Philosophy Compass 3/1 (2008): 51–65 Lumsden, ‘rise of the non-metaphysical Hegel’

The rise of the non-metaphysical Hegeli

Simon Lumsden, school of philosophy, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2052 Australia
s.lumsden@unsw.edu.au

Poststructuralism and analytic philosophy represent extremes on any philosophical spectrum.

One of the few things that Poststructuralism and analytic philosophy explicitly share is a
common origin myth. Both traditions are often represented as having their genesis in the
rejection of Hegel’s metaphysics. In both cases these myths have been questioned and
problematised.ii For both these traditions Hegel, rather than being the figure that continues
and radicalises Kant’s critique of metaphysics, is taken to be engaged in an anachronistic
project of attempting to solve the residual problems in the critical philosophy (thing-in-itself,
concept-intuition, freedom-causation and so on) by reverting to a pre-critical metaphysics.
Poststructuralist thinkers such as Deleuze and Derrida, largely under the influence of
Heidegger, regarded Hegel’s system as the culmination of metaphysics.iii Following
Heidegger, they take Hegel’s claim for thought’s self-possession to be advocating thought’s
complete self-transparency. The canon of poststructuralist terms such as différance,
individuation and multiplicity develop in clear opposition to what they take to be the all
consuming and all knowing trajectory of the Hegelian dialectic. In the analytic tradition
Hegel’s name is synonymous with a type of metaphysics, the murkiness and obscurity of
which was corrected by the clarity of common sense, the methodology of the natural sciences
and propositional logic, the success of which has relegated interest in Hegel to that long list of
great errors that is the history of ideas.

Recent interpretations of Hegel that take his thought to be thoroughly non-metaphysical and
post-Kantian necessitate the rethinking of the relation between Hegel and these traditions.iv
While this post-Kantian Hegel has come to be known as the non-metaphysical or anti-
metaphysical Hegel, this description has to be understood against the backdrop of the kind of
metaphysics that Hegel had been understood as advocating. What unites those that take Hegel
to be thoroughly post-Kantian is the rejection of the form metaphysics that came to be
associated with his thought, namely that the world is an expression of some kind of quasi-
divine spiritual substance. Hegel is non-metaphysical on this view not just because spirit
cannot be understood in this way but more generally because he is seen as rejecting any idea
of the given.v Hegel does refer to his project as metaphysics and he is concerned with core
metaphysical questions: making claims about ‘what is’, but this ought not be conceived as a
domain of being over and against us that we can with the right tools (abstract reason or
empirical methodology) disclose as it is in itself truthfully.vi In Hegel’s case the self-
transforming character of spirit means that what metaphysics, if we still want to use this term,
can disclose is not a fixed and given reality.

In Hegel’s hands the project of philosophy is not the examination of a world that is assumed
to have a fixed and unified truth waiting to be understood. Grasping the nature of existence is
not a job simply best left to the natural sciences; for him the intelligibility of the world had to
take account of the way in which our explanations and reasons for our beliefs and knowledge
are self-transforming and self-legitimating.vii That thought is self-grounding and that human
freedom ought to be conceived to be self-determining has come to be understood by figures
such as Pippin, Pinkard, Neuhouser and Brandom largely in normative terms. On this view,
the criteria that are employed in making judgments about our thoughts, ourselves and the
world are essentially internal to thinking itself. Hegel’s system on this account tells us how

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these norms of judgment come to be authoritative, that is how they come to be considered to
‘be the case’ in reality.

