The three major unifying ideas through Hegel’s philosophy here are, as you may have guessed by the title, freedom, truth and history. But actually/akshually, the other big idea that does unifying work throughout all of Hegel’s Philosophy is “The Idea” (or, dialectical self-determining reason). The Idea is taken as an immanent rationality in the world itself, and it’s also at work through nature and history.  However, this Idea is not some transcendent supra-natural entity. Instead, the Idea is a logic that’s immanent in reality and in our practical activities.

What needs to be clarified is what it means for the Idea to be a sort of logic. This logic is not meant to be temporal. So when Hegel is taking one through various logical stages of the development of a concept, those are not empirical-temporal stages. For example, he may start by examining the concept of space before he gets to the concepts of time or space-time in his Philosophy of Nature. But this is merely examining the logical structure of the concept of space – not claiming in some paradoxical way that there was space prior to time even existing.

While Houlgate does spend time elaborating on what the Idea could mean in terms of logic in the second chapter of this book (on Hegel’s Science of Logic) by distinguishing it from classical formal logic – it’s still slightly mysterious. I think one thing that Hegel’s Idea or logic does share with the canonical understanding of formal logic, is that logic is primarily normative. It is not a description of how people tend to reason; but rather what reason demands/obliges us to conclude and to think. And that what one is uncovering when one uncovers the Idea in a given domain, is that one is uncovering that domain’s implicit rational-normative structure and demands. The Idea is meant to be intelligible – it’s understandable by us humans.

On the other hand, I think Houlgate wants to give a more inflationary metaphysical account of what the “Idea” is. The struggle here I think is finding a soft spot between Hegel’s supposed naturalism versus a return to pre-Kantian metaphysics (e.g. the Idea as some super-substance, a World-Spirit). I think ultimately, the claim that there is the Idea at work in our practices and in reality – ultimately does cash out into the claim that there’s an intelligible rational-normative structure in play. We may say that this is “really there” to make it sound like we’ve taken on a more substantive metaphysical commitment – but I’m not sure this adds much.

Hegel and Freedom and History

Kant famously claims that human consciousness must presuppose or be laden with certain categories. The sensations we experience are comprehended through certain categories. In Houlgate’s example, in the judgement “the sun caused the stone to become warm” – all that’s sensed is the sun and the stone becoming warm. But the idea of causation here is a category or concept that our own mind brings to the experience.

Hegel follows Kant in also thinking that thought is loaded with categories. Direct, concept-less experience of the world is not possible. But Hegel departs from Kant in two big ways:

1. For Kant, we’re limited to how the world appears to us. But we cannot claim what the world is like in itself (say, independent of human perceptions or ideas).

   But Hegel makes a very intelligent move here – why suppose that our categories are not the same as categories that the world itself has? Hegel thinks that there’s a shared categorical structure between our minds and the world’s. The fact that we must think in categories is not a veil, but the very precondition that makes knowledge of the world as it really is possible.

2. For Kant, our categories were fixed and universal for all rational beings. For Hegel, such categories can be historical and thus their meanings do change through history.

For Hegel, the most important historical changes have involved changes in the categories used to understand the world. Such shifts are brought through humanity’s growing self-consciousness. Such shifts or advancements in humanity’s self-understanding of itself – are getting closer to the truth. What is the truth? That we are free, self-determining beings and that we humans have no fixed identity. Our own identities are made through our acts in history. History is the process of us coming to understand this truth about ourselves. We come to explicitly know ourselves to be what we already implicitly were. In Existentialist lingo: Existence does precede essence.

I think a good broad example of this is our understanding of ourselves, well for those of us who live in secular liberal democracies, as free individuals who can make autonomous decisions about what to do with our lives. There may well have been a time, when this was not fully the case – it was only implicit and contestable. There was a time when we were more susceptible to the powers of the natural world and to the powers of religious or political or economic superiors (we still are to a large degree). But through, say the industrial revolution, the universalisation of education, the march of secularism and liberal values, and thanks to a guy called Martin Luther and a later thing called the Enlightenment – we became to explicitly more and more understand ourselves as being free individuals. We were always implicitly such free individuals because we had the capacity to make ourselves into such free individuals. Now we explicitly realise it. We can shape ourselves, our natures are not fully fixed. That’s the truth. By taking and claiming ourselves as free, we helped make ourselves free. To paraphrase Nietzsche, we become who we are. (Although I think Hegel here would add that it’s the “ideal” realm of our ideas, that drive our political and economic and social changes. Not the other way round.)

