UNDERSTANDING HEGEL 6
OR: NO MORE THESIS — ANTITHESIS — SYNTHESIS

Win Corduan

Part 6 Hegel in Jena

Since this is the sixth installment of this series called "Understanding Hegel," I think it's about time that we start talking about the man whom we want to understand. However, we will start slowly, with some biographical material, and that means a good start is talking about the relationship between Hegel and Schelling.

Born in 1770, Hegel was a few years older than Schelling. Nevertheless, the precocious Schelling was in the same school year with Hegel, as well as his contemporary, the poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1842) as they were attending a Protestant seminary in Tübingen. If they had had Facebook back then, they would have clicked the "like" link for "Kant" and the "French Revolution."

After receiving their degrees in 1893 they went their separate ways, all three of them starting out as private tutors for wealthy families. Eventually, Hölderlin found his calling in poetry, though by 1805 mental illness had wrapped its chain of unwieldy, stiff links around his creativity. Schelling, continuing his role as Wunderkind, had landed an appointment at the University of Jena; Hegel spent four years as private tutor to a family in Bern, Switzerland. When that particular situation became unbearable, Hölderlin, who lived in Frankfurt, found Hegel similar employment there. For a time, two of these musketeers were reunited and mutually stimulated each other's intellectual growth. Although (or maybe because) the job as house teacher was stressful and unpleasant for Hegel at times, he managed to write some book-length essays. Nevertheless, I hasten to add that one takes them seriously at one's peril. None of them were published, except much, much later, and then more for their biographical interest than their philosophical content. To mention one example, Hegel wrote a "Life of Jesus," which consisted of rewriting Jesus' teachings into the various forms of Kant's categorical imperative. ("Always act so that you can will your maxim to be universal law.")

Finally, in 1801, already 8 years out of school, Hegel rejoined the other member of the threesome when Schelling assisted Hegel in finding him an academic position at the University of Jena as Privatdozent, a title that meant that he could list his courses in the university catalogue and would be paid per student who enrolled in his lectures. During that time in Jena, this number averaged below ten, though for a few semesters it soared into the twenties. Hegel was far from attaining wealth or fortune. He also needed to take time off from teaching in order to pursue the research and writing necessary to advance his career, an activity which is often expected as matter of pride for an institution despite a lack of institutional support. Together with Schelling he founded a journal with the titel (Kritisches Journal der Philosophie) "Critical Journal of Philosophy," where we need to think of "criticism" in the light of Kant's books, e.g., The Critique of Pure Reason. Even before the journal started publishing his articles, he wrote a full-length monograph with the catchy title of The Difference between the Systems of Fichte and Schelling. The point of this exposition was to respond to Karl Leonhard Reinhold, a popular philosopher, who never found a philosophical idea that he did not like, at least for a while. He attempted to implement an eclectic practical post-Kantian ideology that circumvented the technical rigor of Kant's transcendental deductions by promoting "Enlightenment" thinking. It was Hegel's point that this superficial treatment lost track of the details that set Fichte and Schelling (and himself) apart from each other.

Hegel also wrote book reviews for the Erlanger Zeitung, which were rather harsh at times. To give just one example, Hegel wrote a rather scathing response to several pieces written by a gentleman named Wilhelm Traugott Krug (1770-1842) who would soon take over the chair of logic and metaphysics vacated by the death of Kant (1804); he was a well-known philosopher and popularizer of philosophy at the time, repeating some of Reinhold's insights. 

I cannot mention Krug as a person without emphasizing that he not only opposed anti-Semitism in thought, but that he very actively labored for the emancipation of Jews in his native kingdom of Saxony. There actually was a clause inserted into a new constitution of Saxony that legalized full freedom of religion. However, the phrase was immediately interpreted as nothing more than tolerance for various Christian confessions. (I am reminded of the Taliban's claim to freedom of religion--as long as it fit their interpretation of the Qur'an.) Krug very openly agued in favor of full citizenship for all people in Saxony. In his conceptual system, Krug followed Kant's transcendental approach, but also attempted to create a "Synthesis" (my intentional capitalization) by positing two realms, one for the existence of actually existing particulars and one for the concepts discovered by transcendental deduction. Thus, his criticisms were aimed at the two prominent transcendental idealists, Fichte and Schelling. Specifically, he proposed a test for them. Assuming that every particular object can be known by transcendental idealism, it should not be asking too much for them to be able to deduce something as small and insignificant as his pen into existence. 

Krug clearly saw himself as an amazingly great philosopher. Aristotle's works on logic are collected under the title Organon. Krug published his own work under the same title, as the New Organon. Hegel did not see things that way. In his brief note on the book in the newspaper, he advised his readers that any attempt to find anything truly philosophical in the New Organon would be in vain. He suggested that Krug maybe should try to write something of philosophical import in the future (Werke 2:164-6).

In the Critical Journal Hegel expanded his response to Krug by stating that there was no point in establishing a test for a philosophical system before its critics understood it. He went on to describe the mental upheaval that would occur if we could transcendentally deduce objects into existence without rhyme or reason (Werke 1:188-207) He quoted Goethe, Ein Fastnachtsspiel. (Unfortunately I had to remove a link since the only accessible text I found was blocked by my anti-virus program, thus making it inaccessible. )

And there's more!The German word Krug means "pitcher," as in a container of liquids, not as in Sandy Koufax. Hegel uses the image of this pitcher to describe what Krug must have poured into the Krug of self-consciousness. Note that he includes Reinhold in this depiction. 

