation' (p. 459).
'"In Swabia when something is long since past people say of it: it is so long ago that it isn't true. And we may say that Christ died so long ago for our sins that it isn't true"' (Hegel, Notebook, quoted p. 463).
'Engels has provided us with very clear guide-lines for understanding [Hegel's] Phenomenology. He says that "one may call it a parallel of the embryology and the paleontology of the mind, a development of individual consciousness through its different stages, set in the form of an abbreviated reproduction of the stages through which the consciousness of man has passed in the course of history"' (p. 468).
'The line of historical development in [the first five chapters] of the Phenomenology is difficult to grasp because, although historical events and epochs appear in the correct order and exert the influence to be expected from their place in world-history, they yet manifest themselves in a form determined by the way they are mirrored in the consciousness of the individual' (p. 478).
'Hegel's resignation [in the Phenomenology], his descent to a mere imperative, an "ought", absent elsewhere in his work, is most in evidence in the concluding parts of the [Spirit] chapter where the actual content of this society turns out to be the "absolute spirit" as incorporated in religion. The "absolute spirit" signals the first appearance of that affirmation of a reality that has discovered itself, of that "reconciliation" towards which the entire philosophy of history was leading up. ... Hegel's general philosophical position has always been that the "objective spirit" must be transcended by "absolute spirit" ... But elsewhere he never fails to give a real description of the social contradictions that can only be resolved in this ultimate synthesis and supersession *before* proceeding to that "reconciliation". Here, however, the positive side, the social content of reconcilation, is left vacant and thought leaps *directly and without mediations* from the preparatory stages of social morality straight into the sphere of "absolute spirit"' (pp. 504-05).
'It was inevitable that the "absolute spirit" should be so prominent a part of the content of Hegel's theory of society, since, in the circumstances, there was no other possible role that a realist like Hegel could have assigned to Germany. ... After the fall of Napoleon this tendency sometimes became so powerful that the appearance in history of the German nation was confined entirely to the role of the incarnation of "absolute spirit", the mouthpiece of philosophy. ... For the Hegel of [Jena, however] absolute knowledge was not only and not always a merely conceptual statement of how far history had progressed and what laws determine its progress. It also had an "esoteric" sub-current in which [Hegel] hoped that a revolution of reality would be brought about or at any rate accelerated by a revolution of the world of thought. Thus in the Napoleonic era he wrote to Niethammer ... "I become more convinced every day that theoretical work accomplishes more than practical. Once the realm of ideas has been revolutionized, reality cannot hold out"' (pp. 505-06).
'The absence of any real content in Hegel's treatment of the development of society in the [Spirit chapter] makes it perfectly clear that it was objectively impossible for him to resolve the contradictions of capitalist society which he discerned ... Once he had provided a profound and central analysis of the movement of history ... once he had given an account of the Enlightenment, of the economy of capitalist society and of the French Revolution, Hegel was not able to go further and propose a definite social form in which to clothe his "reconciliation"' (p. 506).
'Hegel emphasizes that knowledge is a process, that the absolute itself is a result of the overall process. But he obviously requires a criterion with which to gauge the truth of our knowledge of the overall process. And it is at this point that ... the highest concepts of the Hegelian dialectic in all their abstruse mysticism, nevertheless spring necessarily from his own premises. For if the objectivity of the world of objects is the product of a provisional disunity in the identical subject-object, then ... it is absolutely necessary for Hegel to close the circle by positing a recovery of that original by positing a recovery of that original identity of subject and object in the form of the retraction of "externalization", the transformation of substance into subject and the annulment of objective reality as such' (pp. 532-33).
Marx: 'Hegel speaks of "externalization" and its annulment by philosophy. He does not suspect, however, that the philosophy which is supposed to annul "externalization" is itself an egregious instance of "externalization": "... the philosophic mind is nothing but the alienated mind of the world thinking within its self-estrangement - i.e., comprehending itself abstractly." ... Hegel does not perceive this and by failing to notice that alienated thought is alienated ... [he] turns the true pattern of alienation on its head. Consistently with this, Hegelian idealism identifies man with his self-consciousness' (p. 551).
