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Hegel: A Reinterpretation

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Walter Kaufmann's study of Hegel is astonishingly erudite and highly-readable. It is not intended to be an overview of Hegel's thought; rather, it is a supplement to further study.

Kaufmann is mostly occupied with correcting previous misinterpretations of Hegel's thought, providing useful philological material, and interpreting Hegel's philosophy in the light of extensive biographical research. It is clearly the outcome of many years of intensive study, and one comes away with the impression that Kaufmann pored over every letter and monograph he could find.

What the book does NOT contain is a clear, flowing exegesis or interpretation of Hegel's thought. Unlike Kaufmann's "Nietzsche", Hegel's development is looked at chronologically. It is difficult to get a clear sense of Hegel's overarching thought from this study. Bursts of commentary and exegesis are broken by long, technical digressions. A wealth of footnotes provides extreme detail about discrepancies in different versions of Hegel's texts and comments on their editors and redactors.

If you are looking for a tool to assist you in reading Hegel for yourself, this book will make a valuable companion. As an introduction to the thought of Hegel, I recommend Charles Taylor's Hegel and Modern Society.

....do start here, for Kaufmann is an able Hegel commentator, clarifier, and critic.

When I was young, I was taught that I should appreciate J. S. Bach and other musical geniuses about like Walter Kaufmann grew up thinking that Hegel was really something. Kaufmann and I have both noticed how reluctant Hegel was to admit who he was talking about, so he considers it an anomaly on page 490 of the J. B. Baille translation of THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND that the name Oedipus has been inserted into the sentence "In the story of *OEdipus* the son does not see his own father in the person of the man who has insulted him . . ." Walter Kaufmann lists the persons whom Hegel actually mentioned in his manuscript ("only thirteen men and women are named." p. 125). I would say Kaufmann left out Julius Caesar, since the preface happens to discuss historical facts like the year in which Caesar was born. Reading the translation of the preface by Walter Kaufmann in HEGEL TEXT AND COMMENTARY, a separate paperback volume with the same index as HEGEL A REINTERPRETATION, is the best approach for understanding Kaufmann's method of explaining Hegel. His commentary in that book is mostly in the form of notes at particular places in the text, and they do not always refer to persons that might have been meant by Hegel, as a lot of philosophy has happened since Hegel, and Walter Kaufmann was aware of various interpretations and more modern philosophers like Kierkegaard and Heidegger (who, "unlike Hegel, seeks to move philosophy closer to poetry rather than science." note 10 on Commentary page 93). Having HEGEL A REINTERPRETATION as a separate book allows Kaufmann to try to demonstrate the scope of philosophy in a way that Hegel attempted to do, encompassing it all as no one had tried to do since Aristotle.

I learned a lot reading this book years ago, allowing myself to feel a lot like Fichte in the comparison, "Nobody today would rank Fichte with Kant;" (p.110). Self-consciousness in German is not quite what it is in America today, but a large part of how modern the intrusive nature of our media has allowed us to become is the constant measure of our own sorry self-consciousnesses becoming aware of each other, a very Hegelian philosophical theme. The appreciation of particular geniuses in our own day might be troubled by knowledge such as Kaufmann's, that "There are not many non-German composers in a class with Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; and during their era German poetry was coming into its own, too. The great achievements of the period were triumphs of the artistic imagination." (p. 114). Our own composers always seem to be thinking about something else instead of what it would take to make their music better.

Did anybody notice how long the song "Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" was on Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks" album? If "the drilling in the wall kept up, but no one seemed to pay it any mind" could be applied to philosophy, it might be as a form of consciousness which seeks to avoid an overwhelming awareness of anything which is actually going on. Hegel ought to be considered good for philosophy in the way that Bob Dylan would be good for people whose interest in music involves owning the rights to the songs. The big legal questions in our society are about who has to pay for people to keep singing or swapping this stuff. Most people who buy this book will read it as consumers. Hegel was usually not a philosopher to be considered dangerous, but somehow, people like Marx, who read Hegel as an introduction to how unsettled things of their own day were, were dangerous in a lot of intellectual fields. I learned a lot about Fichte the first time I read this book. His attempt to identify God with a moral world order is clearly stated, and it only takes a little knowledge of human nature to see how his career suffered the consequences, with the result, "Accused of atheism, he published a couple of vigorous defenses in 1799 and threatened to resign if reprimanded, which was construed as a resignation--and he was let go." (p. 102). Hegel managed to avoid getting clobbered in that kind of argument, and modern philosophy has a lot of appreciation for everything he managed to say without causing a lot of trouble. This book pulls it all together.