The Traditional view of Hegel

After the decline of British Hegelianism following World War One, Hegel’s thought was
largely ignored in the Anglophone philosophical world. There was some interest in Hegel’s
social and political thought but that interest self-consciously stripped Hegel’s system of its
logical and metaphysical core. Periodic interest in Hegel resulted in some fine but isolated
work on Hegel such as J.N. Findlay’s Hegel: a Re-examination (1958). Resurgence of interest
in Hegel’s thought was reignited by Charles Taylor’s Hegel (1975). That work still a classic
in Hegel scholarship was the catalyst for sustained and systematic interest in Hegel’s social
and political philosophy. Taylor saw Hegel’s thought as responding to the fundamentally
modern challenge the critical philosophy had set in motion, namely how to realise the
possibility of a self-legislated freedom. In Taylor’s view Hegel responds to this pre-eminently
modern question by reverting to an essentially pre-critical metaphysics. Taylor took the core
of Hegel’s metaphysical project to be a universe understood as the expression of Spirit
[Geist], the defining characteristic of which is rational necessity. The meaningfulness of the
world is grounded on a transcendent rational and monistic spirit that realises itself through the
‘vehicle’ of a ‘finite spirit.’viii Geist is embodied through us and must therefore be considered
to be both transcendent and immanent.

Geist on Taylor’s reading is the rational subject writ large. In this case, reason cannot be
considered as self-grounded or self-determined, because our rationality is simply posited by
Geist; that is, the self-grounding and self-legitimating that Kant sought is only possible at the
level of spirit. Things in themselves or nature have to be understood as an expression of Geist,
they have no conceivable existence aside from Geist. As Taylor remarks: ‘absolute idealism is
related to the platonic notion of the ontological priority of the rational order, which underlies
external existence, and which external existence strives to realize’ix Everything in the universe
has to be understood as an expression of this coming to be of Geist. It is easy to see how this
approach solves a great many problems in the Kantian program – the concept-intuition
distinction, the problem of the thing-in itself, the real-ideal distinction and so on. Taylor’s
view of Geist combines the Kantian self-legislation with romantic concern for reconciling the
human-nature division. The human subject, because it is an expression of Geist, does not have
to see itself as necessarily divorced from nature in its self-legislative capacity.

This approach on the face of it seemed to explain well known phrases of Hegel’s such as
‘substance shows itself to be essentially subject’.x By bringing together what appears to be the
clearly Kantian element (freedom) and Spinozistic (substance) element of Hegel’s system
Taylor would seem to have given a plausible explanation for how Hegel might have resolved
the Kantian problem of how freedom can be understood as self-legislation without
irrevocably alienating us from the world and introducing the spectre of scepticism. This
interpretation raised a number of questions: firstly if this were really Hegel, why should
anyone take such a patently implausible theory seriously? Secondly exactly why and how are
we the ‘vehicle’ of this transcendent rational Spirit? In choosing to emphasise Hegel’s social
and political philosophy and his theory of action Taylor agrees that Geist so conceived would
best be forgotten. Ultimately, for Taylor, Hegel’s project fails because the diverse and
disparate forces unleashed in modernity cannot be contained in the pre-critical spiritual unity
Hegel creates for them.

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The emergence of a non-metaphysical Hegel

The initial transition from understanding Hegel’s thought as a reversion to dogmatic

metaphysics was set in motion by Klaus Hartmann (1972). Hartmann was instrumental in
conceiving Hegel’s project as a continuation of Kant’s critical tradition. Hartmann took
Kant’s philosophical legacy to be formulated in the following way: human reason does not
have to appeal to a transcendent domain of objects, norms or categories in order to justify an
action. In Hegel’s terminology thought must be ‘self-determining’, or reason must be ‘self-
grounding’. Since the late 1980’s, revisionist interpreters of Hegel in the English speaking
world have followed Hartmann in arguing that his thought should be understood as a
continuation of the Kantian critical project understood in this way.xi Reason must be regarded
as reflectively setting the norms for its own operations. This self-grounding rationality
dispelled the idea that the key notions of Hegel’s project (Spirit, reason, the Idea, the
Concept) could be understood as the expression of a quasi-divine intelligence. It also
excluded the possibility of appealing to a Platonic idea or a thing-in-itself as the criteria by
which truth could be ascertained. The self-determined character of our social, political and
cultural world is the guiding idea of Hegel’s thought. The central problem in understanding
Hegel’s thought as non-metaphysical, and at the heart of all post-Kantian philosophy, is
precisely how this rational self-grounding can legitimate its claims.

