Customer Reviews

In the Spirit of Hegel

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This is the best single volume on Hegel available. In plain, and often sparkling, English, it does a wonderful job of explicating this tremendously difficult thinker. It also provides a convincing argument that Hegel is not merely a historical curiosity but a very contemporary thinker. It includes a valuable intellectual historical summary that places Hegel within the literary, philosophical, and political thought of his day, a remarkably lucid glossary that translates Hegel's notoriously difficult terminology into plain English, and a fabulous chapter-by-chapter explication of what is arguably Hegel's most important work, The Phenomenology of Spirit.

The 1983 publication date made me think this would be obsolete. But it had been given so much praise, I had to get it. Solomon takes hegel as fundamentally an ethicist(*which I agree with), in response to kant's ethics. I thought his discussion of the realm of spirit was superb. Grad, level; not post-grad. I'm glad I got it.

Solomon gives a lucid and clear picture of Hegel's ambitions in his Phenomenology. For ever obtuse, dense, snide paragraph Hegel wrote, Solomon delivers clear, intelligent, and at times funny explanations of Hegel's motivations and plans. An essential companion when burrowing through Hegel's magnum opus.

This book has been rightly praised as a guide to an individual's philosophy, as if we can all accept that Hegel had an individual self entitled to pick and choose among the many reactions to the intellectual currents which had been generated in his time by Kant, Goethe, Schelling, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), who is discussed in a section on pages 85-96 of this book but is not listed in the index. I had intended to count refernces to Fichte in this book before writing my review, so customers would have some idea how often I looked at the pages of this book, but that would have been tedious. Most often Fichte was merely mentioned as another self, whom we are expected to believe was entitled to choose from the intellectual currents of his time much as a chairman at a political convention might officially state, "The chair recognizes the floor." Of course Fichte thought he could do more than that with Kant's philosophy, as Solomon shows in his typical comment: "And it is in this morass of ambitions, hostilities, and mixed interpretations that the seemingly simple progression, from Kant to Fichte to Schelling to Hegel, has to be viewed" (p. 85). Note 41 at that point mentions "one of the best-known post-Kantians, Arthur Schopenhauer," who was omitted in the simple progression because his "notoriety" came later. Those who have criticized Schopenhauer (see Witold Gombrowicz, PHILOSOPHY IN SIX LESSONS AND A QUARTER, for someone who considers a lot of these philosophers Polish, and still criticizes them) are likely to picture Schopenhauer going through the roof as a primary feature of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Hegel, as a professor, does not have quite that much freedom, and involvement in philosophy might be considered his greatness because it is obviously his effort to cling to the floor in the midst of mounting outrageousness. Solomon does a pretty good job of staying on the floor, too. Only a poet would read this stuff and think, "We shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped," as Paul Celan wrote in a famous poem after World War II, only in German.