r0b’s Reviews > Hegel: A Biography > Status Update

...he may consider himself lucky if only the gallows remain liberated from him."

Hegel, who had never liked Schlegel, now thoroughly and utterly detested him, and he could barely contain himself at the defeat suffered by the Austrians. Playing on Schlegel's stated desire to "liberate" Ba­varia, Hegel said, with a certain amount of what the Germans call Schadenfreude, "the opposite liberation of Friedrich Schlegel with his Catholicization of all of us has gone down the drain, and he...

...for Hegel, the dense, compact presentation of a complete thought - the style developed by Kant - was the only suitable form for rigorous speculative philosophy.

Some general and important themes nonetheless began to crystallize out of the early reviews of Hegel's book. Almost everyone complained about the turgid, dense style of the book, something Hegel himself acknowledged but nonetheless continued all his life to defend as neces­sary for the presentation of such a "rigorous" (wissenschaftlich, "scien­tific") undertaking;...

...much more radical, seeing his own personal religious views fairly completely in terms of his overall philosophical views about "mindedness" and "like-mindedness."

..the view I take is that Hegel's philosophically articulated views on religion (at least from Jena until the end of his life) were outgrowths of his theory of Geist and not vice versa (as so many Hegel interpreters have done and continue to do). In other words, I do not see Hegel as advancing his philosophical views on the basis of previously held religious views; Hegel was, as I understand him, much more radical...

...the usual cognates of either "spirit" or "mind." But, it should be noted, the use of "mindedness" and "like-mindedness" also submerges the possible religious connotations that Geist has in German (and which are obviously better caught by the term "spirit"). The choice of translations thus rests on an interpretive decision about how to treat the importance of religion in Hegel's system; the view I take is that...

... some of his discussion to help to clarify Hegel's conception of Geist. I do not think that this does any violence to the historically situated way in which Hegel in fact understood the concept of Geist. Indeed, I also think that the artificial terms "mindedness" and "like-mindedness" are in fact more helpful in translating the notoriously untranslatable German term "Geist" than the usual cognates of either...

Endnote: The citation on "I" and "We" occurs in Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 177, p. 1 10, PC, p. 140; PhG, p. 127. The terms themselves, "mindedness" and "like­ mindedness," are taken from Jonathan Lear, "The Disappearing 'We'," in Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul, pp. 282-300. Lear uses the terms to discuss Wittgenstein's conception of mind, but I have adopted his terminology and...

...later to try to make good in his "philosophy of nature."