Hartmann rejected any conception of Hegel’s thought that presented it as a grand

metaphysical project in which reason either unfolded itself immanently in the world in a
grand historical narrative or as an expression of a monistic Spirit. Hartmann’s strategy for
showing the essentially self-grounding and self-legitimating character of reason focused
primarily on the categories of Hegel’s logic. He argued that Hegel’s Logic has an internal
coherence; its categories are self-justifying, but that, at the same time, these categories reveal
the essential characteristics of the phenomena of human existence. The categories of Hegel’s
logic do not appeal to a given, to an independent realm of truth, nor does it presume an
identity of thought and being in order to legitimate themselves. Rather it ‘reconstructs’ the
real in a manner satisfactory to reason alone, the consequence of which Hartmann argued is
that the categories of Hegel’s logic are self-legitimating. Hartmann’s category theory set the
scene for subsequent important developments in Hegel scholarship.

Despite Hartmann’s success in shifting the interpretation of Hegel away from conceiving his
project along the lines of pre-Kantian metaphysics, doubts have been raised about thought’s
ability, within the framework of Hegel’s logic alone, to provide itself with its own content.xii
No matter how internally coherent the program of Hegel’s logic may be, if we are to move
from a merely internal coherence to asserting anything about the world we have to find a way
of guaranteeing that this self-legitimating in fact gives us an understanding of the world.
Truth claims are legitimated, on Hartmann’s view, only by the rationally determined
categories of thought itself. The metaphysical interpretation was at least able to tell a story,
however implausible, as to how Geist could come to realise itself in the world and so why we
would want to see the world as an expression of just those categories. In Hartmann’s account
we can see the necessity for the categories but not why we could come to see the world in
terms of just those categories. If reason is itself the judge in determining what satisfies it,
then, at the very least, an account is needed of exactly how, other than by appeal to its internal
logical coherence, it has come up with the standards that it uses for asserting the legitimacy
or otherwise of truth claims.xiii

Post-Kantian Hegel

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The decisive shift in Anglo-American Hegel scholarship occurred with the publication of
Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism in 1989. This is a landmark work in Hegel research, not just
because it has become the most important work in English language Hegel scholarship (and
arguably the most important recent work on Hegel in any language) but because it made
Hegel genuinely contemporary. It has extended the influence of Hegel far beyond the world
of Hegel scholarship and social and political philosophy. This complex and difficult work not
only transformed Hegel scholarship but has lead – finally – to Hegel being engaged with by
some of the leading figures in analytic philosophy. Unlike Taylor, who thought the
metaphysics of Hegel’s system had to be excluded if Hegel’s thought was to be taken
seriously, Pippin does not think there are merely some viable parts of Hegel’s project that can
be rescued from the core systematic project.xiv Pippin presents a thoroughly post-Kantian
Hegel that effectively extends the view of Hegel developed by Hartmann. Hartmann’s Hegel
was, as we have seen, also thoroughly post-Kantian, but the primary problem for Hartmann
was establishing the authority of the categories of Hegel’s logic. Why would we come to
understand ourselves and the world in terms of just those categories of thought and how could
they come to have normative force? In short what was missing in Hartmann’s account was an
appreciation of the role that the Phenomenology of Spirit served in Hegel’s system.

In Pippin’s reading the Phenomenology was rightly restored as the ground of Hegel’s project.
The story of how things come to be authoritative required a detailed examination of the
Phenomenology. How things come to be meaningful for us is the result of an evolving set of
socially and historically mediated conditions for which we can collectively be considered to
be responsible. Pippin argues that Hegel’s account of self-determination, which is how Hegel
conceives freedom, cannot be explained by natural laws or objective descriptions of mental
states.xv The central terms in Hegel’s exposition of the idea of freedom (self-consciousness,
Spirit, reason and ethical life) cannot be taken to characterise ‘things’, but must be understood
as ways in which the world is meaningful. These core Hegelian concepts do not describe fixed
attributes of the world or some kind of cosmic spiritual substance but are best conceived as
conditions of the world’s intelligibility, conditions that are however are historical
achievements and which are themselves able to be transformed.