'Marx's critical commnets show how [Hegel's] false identification of man and self-consciousness necessarily springs comments a false view of alienation in society. On the subjective side, there is [1] the mistaken identification of man and self-consciousness demonstrated and criticized by Marx; on the objective side, there is [2] the equation of alienation and objectification in general' (p. 551).
'Contradictory and imperfect though Hegel's views may have been ... it is undoubtedly no accident that the man who completed the edifice of idealist dialectics was the *only* philosopher of the age to have made a *serious* attempt to get to grips with the economic structure of capitalist society. Rather it is the case that the *specific* form of dialectics evolved by him grew out his preoccupation with the problems of capitalism and its economics. ... The specifically Hegelian categories ... were the first to elaborate the essential determinations to the point where the materialist dialectics of Marx could take over - criticizing Hegel and turning him the right way up, but nevertheless taking up *directly* where he had left off' (pp. 564-55).
'"For it is a false principles which maintains that the shackles of law and freedom can be cast off without a liberation of conscience, or that there can be a revolution without a reformation"' (Hegel, Berlin Lectures, quoted p. 16).
'It is important to avoid the impression that the early Hegel had no real philosophical problems that his biography consists in the awakening of his philosophical instincts. ... But problems of epistemology only become acute for Hegel and move to the forefront of his attention when the contradictions in his original view appear as the objective contradictions of social reality, i.e. when epistemology becomes the dialectics of reality itself' (p. 22).
'[Hegel's] new starting-point [in Frankfurt] is the life of the individual. The individual lives in a society which abounds in positive institutions, positive relations between men and indeed men who have been deadened by positivity and transformed into objects. Hence the question has ceased to be: how can this positive society be smashed and replaced by a radically different type of society? On the contrary, the question he now poses is this: how can the individual in this society lead a human life, i.e. how can the positivity in himself, in other people and in his relations to people and things be eliminated? Thus the social problem is transformed into one of individual morality, into the problem of what shall we do? How shall we live? And the underlying aim here is to bring about a reconciliation with bourgeois society and a (perhaps partial) abolition of its positive character' (p. 112).
And 'since [in Frankfurt] Hegel's starting-point is the fate of the individual, it is natural that Christianity should have a much more immediate appeal for him than it had done earlier on. Hence the question of how an individual's life should be shaped and conducted was bound to lead to a reconsideration of Christian ethics' (p. 179).
'By the time he comes to Jena, the general social perspective prevails over that of the individual. From this time on the individual is no more than a member of society, his individual problems are consistently treated in the light of general social ones' (p. 179) - really?
'We may therefore venture the paradoxical statement, which, however, really does sum up the contradictory course of Hegel's development, that the more he is driven to abandon the revolutionary ideals of his youth, the more resolutely he "reconciles" himself to the rule of bourgeois society and the less his thought reaches out to new possibilities - then the more powerfully and consciously the dialectician in him awakens. Given the existing historical conditions, the dialectical view of human progress which is given its first comprehensive and philosophically significant shape in The Phenomenology of Mind could only have been constructed from such a contradictory position' (p. 234).
'The true idealist contradiction in Hegel's early thought is that he who had discovered the new teleology of human activity was neither able nor willing to perceive the tragic teleology of his own age. He inverts the relationship of ends to means. Whereas in reality all the heroic efforts of the French people, the deeds of all the great heroes from Marat to Napoleon only resulted in the establishment of capitalism on the ruins of feudalism, Hegel is concerned to formulate a philosophy of history that shows how the unleashing of the forces of production by capitalism and the rise of a triumphant bourgeois society will provide the basis for a new heroic age, a new glorious era of human culture' (p. 401).
