Customer Reviews

Hegel: A Biography

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Terry Pinkard, who has already made notable contributions to Hegel scholarship, goes a step further by providing us with a truly outstanding biography of one of the 19th century's greatest thinkers. Pinkard's prodigious research enables him to offer a richly detailed portrait not only of Hegel himself, but of his wife, his family (including his illegitmate son, whom he later formally adopted), his friends, colleagues, and enemies. For the first time, readers will be able fully to understand the enormously complex social and political--not to mention philosophical!--context in which Hegel's thought developed. In addition to all this, Pinkard provies brief but penetrating discussions of all of Hegel's works. Although the book is long, I found myself continually drawn back to it, so fascinated was I by what I was learning about Hegel's life and times. My appreciation for Hegel's thought, which is at times notoriously obscure in part because of Hegel's dense prose style, has been significantly enhanced because of what this book taught me about Hegel's effort to reconcile the particularist demand of German "home towns" with the universalizing impulse of Enlightenment modernity. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

I'm glad to see that Cambridge is building on its series of philosophical biographies, established last year with the very nice volumes on Hobbes and Spinoza. This Hegel biography has the advantage of the far greater documentation available on the life of this 19th century giant.

Where it most outdoes the usual familiar accounts of Hegel's life is in the treatment of his early years. Other than scattershot anecdotes, his years in Stuttgart and Tuebingen and Bern and Frankfurt are usually treated as a period of echoey darkness leading up to the philosopher's drmatic residence in Jena. Thanks to Pinkard's skilled account, we are enabled to live with Hegel in detail through the years of his ambitious but stifled youth. This biography will be sure to shake up our usual conception of Hegel's education.

While you are unlikely to approach Hegel aa a novice, all the same, if you were and did, this is a remarkably well written, clear presentation of Hegel's life and thinking, as well as a thoughtful setting of the philosophical questions of his time. It was a time when thinking still mattered to the spirit of a people. Pinkard has written a great account of a life of a man who sought his own voice after so many disappointments. His friendship with Holderlin, his relationship with his illegitamate son, his rancourous rapport with his nephew, the slights suffered working for philistines or in the shadows of lesser minds were the sand in his soul that ground a pearl. Pinkard details them all with a truly 21st Century American voice, and in so doing makes the drama of Hegel's life present to today.
Pinkard is another great Georgetown Hegelian in the line of Wilfrid Desan, and in so doing weaves the dynamics of Hegel's life into the dialectics of his thinking. Pinkard presents a terrifically concise and to the point analysis of the immediate momentums initiated by Kant, Fichte, Schelling and others, casts them in as true a light as possible, and so opens an entire tradition, well regarded for its complexity for consideration by those trained in this tradition as well as by those wondering what all the fuss was about. Hegel was not an Ivory Tower elitist. His life formed the ground of his philosophy, and while he was also not an everyman, he is one in whom thinking took hold at any early age and kept calling him out into its light. Hegel meant that his writings have an impact. He was not interested in building flights of fancy that had no repercussions for culture, politics, spirituality. He distanced himself from traditions that would have ensnared him, compromised his boldness, and left him in a tradition, instead of clearing new ground.
Pinkard clearly shows how and why you have to deal with Hegel in Western Philosophy, just as much as you have to confront Plato, Aristotle, Kant. Nothing was the same after Hegel. History, psychoanalysis, culture, politics were all forever changed. His was an original voice, and the call, once heard, altered everything.
I keep returning to the point that this is a great read. And it is! So novice or enthusiast, you'll find this a book you'll return to often. This should be mandatory reading for anyone pursuing a higher education. The lessons of the life as well as the philosophy produced deserve thoughtful consideration.

The idea of an 800-page book as an easy introduction to Hegel sounds like a morbid joke guaranteed to send any student running for Cliff's Notes or a class change. Pinkard, who teaches at an Eastern university, has produced a very readable and meticulously researched account of Hegel's life, plus 4 chapters of a very basic explanation of his philosophy - if this isn't quite "Hegel for Dummies", it's as close as you're going to get. In contrast to the complex and obscure Hegel (even Germans have trouble with Hegel), Pinkard's own writing is clear, straightforward, free from jargon, and well-organized. Hegel as a person has always tended to disappear into the great systems of his own intellect. Pinkard successfully retrieves the man behind the thought, giving us a much more human Hegel, who enjoyed playing whist, dressing up for costume balls, and eating Christmas cookies. His life is covered in chronological fashion, with considerable attention paid to the earlier years. Particularly interesting and important, however, are the last ten years of his life in Berlin. How did it happen that Hegel, who was born in Stuttgart, enthusiastically supported Napoleon, drank a toast every year on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, and who had never even visited Berlin until he was offered a job there, became in that short time a public figure and came to be viewed (as he often still is) as the leading apologist for - or theorist of - the Prussian state? Pinkard, whose previous books include a biography of Varnhagen Von Ense, is thoroughly at home in the time period, and offers us an striking view of the issues and infighting.

Those who have always wanted to know more about Hegel, but didn't know where to begin, and those who are studying him for a required course, should start with this book; and even old radicals who cut their eyeteeth on dialectic should find a few fresh insights.

I was afraid that this biography would be as oscure as the infamous oscure prose of the Hegel himself. What a relief!. As a layman that likes to delve into philosophy I found this book extremely useful not only in understanding Hegel the man, but also in understanding his ideas. Pinkard succeeds in putting Hegel in the context of the turbulent political times and in the exciting cultural milieu prevalent in "Germany" at the time when philosophy flourished like it hadn't for centuries.