Understanding human freedom as post-Kantian required the abandonment of a transcendent

and naturalistic grounding of ‘spiritual’ judgments. The natural world cannot be taken to be
the foundation for human judgments. This does not imply the collapse of the spirit-nature
divide but instead involves considering them as effectively two realms: a natural and a
spiritual. The natural realm is the domain of necessity and the spiritual is the domain of
freedom. The spirit–nature division does not fall prey to the phenomena-noumena distinction
because of the way Hegel conceives the concept-intuition distinction, as Pippin puts it:
‘concept and intuition, even mind and world, must be understood as inseparable, but precisely
not as indistinguishable, as if collapsed into one another.’xvi Kant’s two faculty approach to
cognition divided consciousness from world by assuming these two were antithetical.xvii The
separation of intuition and concept was for Hegel unsustainable. This is why Hegel in the
introduction to the Science of Logic asserts that Ancient metaphysics was superior to Kant’s
approach because its claims for thinking were also claims for the truth of objects, not just our
thinking of them. The way Kant divided cognition into its receptive and spontaneous arms
betrayed Kant’s awe of the object. Despite the fact that Kant thought of the concept-intuition
relation as inseparable, he presupposed that truth ‘rests on sensuous reality’ even though that
truth is cut off from knowing.xviii On Pippin’s reading the way Hegel establishes the genuine
inseparability of concept and intuition is by showing that the normative authority of a claim is

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not reliant on appeal to a given to supply it with content. The ‘source of the determinate
norms accepted and modified or discarded can be said to be experience itself, in the self-
examining, ultimately self-authorising sense Hegel wants to give such a notion’.xix Experience
supplies the content of concepts, but that experience is not of given empirical realities but
instead must be understood as forms of life or shapes spirit that are natural but for which
causal and naturalistic explanations are no longer adequate and which can only be conceived
in a historically and socially mediated way. That does not make the content of this sphere
purely conceptual but neither does it make it empirically given.

In this way Hegel preserves some sense of the intuitive, though an intuition stripped of its
pure receptivity. It is a restraint on thought, or a non-discursive domain which conceptuality
can use to transform its inadequate self-understanding. On this view, intuition while not
delivering the world to us unmediated does nevertheless express non-discursively the
complex web of affects, mediations, determinations and so on that is constitutive of
experience and which are bound to concepts but that are not reducible to them. They are at
play in our basic judgments, and even though they are not concepts they cannot be conceived
in purely receptive terms either. So conceived Hegel does not reassert the division between
mind and world that Hegel is so worried about in Kant’s thought.xx The point here is that
Hegel preserves the receptivity-spontaneity distinction in such a way that they remain
‘distinguishable’ yet ‘inseparable’, that is, while intuition cannot do the legitimating of a
particular claim or judgment it is nevertheless instrumental in guiding the way in which those
claims come to be conceptually articulated, as it prefigures those concepts in a non-discursive
form.

James Kreines presents another possible response to the way Hegel deals with the untenability
of Kant’s formulation of the concept-intuition distinction. He argues that in order for Hegel to
collapse this dichotomy we should take seriously Hegel’s metaphysical ambition, which it is
argued re-asserts the truth of an independently knowable object. In this case, Hegel is a
metaphysical thinker who has not abandoned the unconditioned. Hegel finds an
unconditioned certain knowledge in the form of the universal laws governing mechanism.xxi
On this view because we can have no adequate knowledge of the intuitive (because it is not
discursive) and because we cannot be sure that discursivity is not just reason’s imagining and
so therefore is unable to deliver truth, Hegel looks for a more secure knowledge of the world
than either intuition or thought alone can provide. Such a truth can only be delivered by the
real. Other figures in recent scholarship such as Frederick Beiser have also seen Hegel’s
project as a quest for the unconditioned, but in his case the metaphysics at issue is based on a
Schellingian view of the organic, which it is argued, is extended into the “realms of society,
spirit and state”.xxii There is a given structure to Spirit that comes from organic life that we
can through experience understand. Both these recent metaphysical accounts posit a
metaphysical truth that can be understood independent of human discursivity.