'"It is remarkable how Darwin can examine the world of plants and animals and discover there his own English society with its division of labour, competition, the opening up of new markets, 'inventions', and Malthus' 'struggle for existence'. It is Hobbes' bellum omnium contra omnes and reminds one of Hegel in the Phenomenology where bourgeois society appears as the 'animal kingdom of the spirit', whereas in Darwin the animal kingdom appears as bourgeois society"' (Marx, Letter to Engels, quoted p. 417).
'The greatness of the age in which Hegel lived and worked is manifest in many ways; one of them is that there is scarcely any possible problem and solution which did not find an advocate to argue it out at the highest level' (p. 418).
'In brief, Hegel's position [in 1806] was that after the great crisis of the French Revolution in the Napoleonic regime a new epoch was about to dawn. His philosophy was to be its intellectual expression. The specific value that Hegel puts on his own philosophy is that it is the philosophical synthesis of the birth of this new historical epoch. Rosenkranz has published the words with which Hegel concluded his lectures on phenomenology in the autumn of 1806: "This, Gentlemen, is speculative philosophy as far as I have been able to construct it. Look upon it as the beginnings of the philosophy which you will carry forward. We find ourselves in an important epoch in world history, in a ferment, when spirit has taken a leap forward, where it has sloughed off its old form and is acquiring a new one. The whole mass of existing ideas and concepts, the very bonds of the world have fallen apart and dissolved like a dream. A new product of the spirit is being prepared. The chief task of philosophy is welcome it and grant it recognition, while others, impotently resisting, cling to the past and the majority unconsciously constitute the masses in which it manifests itself. Recognizing it as the eternal, it falls to philosophy to pay it reverence"' (p. 454).
'Whereas Hegel had thought of the Phenomenology as a guide to a *completely new* world, he later [in the Philosophy of Right] gives an *entirely opposed picture* of the relation between his philosophy and the present, even though he is operating from the same general methodological base. ... [Writes Hegel:] "As the *thought* of the world, [philosophy] appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed. ... When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old." ... The extraordinary vividness with which Hegel expresses his ideas in each passage points up the contrast in his views even more sharply. In the first case [i.e., the Phenomenology Preface] he speaks of the dawn, in the second, of the dusk; the *birth* of a new epoch in the first case, the end of an era of human history in the second' (p. 456).
'The really incisive change in his later philosophy of history affects his view of the modern world: in Jena the French Revolution and its supersession (in all three senses) by Napoleon was the decisive turning-point. It had provided the historical foundation for the picture he gives of the philosophical situation of the present and the indispensable tasks of a modern scientific system. However, in his later lectures on the philosophy of history we find that the place formerly assigned to the French Revolution and Napoleon has now been given to the Reformation. ... The conception of philosophy as the "owl of Minerva" is just the necessary consequence of his later view of the modern world as having begun with the Reformation and which in his own words has as its sole task to shape the whole world in accordance with the principle embodied in it ... Hegel's further elucidations make it quite clear that ... all subsequent events are but the development and concretization of that major turning-point and cannot produce anything radically new' (pp. 457-58).
'Thus in Hegel's later philosophy of history revolutions on the French pattern represent vain efforts to achieve through secular means, the reconciliation of reason with reality, that had already been brought about in Germany by the Reformation' (p. 459).
'"In Swabia when something is long since past people say of it: it is so long ago that it isn't true. And we may say that Christ died so long ago for our sins that it isn't true"' (Hegel, Notebook, quoted p. 463).
'Engels has provided us with very clear guide-lines for understanding [Hegel's] Phenomenology. He says that "one may call it a parallel of the embryology and the paleontology of the mind, a development of individual consciousness through its different stages, set in the form of an abbreviated reproduction of the stages through which the consciousness of man has passed in the course of history"' (p. 468).
'The line of historical development in [the first five chapters] of the Phenomenology is difficult to grasp because, although historical events and epochs appear in the correct order and exert the influence to be expected from their place in world-history, they yet manifest themselves in a form determined by the way they are mirrored in the consciousness of the individual' (p. 478).
