John Burbidge-King

Hegel suggests that spirit, in contrast to animal nature, can encounter infinite agony in the death of what was its center, and yet, by dwelling with this loss, emerge into a new form of existence. The paradigm for this move is described toward the end of the chapter on Revealed Religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit. An analysis of the key paragraph introduces a discussion of four questions: Why is this experience triggered by the death of a mediator? What characterizes the spiritual metamorphosis that results? Are such transformations restricted to revealed religion? And what does this defining characteristic tell us about the way spiritual life differs from the natural?

At a time when Hegel studies were virtually non-existent in North America, Emil Fackenheim began teaching at the University of Toronto, in a department strongly committed to the history of philosophy. He taught medieval philosophy to third-year students in the honours program, and a course on metaphysics and the philosophy of history to students in fourth year honors, a combination of interests that found expression in his Aquinas Lectures of 1961: Metaphysics and Historicity. It was, however, his graduate course on Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, given for over thirty years, that inspired many to take up the challenge of German idealism. “One day I took my courage in my hands and told F. H. [Anderson, then head of the department] that I wanted to teach a course on Hegel. ‘Do you understand Hegel?’ he asked. The question was more like an assault. ‘Yes,’ I lied, and went on to teach Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel in all the years ahead.”

At a time when Hegel studies were virtually non-existent in North America, Emil Fackenheim began teaching at the University of Toronto, in a department strongly committed to the history of philosophy. He taught medieval philosophy to third-year students in the honours program, and a course on metaphysics and the philosophy of history to students in fourth year honors, a combination of interests that found expression in his Aquinas Lectures of 1961: Metaphysics and Historicity. It was, however, his graduate course on Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, given for over thirty years, that inspired many to take up the challenge of German idealism. “One day I took my courage in my hands and told F. H. [Anderson, then head of the department] that I wanted to teach a course on Hegel. ‘Do you understand Hegel?’ he asked. The question was more like an assault. ‘Yes,’ I lied, and went on to teach Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel in all the years ahead.”

Over the years, in various journals, I have seen lengthy articles about Hegelianism in Poland, in Japan, or in Holland. Never, however, have I seen anything about Hegel studies in Canada. In Europe, for example, anglophone Canadians are simply identified with Americans. On the other hand, in the membership list of the Hegel Society of America, Canadians are lumped together with all the others “outside the U.S.A.”—this despite the fact that three times over the past thirteen biennia Canadians have been elected president of the HSA, and three Canadians vice-president.

This is a good book. The quality of Flay’s analysis grows on the reader as he moves from the introductory comments, through the discussions of self-consciousness, reason, and spirit. We have here an interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit which does justice to the Hegelian project and at the same time renders most, if not all, of the standard criticisms ineffective. But it is not just a new reading of a work which has challenged many commentators of the past and present. In addition this volume provides us with a thorough critical review of most of the literature on the Phenomenology up to 1980. The bibliography includes 543 references, each of which is either discussed or referred to, in many cases more than once, in the 140 pages of detailed notes. From now on no student of this work of Hegel can avoid turning to Flay, if only to find out what his predecessors have said.

In the conclusion to his long book on Hegel, Michael Inwood cites a passage describing the way Stephen Spender’s tutors approached the study of philosophy: “This might be described as the Obstacle Race way of teaching philosophy. The whole field of human thought is set out with logical obstacles and the students watch the philosophers race around it.” Inwood mentions it because “it represents … one of the ways in which we should not treat Hegel - disqualifying him from the race altogether on account of his obscurity or allowing a simplified parody of him to stumble at an early stage”.

When he died in 1831, Hegel had just completed a revision of the first Book of the Science of Logic, “The Doctrine of Being”. Since the revised edition has been consistently used in subsequent printing, the first edition disappeared from view, to surface again only in 1966 when Vanderhoeck and Ruprecht of Gottingen published a facsimile reprint. Along with the never-revised “Doctrine of Essence” of 1813, that original text of Book I has now received elegant treatment in volume 11 of the critical edition.

In the year 1841, the sixty-six year old philosopher, Schelling, was installed in the chair of philosophy at Berlin. Because he wanted someone with sufficient authority to combat the influence of Hegel, the new king of Prussia supported his appointment. As Crown Prince he had been concerned about the liberal and subversive elements in Hegel’s political philosophy. In power, he chose an associate of Hegel’s youth to lead the attack, a man who had disappeared from the intellectual scene just as Hegel’s star was beginning to rise. Although Schelling and Hegel were collaborators in the years that led up to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Schelling had not been converted to dialectical philosophy. Indeed, in lectures on the history of philosophy given in Munich during the years after Hegel’s death, he challenged its rationality. The move from the logic of pure thought to a philosophy of nature was unjustified. For Schelling there could be no logical bridge between transcendental idealism and the theory which expressed the inherent structures of the natural order. They are two quite different disciplines, of quite a different order. When Hegel moved from one to the other, then, he was violating a fundamental logical principle, first enunciated by Aristotle. He was passing over into another genus—from thought to reality. The image that sprang to Schelling’s mind was one vividly expressed by Lessing for an analogous problem. Between the two—thought and reality—lay a “nasty broad ditch.”

To formulate a philosophy of time is not easy, even though it would seem to be the basic requirement for any philosophy which attempts to comprehend the world of nature or of history. The problem is briefly posed: Can the conceptual framework of philosophical thought do justice to the dynamic character of time?The purpose of this paper is not to provide a definitive answer to this question. Its aim is more limited. By discussing carefully the way in which Hegel's philosophy related conceptual thought to time, it hopes to provide new perspectives on this vexing philosophical problem.