Those who are interested in returning Hegel scholarship to this type of metaphysical
interpretation play down the seriousness of Hegel’s concern in the Phenomenology and the
Philosophy of Right, and even it might be argued in the third book of Hegel’s Logic, with the
distinctively and consistently modern response to the problems that emerge in the wake of
Kant’s thought. Because Hegel’s idealism is modern, whatever constraints one wants to place
on the type of truth claims Hegel makes, those constraints cannot be found outside the self-
determination of the Idea.

Normativity and the dynamism of modern self-understanding

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One of the key features of the ideal of modernity and the source of its dynamism is that it
subjects its norms to constant criticism and contention. Despite modernity’s constant revision
and reappraisal of norms, the issue of how a norm becomes authoritative or binding on us
once it can no longer be grounded on God’s authority, a platonic universal or the natural
persists as a contested and unresolved issue. Hegel gives a rational, distinctively modern
response to this problem. The question for Hegel that constitutes the modern problem of
philosophy is not an epistemological question concerned with how consciousness could know
anything about external realities but the question of how a finite being can find a meaningful
place in a world set in constant motion? The issue that concerns him is the possibility of
taking our bearings in a world in which no absolute and immutable measure can be envisaged.
The approach of authors like Pippin, Pinkard, Brandom and Neuhouser takes Hegel to be
concerned with capturing a kind of modern self-understanding, which would enable the
modern subject to identify with the self-transforming nature of norms. On this view, Hegel
articulates the political, social and historical conditions that would allow modern
consciousness to be at home in such a collective self-transforming enterprise. Hegel provides
the theoretical framework in which we could be, in a phrase that Hegel uses consistently
throughout his texts, “at home” [bei sich] in this world set in motion.

If the only “given” Hegel accepts is that the world is in motion the problem of the objectivity
of norms becomes a pressing problem. For the authors just mentioned the historical, social,
political and rational features involved in determining what can count as a legitimate reason
or justification is a fundamental concern of Hegel’s project.xxiii Reason’s self-grounding has
come to mean that norms are binding and authoritative because they are based in inter-
subjective recognition.xxiv This inter-subjective grounding of norms is rational and objective
because of the way Hegel reconfigures Kantian autonomy: rather than being based on an ideal
of a rational being who subjects herself to a law as if she were its author, in Hegel’s case the
type of reasons we give for our actions have to be understood to be socially, politically and
historically evolved. Two of the central ideas in The Philosophy of Right, Ethical Life
[Sittlichkeit] and Civil Society, are presented as institutions and ways of life that have
emerged in order allow the modern subject to feel at home. In these cases her subjective
freedom is supported and facilitated by an objective sphere in which that freedom can realise
itself most effectively through these distinct forms of social and public life. In both these
cases autonomy is viewed collectively: we can only act as if we are authors of the law
because of the communal and historical ties binding individuals together, what Pippin, and
Pinkard following him, term our mindedness. Ethical life in particular is an expression of that
collective self-determining identity.

In Hegel’s examination of historical existence and his social and political philosophy, he
articulates the institutional and experiential conditions by which the constant revision of the
standards of judgment is possible. If we are to fully make sense of the self-correcting quality,
which the non-metaphysical or post-Kantian Hegel interpreters rightly recognise at the heart
of Hegelian reason, it has to be situated in relation to Hegel’s philosophical exposition of
experience. In particular the dimensions of that experience that involve the consciousness of
movement. Modernity has once and for all set the world in perpetual motion and change.xxv In
this context, the Phenomenology can, in part, be understood as the comprehension and self-
consciousness of modernity’s self-transforming capacity. It presents us with a distinctly
modern point of view from which to interpret the world we inhabit and the developments of
history, philosophy, religion and culture.

