Beiser's Hegel

Sorry to take up more space (my colleagues at Long Sunday must have taken the advice and gone on holiday with the CIA) but I thought I’d share with you how good I think Frederick Beiser’s new book Hegel is. It seems like the fruit of many years teaching the subject, and sure enough he’s distilled the essentials down to a very readable, admirably clear and blissfully doxa-free account of Hegel’s philosophy. What’s more it has a nice cover, and though one isn’t supposed to judge a book by it, this sure beats Continuum’s recent gaudy efforts.

I thought I’d quote just two paragraphs from it, where Beiser is setting the context in which Hegel is beginning to forumulate his ideas, during the final decade of the 18th century, amidst debates floating about in the wake of the reception and popularizing of Kant by Rheinhold and Fichte. To my mind this passage is pretty mind-blowing, and shows that those who read Kant (unlike my first reading of him which ended pretty much in bewilderment) saw straightaway how revolutionary Kant was, but almost as quickly saw what his flaws were and could pinpoint them exactly. By the end of the 18th century these readers of Kant had already gone through a series of arguments and counterarguments about the implications of his work which we forgetful children of the 20th century repeated, not having realized the work which had already been done.

Starting in the early 1790s in Jena, a host of young thinkers began to criticize foundationalism, and more specifically the attempt of Rheinhold and Fichte to base Kant’s critical philosophy on self-evident first principles. Because it focused on the possibility of these first principles or Grundsätze, their critique of foundationalism has sometimes been called the Grundsatzkritik. In the forefront of this critique were some leading students of Rheinhold and Fichte, among them Benjamin Erhard, Immanuel Niethammer, Carl Immanuel Diez, Friedrich Carl Forberg, Carl Christian Scmid, A.W. Rehberg, Friedrich Heinrich Weiβhuhn, and Paul Johan Feuerbach. Of no less importance for the critique were some of the young romantics, Hölderlin, Friedrich Schlegel, and Novalis.

…

It is difficult to summarize the richness and complexity of the Grundsatzkritik, a development lasting nearly a decade and involving many thinkers. Here we can only hint at some of the main lines of its criticism, some of the basic reasons for its doubts about the possibility of beginning philosophy with self-evident first principles. (1) The first principle would have to be analytic (of the form ‘A is A’) or synthetic (of the form ‘A is B’). If it were analytic, it would be trivial and without consequences; if it were synthetic, it would be deniable and so subject to skeptical doubt. (2) It is impossible to justify a first principle by appeal to immediate experience, some self-evident intellectual intuition, because it is always possible for someone else to appeal to a contrary intuition. (3) The first principle cannot be merely formal, a law of logic, because that is not sufficient to determine material truth; but if it has some content, it must be very general to encompass the great variety of truths subsumed under it; and such generality is insufficient to derive the specific truths of experience. (4) Even if the first principle were sufficient to derive an entire system, it would not follow that it is true; we can determine its material truth only by consulting experience itself. But experience too is no final arbiter: we can conceptualize, systematize or interpret the same facts in incompatible ways.

Beiser lists a fifth point, but I'm already testing your patience. Suffice to say, it's a great book. Go read.

Comments

[Jared Woodard]

Thanks, this does look like a good read. I strongly second the comment about cover art.

[Matt]

Well I'm probably the least qualified one to comment on such a recommendation. So I won't. But if anyone knows his Hegel it is YH.

"Hagel," incidentally, is the name of a new American TV ad about our little cowboy quagmire:

http://tinyurl.com/czfdq

Not to hijack YH's comment thread, but since the patent is pending (full permission to delete or amusingly alter is hereby granted), here's what I'm reading––not very closely or well at all––this stormy afternoon.

Over There: From the Bronx to Baghdad, a memoir, by Alan Feuer

...disappointing on multiple levels, the protagonist, a NYTimes reporter, reminds me of friends I had in highschool, affectedly reluctant but stubborn conformist, demonstrative ignoramous. But then I suppose, some of my friends are still prone to barfights too. A weirdly entrenched and unoriginal, frat-boyish, default machismo these days...sort of sheepish and self-conscious, as if just reporting for social duty, almost. It's too bad these people run our media (and our country). But here's a sample passage:

"At any rate, it was not good news about the hipsters. T.R. [short for "This Reporter"––I mean how fucking cheesy can you get] had always disliked hipsters. In zoological terms, he meant the sort of young, attractive, wealthy, clever, high-ironic city type to be found in any of several Lower East Side ratholes with a feedstore gimme cap, a vintage T-shirt, a job in the production end of anything, a habit of quoting television shows, and a bad Chinese tattoo. One could slice them in a hundred ways, it did not matter; like the towns they were raised in, they lacked some hard rich core of personality, some iron ore of self. So they were reaching, always reaching, for identity, for history, for the lost remote control. Even their politics were much the same––they reached for them like hand-me-downs. Just last month T.R. had seen a group of hipsters at an anti-war march in New York. There they were––Greens, queers, whalers, Naderites, pro-Palestinians, anti-globalists, free-trade haters, late converts to Marx––they had that patchwork quality of a freshman campus activity fair. As they marched down Second Avenue, a fire truck had tried to cut through the crowd on its way to fight a fire. The hipsters, assuming that any city vehicle with lights and sirens was an evil detachment, had thus seen fit to block its progress. And this very company itself had lost a half-dozen men on 9/11. And when the firemen hollered out that there were lives in danger, move!, the hipsters hollered back that the firemen were...FASCIST!"

One senses the narrator making it up, getting enthralled as he goes along, perhaps pillaging and honing from his drinking buddy's talking points, or for that matter the latest Thomas Friedman column. But at least distinguised economists and former advisors to President Clinton know better than to imitate Fox News, right?

Why is it so pernicious, this jubilatory rhetoric? Well, because it in a proudly, defiantly banal sense it is true. Hipsters ARE repulsive, and they are everywhere, increasingly alienated by a country that has no need for their often-enough facile and shabby liberal arts education.

Anyway, T.R. harbors no illusions about the real motivations for war. And yet he supports it. Culturally. Because he supports the President. The same thing could be said for most military families. We are now at the tipping point. You know, the one at which John Kerry began recording veterans stories so long ago. Only this time, as I believe Tupac once said of Bob Dole, he's too old to know how the game's told.

But word to Alan Feuer (http://tinyurl.com/9mx58 ) or whoever Tool scribbled this piece of shit for him: You're not Hemingway. You're really not even close.

A Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal, by Asne Seierstad (author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Bookseller of Kabul)

...is better, barely. Cliche-ridden, also an advance proof copy courtesy of the day job, that rightly sat around long enough to no longer be advanced.

Blanchot's Vigilance, by Lars Iyer

...so far the first and the last chapter are very good, despite all charming complaints on his blog, Spurious.

On Escape, by Emmanuel Levinas

...is getting heavier. I feel I'm lacking some Bergson, and Talmudic references.

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. II

...has some great essays on Kafka

Publicity's Secret, by Jodi Dean

...is heavy on the Habermas, or on leaving Habermas, and very good. Expect a joint post here with Alain on it soon. Watch this space.

Kafka on the Shore, by Murakami

...dragging my feet about finishing, reviewing it hopefully from a non-humanist angle, contra Powells (it's like Sartre-lite popcorn for teenagers––maybe I'll give it to my niece).

[hum]

YH, Thanks for the recommend! Curious to know if the book addresses Hegel's "relations" with Schelling and Holderlin?

[Christoph]

Just ordered it. Thanks YH.

Matt, that line about Murakami is quite brilliant. Have not read Kafka on the Shore, but holds true for Sputnik Sweetheart and to a lesser extent the Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

[YH]

hum, there are a few pages in the biographical part at the beginning of the book on the 3 roommates at the Tuebingen Stift (Beiser says the story about them planting a tree to honour the Revolution is probably false), and some good discussion later on how Hegel aligned with and differed from Schelling's Naturphilosophie, all well focussed through a comparison of their accounts of the subject-object relation.

In general I would say the book is not breaking massively new ground, but it draws together the best re-readings of Hegel from the last decade and presents them in very readable (I would say novice-post-grad level) form.

[Brad]

By and large, Beiser typically churns out really good stuff. His stuff on early Romanticism & idealism has a historian's perspective that is especially helpful in light of contemporary appropriations of the era.

[anon]

God, pages were so much THICKER in those days...almost like a photo album.

Of course for this generation photo albums are a thing entirely of the past...

[Luke]

I'm in the middle of Beiser's book on German Idealism, which is very good. Thanks for the review, it's exciting to have a new biography of Hegel.

[anonymous]

Nice post. A fresh review is here (via PTDR)