CU Course on Hegel,
03a
Hegel and Napoleon Bonaparte, Jena, 1806
The Young Hegel
and what drove him
Now that we have struggled with some of Hegel’s own words we
may as well take advantage of some of Andy Blunden’s illuminating scholarship.
See the download linked below for the first of Comrade Andy’s set of ten
lectures on Hegel, called by him “The young Hegel and what drove him”.
Andy sketches the world of Hegel, corresponding in time with
the first (English) Industrial Revolution, containing the Great French
Revolution, and extending to the bourgeois military conquests of Napoleon
Bonaparte. Hegel actually saw Bonaparte in the streets of Jena in 1806. Hegel
admired Bonaparte, and called him “The
World Spirit on horseback”. “World Spirit” did not mean God.
Andy Blunden points out that in an age of liberals, Hegel
was not a liberal. Andy’s remarks correspond with Christopher Caudwell’s “On Liberty”,
where Caudwell points out that men without institutions are mere brutes. (“Unfortunately not only is man not good
without institutions, he is not evil either. He is no man at all; he is neither
good nor evil; he is an unconscious brute.” – On Liberty)
Andy Blunden says: “There
is some basis for associating Hegel with notions of progress and a ‘cultural
evolution’ in which all the people of the world are subsumed into a single
narrative”. We must look to see if it is with Hegel that the idea of one
human history, and “one race - the human race” arrives. In a work like Engels’ “Origin
of the Family, Private Property and the State”, written a little over
half a century after the death of Hegel, and indeed in the “Communist
Manifesto” of 1848, the idea of a single human revolutionary history is strong.
Lastly, Andy Blunden introduces Hegel’s “The Spirit”. Read
about it and leave it to bed down in the mind. But note this passage of Andy’s
(shortened):
“One of the
difficulties that Hegel had to overcome was the problem of dualism… Kant’s philosophy got around
mind-matter dualism at the cost of introducing a host of other such dichotomies
and it was the need to overcome these dichotomies in Kant’s philosophy which
was one of the main drivers for Kant’s critics [including] Hegel. For Hegel, it
was all thought. We will presently come to how Hegel arrived at difference from this abstract
beginning, but the idea of thought, of Spirit, shaping the world, served as a
foundation upon which to build a philosophical system… Thinking [is] the
activity of the human mind, but the content of that thinking is objective, it
is given from outside the individual, it is the individual’s ‘second nature’.
The objects around us and which are the content of our perception and thoughts
are the objectifications of the thought of other people, or ourselves. We live
in a world not of matter, but of thought objects, which are, like all objects,
also material things.”
Here is a
hyperlinked list of main Works of Hegel in English:
The German
Constitution, 1798-1802 (HPW) Ø
Introduction to The
Critical Journal of Philosophy, with Schelling (1801) Ø
Faith & Knowledge
(1802) Ø
System of Ethical
Life (1802-3) Ø
Realphilosophie I
(1803-4) & II (1805-6) Ø
Phenomenonology of
Spirit (1807) Ø
The Science of Logic Ø
Part I: The Doctrine of Being
(1812)
Part II: The Doctrine of Essence (1813)
Part III: The Doctrine of the Notion (1816)
Part II: The Doctrine of Essence (1813)
Part III: The Doctrine of the Notion (1816)
Encyclopaedia of the
Philosophical Sciences (1817 & revised up till his death in 1831)
The Philosophy of
Right, 1821 Ø
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: The Young Hegel and what drove him, 2007, Andy Blunden.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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