Was it wise for Hegel to be so harsh to his intellectual opponents in light of the fact that he wanted to move up in the world of academia? We need to view his first years at Jena as a euphoric time of promise and potential, though things did not end up that way. At this early time he was glad for at least having a position at the university, grateful to Schelling, and deeply motivated to defend the integrity of philosophy in general and of transcendental idealism in particular.

This incident, if that's an appropriate term for the give-and-take of academic discussion, has taken on a life of its own. 

As we know, at this point in time Hegel was an unsalaried instructor of philosophy, struggling financially, and hoping for an academic appointment that would provide a regular income. The completion of the Phenomenology of Spirit was still a distant dream. However, some writers have made up some peculiar stories about the exchange.

For example, Gordon Clark in From Thales to Dewey: A History of Philosophy (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1957), pp. 446-47, sets it into a time many years later and invents a truly imaginary response on Hegel's part He describes Krug as a young, struggling newcomer to philosophy who dared to attack the great Hegel with his supposedly insolent demand for him to deduce his pen. Clark continues with his version of Hegel's reaction.

What?! At the time, Hegel was the obscure person, and Krug was widely known and admired. Hegel occupied a chair of philosophy in Berlin--fifteen years later. There never ever was an "official philosopher of the Prussian state." Hegel had no weight to throw around at the time of the incident, nor did he engage in such a practice later on, though he could be cantankerous at times. The Phenomenology was written several years after Krug's critique, and there is nothing in its first chapter dealing with this question, not even in the summary of the chapter that Clark invented. This is fiction. I'm tempted to say "absolute" fiction, but, unlike Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel, I'm never quite sure what the term "absolute" adds to a characterization.

In 1803 Schelling left for Würzburg, where he would continue to teach as well as to pursue an affair that eventually led to marriage with Caroline, by then the ex-wife of the romanticist August Wilhelm Schlegel.

For financial reasons, as well as in order to get ahead in his career (I guess that's redundant in many cases), Hegel needed to publish a decent book, and so he started to work on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Phenomenon basically means "appearance," so the title communicates something along the line of "Ways in which the Spirit manifests itself." One of those ways is, of course, the Absolute, with which Schelling was heavily enamored at the time, though apparently not at the expense of paying the necessary attentions to Caroline Schlegel.

The Phenomenology is a rather thick volume; the edition I hold in my hand is about 590 pages of German written with Greek grammar (or so it has been claimed), and it took Hegel a while to write it and to inject sufficient complexity into it for it to be worthwhile. Actually, as shown by his earlier articles, Hegel could write clearly, succinctly, and engagingly. For some reason, he suspended most of those attributes in writing the Phenomenology-- most of the time. Hegel hoped that in the Phenomenology he could teach philosophy to speak German. If he succeeded, I, for one, do no recognize the dialect of any region in Germany with which I am acquainted. Some people claim that they find him rushing his argumentation a bit toward the end, but, if so, it is certainly not noticeable to me. The original plan was that Schelling would write a foreword to it, which would greatly foster its success. As Windischmann said, "His manner is often harsh, dry, and more difficult to cope with than the subject matter."

What happened with this book can, to some extent, be traced by following the correspondence between Hegel and other concerned parties, which has been printed up in the documentation section of Walter Kaufmann's book Hegel: A Reinterpretation (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1965). This book was, indeed, groundbreaking for scholarship on Hegel in the English-speaking world. It was not, of course, the final word, which you are reading here, as you realize. (tongue in cheek)

Hegel finished the Phenomenology in 1806. By this time, the political situation in Europe was chaotic, thanks to Napoleon trying to turn it all into the Greater Paris Metropolitan area. Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer (1766-1848), who had come to know Hegel and his friends while studying at the same seminary, but had finished before them, had been in Jena from 1790 to 1804, first as student, and then as professor of philosophy. He mediated between Hegel and the publisher, a man named Göbhardt, who lived and worked in the town of Bamberg, and Niethammer paid for the upfront costs of printing the book. Doing so was very generous of him, but it put a great amount of stress on both him and Hegel, who was struggling to meet the publisher's deadlines. Napoleon Bonaparte seriously lessened the reliability of mail delivery in the course of his attempt at conquering the world (little did Bonaparte know that he would eventually be succeeded by Dr. No, Auric Goldfinger, and similar figures). Only after Hegel and Niethammer had committed themselves, did they find out that Herr Göbhardt had a reputation for interpreting a contract in ways that surprisingly earned him more money (and the author less) than had been anticipated. The book was printed roughly in halves, and Hegel needed to correct the page proofs of the first half at the same time as to finish writing the second half of the manuscript, all the while counting down the days to the deadline and to the almost-certain arrival of Napoleon and his army.

In August of 1806, Hegel asked Niethammer to make sure that Göbhardt was printing the correct number of copies (of the first half), so as not to cheat him of potential royalties (K, 317).

On October 3, 1806, Niethammer reminded Hegel to be punctual about mailing his work. He wrote (K 317-318),

On Monday, October 13, Napoleon entered Jena.

Plus tard.