'Hegel's resignation [in the Phenomenology], his descent to a mere imperative, an "ought", absent elsewhere in his work, is most in evidence in the concluding parts of the [Spirit] chapter where the actual content of this society turns out to be the "absolute spirit" as incorporated in religion. The "absolute spirit" signals the first appearance of that affirmation of a reality that has discovered itself, of that "reconciliation" towards which the entire philosophy of history was leading up. ... Hegel's general philosophical position has always been that the "objective spirit" must be transcended by "absolute spirit" ... But elsewhere he never fails to give a real description of the social contradictions that can only be resolved in this ultimate synthesis and supersession *before* proceeding to that "reconciliation". Here, however, the positive side, the social content of reconcilation, is left vacant and thought leaps *directly and without mediations* from the preparatory stages of social morality straight into the sphere of "absolute spirit"' (pp. 504-05).
'It was inevitable that the "absolute spirit" should be so prominent a part of the content of Hegel's theory of society, since, in the circumstances, there was no other possible role that a realist like Hegel could have assigned to Germany. ... After the fall of Napoleon this tendency sometimes became so powerful that the appearance in history of the German nation was confined entirely to the role of the incarnation of "absolute spirit", the mouthpiece of philosophy. ... For the Hegel of [Jena, however] absolute knowledge was not only and not always a merely conceptual statement of how far history had progressed and what laws determine its progress. It also had an "esoteric" sub-current in which [Hegel] hoped that a revolution of reality would be brought about or at any rate accelerated by a revolution of the world of thought. Thus in the Napoleonic era he wrote to Niethammer ... "I become more convinced every day that theoretical work accomplishes more than practical. Once the realm of ideas has been revolutionized, reality cannot hold out"' (pp. 505-06).
'The absence of any real content in Hegel's treatment of the development of society in the [Spirit chapter] makes it perfectly clear that it was objectively impossible for him to resolve the contradictions of capitalist society which he discerned ... Once he had provided a profound and central analysis of the movement of history ... once he had given an account of the Enlightenment, of the economy of capitalist society and of the French Revolution, Hegel was not able to go further and propose a definite social form in which to clothe his "reconciliation"' (p. 506).
'Hegel emphasizes that knowledge is a process, that the absolute itself is a result of the overall process. But he obviously requires a criterion with which to gauge the truth of our knowledge of the overall process. And it is at this point that ... the highest concepts of the Hegelian dialectic in all their abstruse mysticism, nevertheless spring necessarily from his own premises. For if the objectivity of the world of objects is the product of a provisional disunity in the identical subject-object, then ... it is absolutely necessary for Hegel to close the circle by positing a recovery of that original by positing a recovery of that original identity of subject and object in the form of the retraction of "externalization", the transformation of substance into subject and the annulment of objective reality as such' (pp. 532-33).
Marx: 'Hegel speaks of "externalization" and its annulment by philosophy. He does not suspect, however, that the philosophy which is supposed to annul "externalization" is itself an egregious instance of "externalization": "... the philosophic mind is nothing but the alienated mind of the world thinking within its self-estrangement - i.e., comprehending itself abstractly." ... Hegel does not perceive this and by failing to notice that alienated thought is alienated ... [he] turns the true pattern of alienation on its head. Consistently with this, Hegelian idealism identifies man with his self-consciousness' (p. 551).
'Marx's critical commnets show how [Hegel's] false identification of man and self-consciousness necessarily springs comments a false view of alienation in society. On the subjective side, there is [1] the mistaken identification of man and self-consciousness demonstrated and criticized by Marx; on the objective side, there is [2] the equation of alienation and objectification in general' (p. 551).
'Contradictory and imperfect though Hegel's views may have been ... it is undoubtedly no accident that the man who completed the edifice of idealist dialectics was the *only* philosopher of the age to have made a *serious* attempt to get to grips with the economic structure of capitalist society. Rather it is the case that the *specific* form of dialectics evolved by him grew out his preoccupation with the problems of capitalism and its economics. ... The specifically Hegelian categories ... were the first to elaborate the essential determinations to the point where the materialist dialectics of Marx could take over - criticizing Hegel and turning him the right way up, but nevertheless taking up *directly* where he had left off' (pp. 564-55).
