Stephen Houlgate

In this essay, I examine Robert Williams’s account of Hegel’s concept of divine “personhood.” I endorse Williams’s claims that God, for Hegel, is not a person but exhibits only personhood, and that divine personhood realises itself in a human community based on mutual recognition. I take issue, however, with Williams’s further claim that Hegel also takes God and humanity to stand in a relation of mutual recognition to one another, since this claim, in my view, risks turning God into a person after all. To conclude, I briefly consider a difference between Williams and myself concerning the relation of right to mutual recognition.

RESUMEN Largamente desatendida o malinterpretada, la noción de caos en la filosofía de Nietzsche es una pieza constitutiva de la particular concepción del ser que este autor habría dejado apenas esbozada. El artículo se propone elaborar este concepto en la obra nietzscheana, siguiendo algunas de las metáforas que lo iluminan. Desde allí se busca plantear los rasgos centrales de una ontologia del caos, de sesgo no metafísico, que, al afirmar el carácter acontecimental de la realidad, puede verse como precursora de la ontología hermenéutica contemporánea. ABSTRACT The notion of chaos, which has long been neglected or misinterpreted, is a constitutive element of a peculiar conception of being that the philosopher only had time to outline. The objective of this article is to elaborate on this concept in Nietzschean philosophy, guided by some of the metaphors that shed light on it. This serves as the basis to set forth the main characteristics of a non-metaphysical ontology of chaos that asserts the eventful nature of reality and can thus be seen as a precursor of contemporary hermeneutic ontology.

In his excellent recent book, Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other, Robert Williams argues that, contrary to what many commentators claim, Hegel’s philosophy does not seek to swallow up individuality and difference in an all-embracing and all-consuming absolute, but rather takes individuality and differentiation seriously as essential features of the society and the world in which we live. Williams defends this interpretation by arguing that Hegel understands all forms of genuine human community and interaction - including not just civil society and the state, but also family relations and forgiveness - as modes of reciprocal recognition between individuals.

The Fifth Annual Conference of the Hegel Society of Great Britain took place on September 15–16, 1983 in the delightful setting of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. The theme of this year’s conference - “Hegel’s Dialectic” - was approached in a variety of ways by the contributors and provoked several lively and interesting discussions. The first paper of the conference was to have been given by Howard Williams, but unfortunately he had found his way to Pembroke College instead of St. Edmund Hall and so was unable to begin the proceedings. The conference started therefore with a paper by John Llewelyn entitled “The Development of Dialectic from Kant to Hegel.”

Rosen’s book renews the skeptical attack on Hegelianism. He pursues the attack well - perhaps as well as the case permits - and thus exposes Hegelianism to the discipline of an instructive test. He in fact concedes less to Hegel than his fellow anti-Hegelian in the skeptical tradition, Jacques Derrida. For where Derrida admits that Hegel is rationally impregnable and thus resorts to mockery and jest, Rosen ultimately denies such impregnability. True, Hegelianism cannot be criticized except from a standpoint within the system - which rules out negative criticism of the system. Yet behind this seeming imperviousness to criticism lurks a fatal criticism: the mere existence of internally rational standpoints outside the system refutes its claim - and apparently the claim of any philosophy - to being the universal system of human reason.

In this essay I propose to examine Hegel’s account of necessity and contingency in the Science of Logic. Anyone who dares to take Hegel’s Logic seriously in public risks being accused by legions of formal logicians of “elementary logical fallacies”. Nevertheless, John Burbidge, Dieter Henrich, and others have demonstrated that it is possible to discuss the Logic with clarity and intelligibility, and I shall endeavor to emulate their example as best as I can. One should take heed, however; even Hegel admits that “the concept of necessity is very difficult,” and rendering the concept of necessity intelligible will not eliminate that difficulty. All I can hope to do, therefore, is take us from the point at which we are not even sure what the difficulty is supposed to be to the point at which the nature of the difficulty itself becomes clear.

The aim of this article is to explain why, in Hegel's view, art's history brings it to the point at which it can no longer afford the highest satisfaction of our spiritual needs and so fulfill its own highest calling, and why, nevertheless, we moderns still need art and still need it to create beauty. I argue that Hegel advocates a modern art of beauty because he believes that what has to be given aesthetic expression in the modern world is concrete human freedom and life and that the aesthetic expression of such concrete human freedom entails beauty

In this paper I wish to consider the following sentence from Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history: “World history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom, — a progress whose necessity it is our business to comprehend.” I wish to consider this sentence because it seems to me to lie at the heart of two important misunderstandings of Hegel’s philosophy of history. On the one hand, the statement that world history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom has led some — notably Marxists — to argue that Hegel’s is a one-sided, idealist view of history, which, for all its dialectical subtlety, ignores the important role played by material, economic factors in historical development. On the other hand, the statement that this progress must be comprehended as necessary has led others — Nietzsche, for example — to see Hegel as denying the importance of human agency in history and as positing some kind of mysterious world-spirit as the cosmic puppet-master of historical change. Both of these criticisms, in my view, are based on misinterpretations of Hegel’s project in the philosophy of history, and both, I believe, can be avoided if we pay close attention to what Hegel actually means by the sentence cited above.

The publication in the mid-1980s of the new critical edition of Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion is widely recognized to have been one of the most important events in the history of modern Hegel scholarship. By differentiating between Hegel’s own manuscript and the individual transcripts of the lectures made by his students, this edition enabled a wider philosophical public to trace for the first time the development of Hegel’s philosophy of religion throughout the 1820s. In view of the great importance of this new version of Hegel’s lectures, Jaeschke’s Reason in Religion, originally published in 1986 as Die Vernunft in der Religion: Studien zur Grundlegung der Religionsphilosophie Hegels, deserves particular attention and respect, because it is the first comprehensive study of Hegel’s philosophy of religion to be based on the new edition, and because Jaeschke himself was the person primarily responsible for preparing that edition.