Hegel: A Very Short Introduction Revised ed. Edition

The Australian moral philosopher, Peter Singer, does his best to make Hegel more accessible. In some ways, Singer is the obvious man for the job, a philosopher at Princeton who served as Chair of the Philosophy department at Monash University, who is obviously versed in both analytical and continental philosophy. In other ways, Singer seems the odd man out of the job, working in moral philosophy more than philosophy of history and religion, and working primarily in preference utilitarian theory, which is many metaphorical miles away from the Hegelian tradition. Furthermore, to simplify Hegel is a huge a task as Hegel is not only systematically complex, but uses language idiosyncratically and often overlays meaning in his words so that they have both a possible religious and a secular interpretation. To make matters worse, Schiller, Fichte, and Kant get read "into" Hegel as Hegel was in dialogue with all of them, but differed on key points. Then, adding even more complication, there are several traditions of interpreting Hegel which often get read back into the text: the Marxist reading, the Feuerbachian one, the analytic response, the transcendentalist reading, the British idealist reading, etc.

Singer tries to do this with a bit of bait and switch. His first two chapters he focuses on Hegel's biography and philosophy of history. However, Singer does not quote Hegel very much during these chapters. Focusing on Schiller, Marx, and even F.H. Bradley to simplify the point. Furthermore, Singer allows one to think Hegel's definition of freedom were standard, and even implies that Hegel's economic values were closer to Marx's than Philosophy of Right and Science of Logic actually indicate.

Then, Singer backtracks and goes to Phenomenology, and he decides to translate Giest as mind to avoid religious implications. Now, it view Hegel solely in orthodox religious context is a problem and thus translating Giest as spirit can be misleading, but as Glenn McGree has illustrated in his "Hegel and Hermeticism," to translate it solely as mind is just as problematic. Singer must answer philosophical problems created by ignoring the fact that Hegel means both spirit and mind in almost all uses. This is clear when he talks about absolute, which has both a epistemic and metaphysical reality. It is both secular and religious as Hegel sees history as moving in that direction. Singer bracketing sides out, which he does honestly and explicitly, still causes several interpretative problems.

So far, nothing entirely misleading. There is Singer's very, very brief attempt to talk about Hegel's logic. Singer states that Hegel's view of dialectic is "thesis-antithesis-synthesis." Frankly, this is wrong. Hegel only mentions this formation once, and it is quoting unpublished views of Kant. Fichte and Schiller relied on this formation, but as even the Hegel critic Walter Kaufman realized, Hegelian dialectics is much more complicated. It is something closer to the formulation "Abstract-Negative-Concrete" with the negative moving through to complete the idea and make it real. This is crucial to understanding both Hegel's critique of Schiller and Kant, but also Marx's logical models do not work on "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" model, but on the Hegelian model. I have a hard time believing Singer did not know this problem because he sites some of Kaufman's work on Hegel which mention this distinction. Still, it is a common misconception about Hegelian thought and Singer would be hardly the first person to make it.

The last chapters on Right and Left Hegelianism as well as the few mentions of Popper's critique are insufficient for understanding much. While Singer does show that Popper was relating a particularly problematic and literalistic reading of Hegel's lecture notes by his students, he does not really divide into the differences between left and right Hegelianism in a way that is clarifying to influence Hegel had on the 19th and 20th century. Indeed, Hegel is the reason for the analytical and continental divide in English philosophy departments in the first place. Furthermore, even the left Hegelians, cannot be summarized in the opinions of Feuerbach and Marx. Hegel's profound influence on transcendentalism is not discussed either.

In short, Singer is an excellent reader and he does clarify many elements of Hegel's philosophy, but he also obscures many in his simplification. Singer may also be making Hegel more amendable to Utilitarian and secular communitarian models of liberalism than he actually is, and he definitely has some severe missteps in his explanation of Hegel's logic. It is still worth reading though and does not take much time commitment to do so. The bibliography is also quite useful. If one really wanted to deal with Hegel more seriously, I suggest a few books: Justus Hartnack's "An Introduction to Hegel's Logic," Robert B. Pippin's "Hegel's Idealism" and "Hegel's Practical Philosophy," Stanley Rosen's "The Idea of Hegel's "Science of Logic," Micheal Allen Fox's "The Accessible Hegel," and Horst Althaus and Michael Tar's "Hegel: An Intellectual Biography." These would be useful after reading this very brief introduction by Singer, and if you are truly adventurous and want some mad-cap views of Hegel, Zizek's "Less Than Nothing" would be a starting point if one remembers that this is Zizek's Hegel as much as Hegel-in-himself. In short, one can does worse than this book, but if one is interested, I would not stop with Singer's very brief introduction.

I read Marx. He went on about Hegel. I knew nothing about Hegel so, I wanted a thumbnail of Hegel's ideas. I can't speak to the accuracy of Dr. Singer's work, but this book was VERY well written. He is a great writer- having made Hegel's obscure work quite understandable. Dr. Singer speaks TO the uninitiated student of philosophy without speaking DOWN to him.

I liked how Dr. Singer showed the connections between Hegel, his influences, his detractors and his students. I also liked how he thoroughly explained difficult concepts - again, without talking DOWN to the reader.

You want an introduction to Hegel? Look no further. This is the book for you.

Provides a reasonably good overview of Hegel's philosophy. However, I was looking forward to read about his philosophy of history in particular. Perhaps because the book is so short, I found the author's treatment of that subject a little disappointing.

This is a good introduction but one shortfall in my opinion. Hegel's dialectic method gets short changed in this pretty strongly. I suspect that was by design as Singer wanted to give an interpretation based on his earlier works....and not on the Science of Logic.

I am not a trained philosopher but love these introduction books on Habermas, Marx, Hegel, and Kant (working my way backwards). They helped me immensely in my research and writing work and I recommend them highly for students and interested lay people.

While it is brief, I had been struggling with some other philosophical works that referenced Hegel, and didn't know anything about his work. This book provided me an adequate background of his work and went over some of the core concepts and debates. Good book for someone who's needs an intro to Hegel like I did.

The introduction for the layman (vulgarisms toon) has been a French specialty but now is being done well in the US. I've looked for a good one on Hegel for years. Singer's is perfect and I'm going to assign it in a class on 18th & 19th century Western ideas.

Great short introduction to Hegel. Extremely user-friendly and fascinating​.