Hegel and art

Humans understand truth in three forms of “absolute spirit” – art, religion and philosophy. Truth in art is presented sensuously or by imaginative forms. While Philosophy articulates truth the clearest – truth is felt more in religion and art, in these domains it touches people. The Idea in art, according to Houlgate, seems to be the aesthetic appearance of the wholeness, richness and freedom we ignore in our lives. The feeling of such wholeness and freedom is also (although Houlgate doesn’t say this explicitly) meant to serve an anti-alienation function. It’s to let us be at home with ourselves and to feel at home with the world before us. Hegel finds such wholeness in Greek sculpture and also in various dramatic characters – most interestingly, in Hamlet. Hamlet for Hegel is not stalling his action because he’s some existential dissonant mess in the drift of distraction, but because he is a “noble soul”. The unity and richness of Hamlet’s character is still there underneath his pain and self-division.

Hegel, while accepting that representation (the imitation of empirical objects) is a part of art – it is not the sole point of art. Art has an “idealising power” to give things a sense of grace or proportion. Even artists that attempt realism can use such idealising power to imbue their art with something out of the ordinary.

There are two broad points raised by Hegel which I think are especially interesting in contemporary discourse surrounding art:

The primary function of art is aesthetic. The main function of art should not be as an instrument to serve other political or moral ends. While art can perform these functions too – the purpose of art is to reveal the harmony and freedom of life. The artist is to raise a sense of openness to art – rather than to implement in their audience an urge to political change.

However, the dialectic is still in play here. It’s through art performing this function – that it is able to provide great practical value. The aesthetic experience of enjoying things intrinsically as for what they are allows us to suspend our immediate preoccupations.

A critique of the technical and topical liberation that art has found for itself post-Reformation and post-Romanticism. Hegel does indeed think that dissonance, division, conflict, ugliness and self-referentiality have a role in art – but that ultimately, art still should serve the reconciling function of showing us a sense of wholeness and freedom. A very interesting critique that Hegel makes of such overly “negative” art, is that it actually reverts us to a primitive understanding of ourselves. Disharmonious art that presents the world as irrational and alien, and presents our selves as divided and at the mercy of external powers – takes us back to our natural state of desire. One may imagine here something like a restless desire for nutrition or sex, it’s satisfied once but it lingers on and on as we linger in an inhumane world at the mercy of our own desires and of the world. Not an advancement, but back to cavemannerisms – says Hegel.


The Death of Art?

The second point above is also mixed in with the dialectical legacy of the Reformation for art and the threat of the “Death of art”. The Reformation gave artists an autonomy to depict many swathes of human life previously unexplored with new techniques. Art was no longer subjugated to just serving religious concerns. Protestantism is more at home in the world than Catholicism. This is because Protestantism is more “inward” (not only was it more willing to withdraw from areas of life, but also one may think about Luther’s insistence on the individual’s relation to God and the autonomy to read the Bible oneself for spiritual guidance) than Catholicism for Hegel, but also because of that – it’s genuinely more Christian (it better emphasises freedom and love). So in a strange way, what we consider secular free modern art – is an outcome of the Reformation and Protestantism.

But such bequeathed artistic freedom means that art has lost the status it used to possess. It’s no longer the highest form of articulating the truth as it was for the Greeks, precisely because of its separation/liberation from religion. For the Greeks, art was the primary means to articulate religious or philosophical truths. Art can still have a future and continue producing spectacular things – but for us living in modernity, there’s always a feeling that it is only art at the end. “No matter how excellent we find the statues of the Greek gods, no matter how we see God the Father…It is no help; we bow the knee no longer”. (P237) It no longer is the primary realm for religious-spiritual truths that spur us into action to change our lives and the world around us, nor is it any longer the realm for the great philosophical truths (as it might have been with Homer).

In turn, such artistic freedom and liberation also threatens us with the real “Death of art”. Art in the sense of performing the function of expressing the richness and wholeness of human life – is potentially “dead” because artists now focus on the harrowing and on the total freedom to express their own visions.

