Kenley R. Dove

What I hope to do in this paper is to sort out three basic senses of the word ‘creativity’ in order to make clear why creativity is not a basic category in Hegel’s philosophy. When it is read as a systematic philosophy, Hegel’s philosophy runs counter to nearly every current usage of the word ‘creativity,’ whether it be theological, common sensical, artistic or scientifically empirical. Which is not to say that creativity has no place in his philosophy. But, whereas Jewish and Christian theology, modern art, modern common sense and empirical science take creativity to be of fundamental significance, Hegel - as Professor Schmitz’s paper shows - “weakens” the theological, epistemological and aesthetic doctrines of creativity to an argument concerning the necessity of contingency presented in his Science of Logic.

What, then, is the method of Hegel's PhG if it is not dialectical? Insofar as it can be characterized in a word, it is descriptive. The study of a science, in Hegel's sense, requires that the student, through a tremendous effort of restraint, give himself completely over to the structural development of that science itself. This, I take it, is what Hegel means by the famous phrase "die Anstrengung des Begriffs". The true philosopher must strenuously avoid the temptation of interrupting the immanent development of the subject-matter by the introjection of interpretive models; he must rather give up this instinctively felt prerogative or "freedom" and "instead of being the arbitrarily moving principle of the content," his task is "to submerge this freedom in the content and let the content be moved through its own nature, i.e., through the self as the self of the content, and to observe this movement".