Hegel: A Biography
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History and Phenomenology - One might hope to master philosophy, yet find it one s master. One could aspire to avoid this and find resolution in science, yet find metaphysics again in this science. These issues find their historical moment of truth in the passage of German Philosophy as it whitewaters in grand style in the generation from Kant to Hegel. Pinkard s fascinating history of the great philosopher of history gives this drama a quiet but exciting chronicle in the career of Hegel, beginning in the wake of the great critiques of Kant, and leading through an extraordinary generation that saw the French Revolution, Napoleon, the Restoration, and finally the July Revolution. We see the genesis of Hegel s Phenomenology of the Spirit in the midst of the turbulence of Napoleonic era, thence the perilous passage through the era of reaction, dangerous to any philosopher. Although Hegel s reputation seesaws in the confusions of later history still mastered by philosophy, the cogency of his thinking to our time is direct, recorded in such lowkey and with the false appearance of reaction in his later works such as the Philosophy of Right which speaks directly to all the issues of liberal societies, communist societies, and the explosion of the new market world that came into being at this time. Just at the end of this extraordinary tale we see the impetus of revolution start again, one whose tide has barely ceased in our own post-revolutionary era, with much of Hegel s perspective ironically apt, just before its turnabout in the Left Hegelian generation to come, that spawned the Hegelian strains of Marx. We hear the drumbeat already in the philosopher s direct reflections of a lifetime on the legacy of the French Revolution, and its contradictions, that so beset the modern world, at risk of being frozen in the themes of this era of great beginnings, to which Hegel was such a fair witness. This nickelodeon is much better than Hollywood.
worth every penny - 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.