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Articles

The Trouble with Hegel

Chris Christensen thinks Hegel shouldn’t have stopped where he did.

Hegel’s philosophy will always undergo revivals because he appeals to those with a bent for reason and a yen for metaphysics, and Hegel dishes that combo out in spades. This is illustrated by his work The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), parts of which Theodor Adorno called “literally incomprehensible.” Hegel’s contemporary and bitter rival Arthur Schopenhauer called him a charlatan who purposely wove his words into tangled vines of verbiage to mask his philosophical shortcomings. Still, to his admirers who have waded through the Phenomenology it is a metaphysical masterpiece. My trouble with Hegel lies elsewhere: in his Philosophy of History (1837), where Hegel traces the development of the ‘consciousness of freedom’ through several countries over three thousand years.

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