July 21, 2018
Not the best first book on Hegel. For that see Houlgate's "An Introduction to Hegel" instead.
Still very readable. Lukacs' Marxist perspective leads to valuable insights into Hegel's system.
Might help to know Lukacs' circumstances at the time of writing (1938). References to Marx/Engels/Lenin/Stalin infallibility sometimes seem forced, as if for a censor's benefit, not a reader's.
Lukács continues to fascinate me. He was steeped in the classics of German literature and had much to say about the descent into fascism. I look forward to his 'The Destruction of Reason' from roughly the same time period (late 1930s).
Still very readable. Lukacs' Marxist perspective leads to valuable insights into Hegel's system.
Might help to know Lukacs' circumstances at the time of writing (1938). References to Marx/Engels/Lenin/Stalin infallibility sometimes seem forced, as if for a censor's benefit, not a reader's.
Lukács continues to fascinate me. He was steeped in the classics of German literature and had much to say about the descent into fascism. I look forward to his 'The Destruction of Reason' from roughly the same time period (late 1930s).
May 14, 2025
La edición de bolsillo del 70 y pico que ha acabado destrozada me lo ha hecho pasar MUY mal y esa es una de las causas de que haya tardado tanto en ventilarme estas 600 páginas (que no lo parecían a simple vista, maldito seas Grijalbo), pero eso no quita que sea una LOCURA. Es JUSTO lo que necesitaba en este momento, un antes y un después en todo lo que sé sobre Lukács, sobre Hegel, sobre idealismo alemán, sobre leninismo, sobre prácticamente todo.
Todos los capítulos son valiosos: los que discuten sin mencionarlo y en muchos casos avant la lettre con la teología política reclamando una aproximación protomaterialista a las lecturas políticas de la antigüedad y la modernidad a través del primer Hegel, el giro de Frankfurt hacia la concretización metodológica y su persistencia (también protomaterialista) en la Fenomenología, las conexiones directas de Hegel con el marxismo, sus líneas de fuga ateas, su modo de rastrear los elementos centrales de la dialéctica hegeliana en la economía política inglesa y la vida alemana, y por supuesto cómo termina todo esto en una impugnación implícita de la tesis central de Historia y conciencia de clase a través de los Manuscritos del 44 y la Fenomenología. La forma de llevar hasta el final sus conclusiones es magistral, qué mente.
En fin, todo un manual y un monumento metodológico que además está presentado muy explícitamente como un artefacto político contra las lecturas irracionalistas, intuicionistas, teologizantes y así germanizantes y fascistas de Hegel, que tiene hoy un valor inmenso. Que lo reediten, por dios.
Todos los capítulos son valiosos: los que discuten sin mencionarlo y en muchos casos avant la lettre con la teología política reclamando una aproximación protomaterialista a las lecturas políticas de la antigüedad y la modernidad a través del primer Hegel, el giro de Frankfurt hacia la concretización metodológica y su persistencia (también protomaterialista) en la Fenomenología, las conexiones directas de Hegel con el marxismo, sus líneas de fuga ateas, su modo de rastrear los elementos centrales de la dialéctica hegeliana en la economía política inglesa y la vida alemana, y por supuesto cómo termina todo esto en una impugnación implícita de la tesis central de Historia y conciencia de clase a través de los Manuscritos del 44 y la Fenomenología. La forma de llevar hasta el final sus conclusiones es magistral, qué mente.
En fin, todo un manual y un monumento metodológico que además está presentado muy explícitamente como un artefacto político contra las lecturas irracionalistas, intuicionistas, teologizantes y así germanizantes y fascistas de Hegel, que tiene hoy un valor inmenso. Que lo reediten, por dios.
