Meet the authors: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit was published in 1807 in the wake of the French Revolution of 1789. It was immediately recognised as a profound and challenging work, and has become one of the most influential texts in Western philosophy. In their new book, authors James Heartfield and Cronain O’Kelly offer us a plain English reading of a text that has inspired and confounded generations of thinkers. They demystify Hegel’s ‘dialectical’ method and explain how Hegel captured the sense that the modern age had allowed the human spirit to break free from the confines of the past.
Hegel’s influence on almost all philosophers since is immense. His ideas are found in the works of Continental radicals, such as Karl Marx and John-Paul Sartre, as well as the American pragmaticist John Dewey, and also the more measured writing of the Canadian Catholic communitarian Charles Taylor. More locally, Hegelianism has been expressed in reflections of English social liberals, such as TH Green and RG Collingwood, as well as the New Left thinkers such as EP Thompson. The late English conservative philosopher Roger Scruton described Hegel as the ‘greatest nineteenth-century philosopher’ and observed that his theories continue to be ‘exhilarating’.
Yet Hegel’s work has not been without its critics. Bertrand Russell claimed that nearly all of his ‘doctrines are false’ and that he offered us little more than a faux-intellectual mysticism in which reality is reduced to a giant ‘pot of treacle’. Worse still, Russell concluded that Hegel’s theory of the state ‘justifies every internal tyranny and every external aggression that can possibly be imagined’ – ideas echoed by Karl Popper, who made Hegel one of the enemies of the ‘open society’. Today, many trace the roots of the contemporary identitarians, social-justice warriors and left-wing radicals to Hegel, placing him as one of the forefathers of ‘cultural Marxism’.
Yet, Hegel continues to inspire a vast literature and his ‘end of history’ thesis frames many of our discussions. So what, if anything, can be learned from studying the Phenomenology? Is it really the case, as Heartfield and O’Kelly argue, that Hegel was the first to ‘treat contradiction, conflict and alienation not as problems to be solved but instead as forces that drive human creativity’? Could we benefit from fresh engagement with his historical philosophy? And might it help us to challenge those who piously seek to erase? Would a new look at history through Hegel’s eyes renew our flagging human spirit?
