Fascinating interview with one of our greatest historians of 18th- and 19th-century German philosophy. An excerpt:
That Hegel is a metaphysician, and that he thinks metaphysics is fundamental to philosophy, is plain enough from his definition of philosophy. Hegel defines philosophy as knowledge of the absolute. The absolute is essentially what Spinoza calls substance. Since substance is infinite, the universe as a whole, i.e., god, Hegel is telling us that philosophy is knowledge of the infinite, of the universe as a whole, i.e, god. You cannot get more metaphysical than that. I think that Hegel scholars have to admit this basic fact rather than burying their heads in the sand and trying to pretend that Hegel is concerned with conceptual analysis, category theory, normativity or some such contemporary fad. Spooky terms like “spirit” and “absolute”? They should get their meaning from their historical context not from contemporary concepts that we impose upon them (viz., normativity). All the spookiness comes from giving a contemporary anachronistic sense to terms whose historical meaning is lost to us....No one nowadays talks about the absolute, not even people with firm and deep religious convictions. The whole Hegelian project has no resonance for us, as it once had for the Germans in the 1820s and the British and Americans around the 1880s. This is not to say Hegel is unimportant, or that we should not take his philosophy seriously. We should take him very seriously, but that is essentially for historical reasons. Hegel remains of great importance to understand ourselves, but essentially because we have all grown out of a reaction against Hegel. This is to say, then, that Hegel is still important for us for essentially negative reasons, i.e., to show us what we are not. Feuerbach wrote in his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future: “Hegel’s philosophy is the last great attempt to rescue lost and fading Christianity through philosophy…” I think that this is absolutely accurate. The more we come to terms with it, the more we can see the degree of Hegel’s relevance for us. I think that for most of us nowadays, who have accepted life in a secular age, Hegel’s project is obsolete. Christianity was still central to the life and worldview of my old supervisor, Charles Taylor, and that is why he went back to Hegel. But as a secular pagan Hegel’s project has no resonance at all for me.
And I'll take the liberty of here quoting myself from "The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud," in The Future for Philosophy (Oxford, 2004):
If we can recover the naturalistic ambitions of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, we will also accomplish two important meta-philosophical goals: first, it helps make philosophy “relevant”--as the critics of philosophy so often demand--and, second, it bridges the so-called analytic/Continental divide in philosophy. Philosophy becomes relevant because the world—riven as it is with hypocrisy and concealment—desperately needs a hermeneutics of suspicion to unmask it. And by taking these three seminal figures of the Continental traditions as philosophical naturalists we show their work to be continuous with the naturalistic turn that has swept Anglophone philosophy over the past several decades. Such a reconciliation of Continental and Anglophone philosophy may seem to some the wrong one, but it is beyond the scope of this essay to defend the importance of the naturalistic turn. All I hope to establish here is that the antipathy to naturalism often thought to be constitutive of “the Continental tradition” is simply an artifact of cutting the joints of that tradition in certain places. Much of that Continental tradition has earned the--sometimes justified--antipathy of Anglophone philosophers, but there is reason to hope that just as German intellectuals of the 1840s and 50s, in the grips of the first great naturalistic turn in philosophy, gave up on Hegel as an obscurantist metaphysician, that we, too, may leave behind Hegel and his progeny.
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