Now, I find this all fascinating and brilliant. I think I probably disagree with Hegel’s central tenet that art is primarily to have a reconciling function of expressing wholeness and freedom. Primarily, because one may simply disagree with trying to give a unified theory of the function of art. Secondly, one may reject Hegel’s conclusion that dissonant art merely remains dissonant. Is there really no reconciling power at work in a Beckett or a Delillo? Thirdly, one may argue that one has to confront art as a whole, not atomistically. Some artworks serve to disturb, and others to reconcile – as long as some balance is maintained then this is fine. But I think it will be more interesting to push Hegel’s argument here, to strengthen them. Here are a couple of potential points in his favour:

1. Look, the reason why so much contemporary art is garbage – is precisely because it ignores its main status as art. We may well agree with the political and moral motivations and aims of much art – but if it’s done badly in terms of its basic aesthetic qualities, then surely its political and moral ideals are also compromised too? Also, isn’t there something pernicious about merely reducing art to political ends? Isn’t that itself a kind of instrumentalist worldview that is also symptomatic of much of the moral decay of modernity?

2. Why does all art really have to be primarily political? There are other modes of articulating moral and political truths (for Hegel, religion and philosophy – in our own time, social science and political theory and journalism). The point of art is primarily aesthetic – that’s what gives art its autonomy from the rest of human culture.

3. The issue with total artistic freedom is that it leaves us unsure with what the criteria for identifying art even is and what separates better art from worse art. If we are to justify our aesthetic preferences and experiences to some degree, surely we need some unified account of art and what art is for – even if we do not accept Hegel’s theory?

4. Dissonant art does influence our implicit worldview. If the only art that one concerns oneself with is politically pessimistic, concerned with alien powers and the irrational, as depicting the fragmented self – then this will feed into our own views and ways we act in the world. Instead of actually being subversive of the status quo, there’s a danger that such art in aggregate simply produces a cynicism and political fatalism. “The world is fucked up and so are we, and you cannot change what is.”
   
   Hegel and religion

I found this chapter on religion to be the most interesting of the whole book. Here, it seems we not only get Hegel’s naturalistic theology – but also a hint at ethics which in turn seems to anticipate American Pragmatism (the importance of community) and Existentialism (radical freedom gained through confronting death).

Recall that religion is one of the three ways of articulating the truth. This truth is that reason is in the world and that we are sustained by this reason. While religion lacks the clarity and accuracy of Philosophy – it remains indispensable for Hegel because it is where the truth can be felt in one’s heart, and thus cause one to transform the world around them. Hegel pre-emptively agrees with Marx that the philosophers have only interpreted the world –  but the change is to come from religion.

For Hegel, the recognition that our existence is owed to the rational character of the world itself – is recognised in religion through worship of “God”. But Hegel thinks that “God” is really the same thing as “The Idea” – reason in the world. Hegel thinks that it’s because religion often articulates such truths in non-conceptual ways (e.g. via images) that it is not to be taken fully literally. Although Houlgate would argue that Hegel is a genuine Christian, I think this alone sets Hegel on the path to what I would call a “non-literal” understanding of religion. Since after all, most religious people do understand their concepts and beliefs in literal-metaphysical terms.

To recap, Christianity for Hegel is not about a belief in a supernatural other-worldly being. Hegel thinks that the previous understanding of God as a transcendent being – is immanently questioned by Christianity itself. Since God ends up sending Jesus into the world – which reveals God as the process of becoming spirit in the community of believers. God (the Idea) becomes fully present in the world as spirit. For God to really fulfil its promise as being a God of Love – it’s even necessary for God to become spirit and suffer and die. This means that God gives up the previous transcendence that is usually thought of as essential to God. God also has to become spirit because it’s God’s own essence to know himself – but this radically requires the human community. God becomes self-consciousness as human self-consciousness.

I think all of that is somewhat still confusing, so I’ll try to articulate my understanding of it. I think what Hegel is getting at, is that the Classical Theist conception of God (Omnibenevolent, Omnipotent, Omniscient) – is a concept that must dialectically mutate. And Hegel thinks that this conceptual mutation occurs through the story of Jesus dying on the cross and of the Holy Spirit. Take the property of Omnibenevolence. For God to be truly all-loving, or at least loving, God must necessarily become the spirit of love that fills the hearts of the human community. God cannot remain as a divine abstraction separate from us. Now let’s take Omniscience – surely being all-knowing means that God must know itself? Well for God to know itself, requires this working through humans. God knows itself as the community – as human self-consciousness. (In Houlgate’s reading – he emphasises the mutation as occurring from God’s nature as graceful, loving and freeing. But I emphasises the three Os, to better get at a sense of the mutation from a transcendent to a naturalised conception of God.)