December 24, 2022
Sólo me he leído unos cuantos capítulos que me interesaban, pero creo que puedo afirmar del libro entero que cae en el vicio de centrarse mucho en aspectos biográficos en detrimento del contenido filosófico. No lo recomierdo
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July 13, 2018When one is even amidst the rudimentary level undergoing a part of the whole of Hegel, time spent examining Hegelian scholarly bibliography divides up into dense ideological encampments. If Hegel is making no sense to you, it will at least make sense that there a number of ways to proceed. Though I have found a number of these volumes do not even have a single review online, there are some that do, and it boils down to muted objectivity. In order to gather an individual consensus concerning Hegel, one must do away with consensus altogether.
Depending on one's modus operandi and Hegel's corpus (Books, lectures, letters) this could, to begin, result in clear Hegelian religiosity or atheism. Yes, there are other philosophers whose critics, translators, and interpreters range from one extreme to the other; however, Hegel's ties to Marx and Marxism's main currents, from cradle to grave, are still within the last night of man's history. There is, for better or worse, a literally tremendous deal of clandestine assumption concerning where to seek Hegel (That is, biographical and systemic clarity rather than dogmatic opinion, dated generational futility, re: Hegel).
With this in mind, Lukacs's book is materialistic historiography with a high accessibility rate. When I first came upon the book in Harvard Square I was offended by its lack of footnotes (Though I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now). One lacking the discerning process concerning Hegelian myth and legend, the Frankfurt-Marxist m.o., will either be swept up in a take on Hegel's humble origins presented as revelation or lost not in a sea of jargon, but in considerations and reprisals of Germany's lugubrious politico-economical history. Wherewithal regarding the French Revolution and its continental impact are mandatory for an authentic reading experience. With this in mind, the hypothetical reader should keep in mind Koselleck and Rebecca Comay. The latter's Mourning Sickness Critique and Crisis
Thus, one does not need a traditional grounding in either Kant or Marxism in reading Lukacs's Young Hegel. These elements are assumed on the reader's behalf, but neither is as important as a serious grasp of German history at the time of Hegel. Again, Koselleck and Comay should be considered as serious predecessors to this volume. Their texts combine in a thorough way to seriously get the scholar into the frame of mind to begin to understand Hegel's life from inception unto Phenomenology.
It is less beguiling than reconciling to take into consideration not just one side of Hegelian scholarship but all of them, including the obscurer Hermetic centerpiece(s). The Left's stranglehold on academia leads to a naturally recurring albeit singly unoriginal and dogmatic materialistic interpretation of Hegel. It is, of course, the incorrigible banality of evangelical atheism.
In Hegelian scholarship there is a general trend to mold Hegel into the concept one sees fit. In truth, Hegelian linguistics almost appear to lend themselves to subjective reconstruction at first glance. Schopenhauer is not bitter when he condemns Hegel as a charlatan.
However, I argue that Hegel is more like a charlatan factory than a philosophical charlatan himself. I did not come to this conclusion until I had seriously examined atheistic, agnostic, Christian, and esoteric readings of Hegel, which themselves have their own natural plethora of bibliographical and scholastic requirements. If Hegel produces charlatans, he has the chance to do so like any thinker with enough enduring profundity for secular discipleship. Hegel produces charlatans in the same way that the Left gets Trump elected, and further, is itself a Nazi factory. The more they point the moral finger, the more they inspire their worst nightmare.
Thankfully in the case of Hegel no one is getting assaulted or imprisoned out on the streets of crocodiles, but rather finds themselves in a glorious time to undertake Hegelian inquiry. For if one can approach Hegel without the baggage of the erroneously attributed dialectic, the pre-Marx function, and can focus on the man's life, work, and European history both internal and external leading up to his philosophical life, one will be met with a canon of unknown books written in a time when the academic circuit was far less fascist and hence conscious of the Hegelian multitudes.
