Few philosophers have so contested a reputation as that of Hegel, whose works have stood for the past two centuries as monuments to a system of thought that has been equally reviled, revered, and reworked by succeeding generations. But this edifice did not emerge from the philosopher’s head fully formed. In works produced prior to the publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807, we discover not the old professor Hegel, but Hegel the journeyman, still in the process of fixing upon the adequate form, style, and content for his philosophical system. Far from the image of the totalising intellect that defines his popular perception, we find Hegel as a late bloomer, as a man in his thirties struggling to escape the shadow of the much younger Schelling, supporting his intellectual pursuits by the piecemeal work of private lecturing. In a phrase, we discover Hegel as an ‘early career researcher,’ whose philosophy seeks both a place and a form befitting its as yet unrealised ambitions.
To excavate this nascent phase of Hegel’s philosophy, these lectures turn to his early works, from his first ‘theological’ writings and articles in Schelling’s Journal of Critical Philosophy to the fragments and lecture notes produced during his years of precarity at the University of Jena. Through these texts we will follow Hegel’s journey toward intellectual maturity, as he developed the logical system and phenomenological method that would serve as the foundations for his mature philosophy. In each of these texts we can hear echoes of his major works—the Phenomenology, the Logic, and the Philosophy of Right—which these lectures will attempt to explicate. But we can also see a philosophical labour that cannot be reduced to the final work: an experimentation with the form of exposition; an exploration of intellectual frameworks, ranging from the transcendental, to the historical, to the economic; and a gradual elaboration of a system of philosophical knowledge, the shape of which cannot be known in advance.
Lecture 1 (Daniel Lopez)
This lecture will be devoted to “The Positivity of the Christian Religion” and “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate,” two early works in which Hegel traces the immanent historical development of the Christian religion, from its revolutionary origins to its institutionalisation as the state religion of the Roman empire. By tracing the logical necessity of this historical development, Hegel helps us grasp the Christian religion conceptually. The result is one of the most important philosophical commentaries on Christianity and a propaedeutic to the rest of Hegel's philosophy which overcomes religious representations of the Absolute.
Readings:
- G.W.F. Hegel, “The Positivity of the Christian Religion,” in Early Theological Writings, trans. T.M. Knox, p. 67-181.
- G.W.F. Hegel, “The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate,” in Early Theological Writings, trans. T.M. Knox, p. 182-301.
Lecture 2 (Brendan Duncan)
In this session we look at two of Hegel's articles, both from 1802, in Schelling's Journal of Critical Philosophy. In these texts we see an early exposition—one perhaps more programmatic than any other in Hegel's corpus—of two of Hegel’s core concepts: the concept of the understanding and the concept of dialectic.
Readings:
- G.W.F. Hegel, “How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy” in Between Kant and Hegel, trans. George di Giovanni and H.S. Harris, p. 292-310.
- G.W.F. Hegel, “On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy,” in Between Kant and Hegel, trans. George di Giovanni and H.S. Harris, p. 311-362.
Lecture 3 (Gregory Marks)
This week we turn to an untitled manuscript of 1802/3, later dubbed by Hegel’s editors as the System of Ethical Life. In this work we find the earliest systematic exposition of the laws of human existence and its social life that would later be developed in the opening chapters of the Phenomenology of Spirit and in the account of civil society presented in the Philosophy of Right. But beyond this familiar content, we also discover fundamental questions of form: what is the proper style of philosophical exposition? Should a system be elaborated according to transcendental, historical, or phenomenological principles? As we will see, the search for answers to these formal problems animate all of Hegel’s attempts at the construction of a system.
Readings:
- G.W.F. Hegel, System of Ethical Life, trans. H.S. Harris and T.M. Knox.
Lecture 4 (Gregory Marks)
This lecture examines the First Philosophy of Spirit (1803/4) as the beginning of a series of accounts of human life that Hegel would repeatedly revise through the stages of his philosophical development, from the second Philosophy of Spirit of 1805/6 and the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) to the Encyclopedia Philosophy of Spirit (1817-30). Seen from its point of origin rather than from its end, Hegel’s conception of Spirit becomes visible in its endless capacity for revision—Spirit appears not as an unchanging human nature but as a perpetually reposed problem of composition, the content and organisation of which are reworked anew in every telling.
Readings:
- G.W.F. Hegel, First Philosophy of Spirit, trans. H.S. Harris and T.M. Knox.
Lecture 5 (Brendan Duncan)
This session covers the 1804/5 Jena System Logic & Metaphysics, Hegel's “first draft” of what will become the Science of Logic. Against the view that sees the Hegel of the Logic as a metaphysical retcon of the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit, we see in the Jena System a young Hegel for whom logic—including the categories of special metaphysics: soul, world and God—occupies a central position.
Readings:
- G.W.F. Hegel, The Jena System, trans. John W. Burbidge and George di Giovanni.