By Jesus’s willingness to die – he shows that human life can be freed from our self will, our self-servingness and our “wayward desires”. What lets us renunciate our selves – is recognising that our own activities in the world do not completely belong to us. We are sustained by God’s love (The Idea) and thus, our activities belong to God too. However, we need faith to enter further into our hearts – a greater sense of our reconciliation and reliance on God will give us a greater freedom from self-will. Thus, enters the community of believers – it’s in acts of worship that we attain our deepest awareness of being united with God.

However, things still need to get deeper. We must also feel our own efforts and intentions as worthless, as nothing. We must experience a sense of our own “nothingness” and wholly trust God’s love. We must lose faith in ourselves to regain a deeper faith in Christ. We are nothing and we need do nothing to gain forgiveness. “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.”

The clearest confrontation with our “nothingness” is our death, that “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns”. That our lives do come to an end – for Hegel means that we are not in ultimate control of them. We are not fully independent islands that birth ourselves into the world. We’re a moment in a wider process – where we come into being, but must pass away too. It’s through radically reconciling ourselves to our mortal nature – and that death is God’s/The Idea’s plan for us – that we can actually attain a new freedom. Because we no longer fear death – we no longer let it be a constraint on our freedom. By accepting death, we remove this dark anxious stain on our lives. By being unafraid of death, we can live in a way where we are “unafraid of life”. Hegel recognises that truly accepting our deaths will not be easy – indeed, Houlgate poignantly mentions Hegel as discussing the need for the heart to be broken in worship. One only has to truly think about one’s own future death, the loss of consciousness, the loss of our memories, the loss of our loves – to get a glimpse of the terror.

But now, after renouncing our selfish desires through a confrontation with death – a life of love seems to be before us. The life of freedom is one where our hearts are serving the good of others. We do not become who we are by living by our own particular interests – we find ourselves in the other, by their recognition. It is the “I that is We and the We that is I”. By being freed from our concern for ourselves (by being reconciled with death) we are opened up to the sufferings of others.

Hegel and metaphysics and logic

The chapters on Hegel’s metaphysics (Science of Logic) and his Philosophy of Nature (specifically his Philosophy of Physics) were the hardest in the whole book. The moves and concepts examined here are abstract by abstract standards. Nonetheless, they’re of fundamental and systematic importance to Hegel’s project – so a word must be said. We’ve seen that in post-Reformation art – artists acquired a freedom in technique and subject matter. Likewise, thanks to Kant and Fichte – freedom in the form of free self-determining reason is the greatest authority in Philosophy. And of course, In modernity – we’ve come to understand ourselves as self-determining rational creatures – hence our demands in the social and political areas of life too.

This is where metaphysics comes in – while in the 19^th century, philosophers gave up metaphysics due to Kant’s critique (and because of the political upheavals of the day) – Hegel thinks that modern freedom requires metaphysics. As thought is the main element of modern freedom that’s brought changes in our self-understanding and practical activities. For Kant, we’re considered moral beings insofar as our will is determined by reason instead of interests or desires. Likewise, thought frees us from illegitimate authority by being able to scrutinise everything – to subject all assumptions to critique. Thus, the modern awareness of freedom requires a presuppositonless account of thought.

Note: Slight upcoming logical torture

Thus, in distinction against formal logic, rational thought for Hegel must suspend several assumptions. For example, it must suspend the law of non-contradiction (that propositions cannot stand in contradiction with another). Or a bit more formally, the principle that it is not the case that there can be a P and a Not-P. P standing for one proposition, and Not-P standing for the negation of that proposition. It’s not possible for both a proposition and its negation to be true. I have my doubt about whether Hegel succeeds in truly suspending the law of non-contradiciton, which I will return to later.

Another important distinction is that rational thought for Hegel is not to be bound by deductive validity and inference rules. Here’s an illustration of such deductive validity: If Hegel had a metaphysics, then Hegel was philosopher. Hegel had a metaphysics. Therefore, Hegel was a philosopher.

The structure of this piece of reasoning works like this: The first statement is a “conditional” – it connects two statements, that Hegel had a metaphysics and that Hegel was a philosopher. The second statement is simply that Hegel had a metaphysics. It’s an affirmation of the first part of the conditional. Thus the last statement, the conclusion follows – Hegel was a philosopher.