Summarily, like Goethe before him, he transcended politics. Politics were beneath Hegel as they were Goethe, the way it should be. Like Schopenhauer, 'Minding not the times but the eternities.' In order to approach Lukac's Hegel one must aim to proceed on philosophical knowledge alone. When at last one is well equipped and in the mood, I recommend this as ideal beach reading. At least it was, is, for me, for I find the ocean disgusting, yet umbrellas and shade relaxing, but that is another story.
Depending on one's modus operandi and Hegel's corpus (Books, lectures, letters) this could, to begin, result in clear Hegelian religiosity or atheism. Yes, there are other philosophers whose critics, translators, and interpreters range from one extreme to the other; however, Hegel's ties to Marx and Marxism's main currents, from cradle to grave, are still within the last night of man's history. There is, for better or worse, a literally tremendous deal of clandestine assumption concerning where to seek Hegel (That is, biographical and systemic clarity rather than dogmatic opinion, dated generational futility, re: Hegel).
With this in mind, Lukacs's book is materialistic historiography with a high accessibility rate. When I first came upon the book in Harvard Square I was offended by its lack of footnotes (Though I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now). One lacking the discerning process concerning Hegelian myth and legend, the Frankfurt-Marxist m.o., will either be swept up in a take on Hegel's humble origins presented as revelation or lost not in a sea of jargon, but in considerations and reprisals of Germany's lugubrious politico-economical history. Wherewithal regarding the French Revolution and its continental impact are mandatory for an authentic reading experience. With this in mind, the hypothetical reader should keep in mind Koselleck and Rebecca Comay. The latter's Mourning Sickness Critique and Crisis
Thus, one does not need a traditional grounding in either Kant or Marxism in reading Lukacs's Young Hegel. These elements are assumed on the reader's behalf, but neither is as important as a serious grasp of German history at the time of Hegel. Again, Koselleck and Comay should be considered as serious predecessors to this volume. Their texts combine in a thorough way to seriously get the scholar into the frame of mind to begin to understand Hegel's life from inception unto Phenomenology.
It is less beguiling than reconciling to take into consideration not just one side of Hegelian scholarship but all of them, including the obscurer Hermetic centerpiece(s). The Left's stranglehold on academia leads to a naturally recurring albeit singly unoriginal and dogmatic materialistic interpretation of Hegel. It is, of course, the incorrigible banality of evangelical atheism.
In Hegelian scholarship there is a general trend to mold Hegel into the concept one sees fit. In truth, Hegelian linguistics almost appear to lend themselves to subjective reconstruction at first glance. Schopenhauer is not bitter when he condemns Hegel as a charlatan.
However, I argue that Hegel is more like a charlatan factory than a philosophical charlatan himself. I did not come to this conclusion until I had seriously examined atheistic, agnostic, Christian, and esoteric readings of Hegel, which themselves have their own natural plethora of bibliographical and scholastic requirements. If Hegel produces charlatans, he has the chance to do so like any thinker with enough enduring profundity for secular discipleship. Hegel produces charlatans in the same way that the Left gets Trump elected, and further, is itself a Nazi factory. The more they point the moral finger, the more they inspire their worst nightmare.
Thankfully in the case of Hegel no one is getting assaulted or imprisoned out on the streets of crocodiles, but rather finds themselves in a glorious time to undertake Hegelian inquiry. For if one can approach Hegel without the baggage of the erroneously attributed dialectic, the pre-Marx function, and can focus on the man's life, work, and European history both internal and external leading up to his philosophical life, one will be met with a canon of unknown books written in a time when the academic circuit was far less fascist and hence conscious of the Hegelian multitudes.
Summarily, like Goethe before him, he transcended politics. Politics were beneath Hegel as they were Goethe, the way it should be. Like Schopenhauer, 'Minding not the times but the eternities.' In order to approach Lukac's Hegel one must aim to proceed on philosophical knowledge alone. When at last one is well equipped and in the mood, I recommend this as ideal beach reading. At least it was, is, for me, for I find the ocean disgusting, yet umbrellas and shade relaxing, but that is another story.
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