Hegel's single minded persuit of his career and of his own "Bildung" are described in highly readable fashion. As a bonus we also get a glimpse at the petty infighting among the pleiad of philosophical "stars" of the time. Probably at no other moment in human history since the glory days of Greece so many great thinkers where alive and interacting. The cast of characters includes Kant, Fichte, Schlegel, Schilling, Jacobi, Hamman, Holderlin and Goethe himself, with a special guest appearances by Schopenhauer and Marx.

If you are interested in the history of thought, you can't miss this book.

It would be difficult to justify a biography of a philosophy as being essential: if you want to understand a philosopher you should read their works instead. But Pinkard manages to wage an astonishingly battle on two fronts: first, elaborating on his philosophical development with a view towards prominent influences and second, foisting off common misconceptions about Hegel.

So, for part one. Hegel is difficult. It was, as I learned, his distinguishing mark in early years: "more obscure than Fichte!" was something like a slogan. Pinkard does a marvellous job of showing the diversity and complexity of Hegel's experience (the chapters on his university friendship with Schelling and Hoderlin are especially absorbing) and pulling out some of the more unexpected sources of his thought. (Adam Smith and Gibbon and the New Testament, for example.) Ever since Dilthey more attention has been payed to Hegel's early work and for good reason. Moving from this account Pinkard gives excellent insights into the genesis and exposition of Hegel's notoriously difficult "system." Having been absoloutely dumbfounded by Hegel in the past I think this book is the best possible introduction to what Hegel is up to in his Philosophical work. Pinkard in addition to being keen has some serious philosophical chops so he brings out some aspects of Hegel that get overlooked.

As for the second front Pinkard does a great job of countering some of the more cartoonish and absurd pictures of Hegel: the pioneer of German nationalism, the doddering obscurantist, the proto-fascist conservative. Pinkard does a good job showing how the most common images of hegel are thorough characters whose longevity has more to do with the fact that few people actually read or know much about Hegel. I particularly liked the way Hegel's complex political commitments were mapped out and how the more intimate aspects of Hegel the person (his addiction to whist, his love of coffee) were brought out.

I am given to understand that Hegel scholarship is experiencing something of a revival these days, and by my account Pinkard's biography should be at the forefront of any movement. He deserves a great deal of credit for producing a skillfull, well-written and insightful work on an extremely difficult thinker.

I have just begun reading Terry Pinkard's biography of Hegel, but I am familiar with his other writings on Hegel, and what he seems to have done here is offer both biography and a very good articulation of Hegel's philosophy threaded within it. Another Hegel scholar Merold Westphal remarked in his "History and Truth in Hegel's Phenomenology" that 'Hegelese is a dead language, and should remain so'. I agree with Westphal, and this makes it all the more important that people like he and Pinkard are doing hermeneutic justice within a contemporary English idiom to Hegel's most important contributions. Pinkard, along with the Americans Robert Brandom and Robert Pippin, is a major contributor to a new and more accurate understanding of Hegel in English-speaking philosophy. This new understanding is post-Kantian and post-metaphysical; it emphasizes the temporal normativity of reason as Hegel's most important insight; it is compelling and highly relevant to people versed in the problems of 20th-century analytic philosophy. There is also implicit in Pinkard's articulation of Hegel a strong understanding of the limitations of 20th-century 'continental', phenomenological, or Heideggerian philosophy. In my view the greatest value of Pinkard's book is the implicit (and sometimes explicit) critique of both 20th-century analytic and continental philosophy that is threaded throughout his clarifying articulation of Hegel's philosophy. Highly recommended for anyone concerned about the state of philosophy.

There are already many good reviews to this book, so I will only add that I was somehow worried I could not understand it. Far from that, it is easy to follow and in order to savour it one only needs to be a curious layperson. So my rate is 5 (content) and 5 (pleasure).

I also suggest reading the following readable books dealing with philosophical matters in addition to Pinkard's interesting book: a) "Justice. What's the right thing to do" by Michael Sandel; b) "The God Question: What Famous Thinkers from Plato to Dawkins Have Said About the Divine" by Andrew Pessin; c) "The proper study of mankind" by Isaiah Berlin; and d) "Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors" by Susan Sontag. Other interesting books, but no so readable as Pinkard's, would be the following: 1) "The accessible Hegel" by Michael Allen Fox; 2) "Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy" by Rüdiger Safranksi; and 3) "The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies" by Thomas McEvilley.

My favorite biography of my favorite philosopher. Previous favorite was the Walter Kaufmann. One can only wonder what intimate details might be uncovered by a Ray Monk treatment but I suspect we aren't likely to get one. Ever. It puzzles me why Peter Singer's little book might be thought of interest to any but those who don't want to read any Hegel.

Two of my favorite Hegel comments are gone thanks to this book. The death bed quote and another item that I can't think of at the moment but I am sure will come to me the next time I go to use it. I suppose another issue is the whole way to approach the dialectic. As many times as the issue comes up it still seems in a short summary class there seems no better way to present it along with the comment that it is a misrepresentation of the process. Which last is always such a marvelously clear thing to point out to people! "Here, let me misrepresent something important for you...."

Can you picture the lightning storm breaking up the birthday party in Tivoli? Ah yes! Just thought of the other thing I have been wrong about - death by stomach complaint and not by plague.

Absolutely good ending.

I won't belabor the kudos here. This is an impressive work of scholarship and well worth the read.