There’s a formal proof rule called “conditional elimination” that allows us to infer Hegel was a philosopher. If we a have a conditional, and we also have that conditional’s first statement as a separate affirmed statement – then we can infer the second part of the conditional.

Apologies if this is still all badly explained. The important part of all this is simply this: Hegel basically diverts from classic formal logic, because he thinks that things can hang in contradiction and he does not think that his logic/thought has to abide by formal deductive rules.

Back to the claim to presuppositionless thought and a sketch of the Science of Logic

Hegel’s claim to think without presuppositions, is effectively to think without assuming various logical or rational principles. The project of the Science of Logic is to figure out what categories we must employ in our thinking – and also how those categories themselves are to be conceived. Again, this is a Post-Kantian project. Hegel does agree with Kant’s point that thinking is endowed necessarily with categories but he thinks that Kant started off on the wrong track by claiming that it was the judgement that was the minimal unit of thought.

How the hell do we get started with thinking without assuming anything (apart from the demand to think freely)? Well, that’s why Hegel thinks that we have to begin with the most abstract, indeterminate thought of all – the empty thought of being. This thought has no particular determinate content to it – it is not about reality or anything even in reality. The least that we can say about this empty thought of being, is that thought simply is.

However, there’s an objection to this that Hegel agrees with. Surely, even to think – no matter how minimal or abstract, is still to think about something. Even if it is to be thinking about nothing. Thus, we’ve moved from the empty thought of being, into the thought of nothing. But in turn, this thought of nothing transitions back into thinking about an indeterminate something. This is because in thinking about nothing – one is still thinking about something – a pure is. This impasse then leads to the thought of pure becoming – the thought of this dialectical oscillation between being of something and nothing.

I won’t torture you further, but these sorts of intricate dialectical movements where one thought/category necessarily turns into another – continues in Houlgate’s explanations. It’s what the Science of Logic is up to. Eventually, we do reach a determinate thought and Hegel shows how further categories are derived from this. Houlgate also points out that categories in the logic of being “pass over” into seemingly unrelated categories (being into nothing); but in the logic of essence – something more like entailment (e.g. the concept of cause entailing the concept of effect) goes on. While only the concepts in the logic of concept stay the same as they change.

Crucially, in the last part of SoL – thought recognises that its categories are not just of determinate being – but of thought itself. Thought becomes explicitly aware of what it has been – self-determined thinking. The final concept is The Absolute Idea, self-determining reason itself.

Where the hell are the metaphysics in all of this (you might ask)? Well Hegel’s Science of Logic is also about the structure of reality (being) itself, not just the structure of thinking. Recall again one of the moves that Hegel makes against Kant. For Hegel, the Kantian claim that our thinking is limited to a world of appearances is itself an assumption. We should not assume that the external world of things exceeds the comprehending grasp of thought. The determinations of our thinking, are themselves also determinations of things themselves. Welcome to Absolute Knowing.

Conclusive Notes

This review has become already much longer than I expected, so I will simply upload it for the time being. I will later come back and add some brief sections on Hegel’s political theory, Houlgate’s distinctive reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit (which is worth talking about), the transition into the Philosophy of Nature and some criticisms of his metaphysics. (I might do all this in the comments.)

I am in fundamental sympathy with Hegel’s project. While I have various criticisms here and there, I think I do accept the core spirit of Hegel’s claims (if not the specific doctrines he espouses). That the categories of thought and reality are in some sense, the same. Or at least that thought, by virtue of being conceptual, can also grasp a conceptual reality. I do think that freedom is of importance in theoretical, and not just practical, philosophy. It is of utmost importance that we are capable of undertaking the task of scrutinising our deepest assumptions. I also agree that it’s our freedom of thought, that gives us the rational autonomy to scrutinise how we are to organise ourselves and to decide what projects to undertake in our lives. I also am in sympathy with his theology – that the significance of Christianity (and of religion) lies in something like a radical ethics where we give ourselves over to a life of love after confronting our finitude. Here, I think the Pragmatist tradition updates this in a brilliant way: We don’t just depend on The Idea, but our justificatory practices to each other depends on a notion of a community. Thus, if I am committed to the idea of justification (and of being a rational being), I am also committed to the community that makes those justificatory and rational practices possible in the first place.  And I love his taste for the running dialectic through things, how things seem to change into their at-first-alien others – and how our categories themselves are not immune from this. It's not hard then to see why Hegel remains a giant to be reckoned with for so many.