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The crucial feature of modernity and of the self-grounding of thought is the capacity of reason
to be self-correcting, to revise existing norms and claims to know as well as being able to
provide the social and institutional conditions in which our norms can be rationally
legitimated. Rational thought is objective on this view because it is open, revisable and lived
in and through diverse social and political institutions. On the post-Kantian/non-metaphysical
view of Hegel the way Spirit transforms itself (through the movement of the negative) is
through the recognition of deficiencies in existing or prior norms. In this account thought is
self-grounding because as we have seen those deficiencies and the norms that result from
those deficiencies are authorised through the socially and institutionally mediated ‘agreement’
and ‘acknowledgement’ between subjects. The benefit of this approach for Hegel
interpretation is that his thought can in no way be understood as appealing to a given or an
abstract ahistorical set of rational categories that could function as a foundation for norms.
However, this rejection of the given, particularly in the interpretation given by Pinkard and
Brandom, is achieved by a discursive bias, that is by an over-emphasis on the conceptual
rather than the intuitive component of experience.

Self-consciously norm governed actions are an important aspect of Hegel’s project, but the
approach of Pinkard and Brandom in particular is limited in two respects: Firstly, it restricts
the negativity involved in thought’s self-determination to what agents in inter-recognitive
relations authorise as legitimate or illegitimate. This account of the establishment of norms by
which we authorise our actions makes what counts as a determination of an agent too
straightforwardly self-reflective. By this I mean that, on this view, it appears that what we say
we are determined by, the values that are made transparent through our explicit identification
with them, simply are the values that determine our experience. The norms that determine
experience and that transform our individual and collective self-understandings are not just
made explicit by our discursive practices (that is in our commitments and reflections). Norms
so conceived do not define the Hegelian idea of experience. The conditions of experience and
the determinations that underlie all our judging activity are more than the norms we assent to.
Secondly, because experience and freedom are understood only on the model of discursive
commitments, intuition is effectively sidelined as a central component of experience. This
restricted view is a consequence of the way Hegel’s overcoming of the concept-intuition
dichotomy is interpreted. While intuition cannot be understood as a direct expression of a
given empirical reality, nevertheless the ‘pre-reflective’ orientation that intuition provides has
to be understood as extra-conceptual. There is a limit to the discursivity of conceptuality. By
focusing primarily on our self-authorising norms as definitive of our self-understanding, this
approach seems to disenfranchise intuition.

While Pippin’s account of Hegel follows a very similar line in emphasising the self-correcting
capacity of thought and Spirit, his approach betrays a less discursive prejudice as we have
already seen. The focus of his understanding of this self-correction is much more self-
consciously concerned with the limitations of conceptual explanations than Pinkard’s and
Brandom’s. As with Pinkard and Brandom he argues that reasons, or what can be considered
to be authoritative, cannot issue from something other to thought. Reason’s capacity for self-
correction cannot be sustained if the grounds for any such judgment are posited in an essential
nature or immediacy. Something non-discursive cannot be the legitimate basis for judgment.
The opening of the Phenomenology makes it clear that the immediately sensed object or pure
singularity cannot be considered as having the capacity to make sense of the world in terms
that are specific to it. An agent acts on reasons or gives explanations that are necessarily part
of the social space of reasons. On this view an agent’s resolutions are the only genuine
commitments in the action. The commitments and intentions only are in the realised deed, and

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that commitment has to be recognised by others as attributable to them and only then can the
agent know that the commitment is hers. In this case an agent can attribute its commitments to
itself to be justifiable only retrospectively. In Pippin’s case the reasons one can give for an
action, event, interpretation and so on are necessarily retrospective. Experience is for Hegel
the process by which our knowledge, self-understanding and thought are transformed. While
this transformation of thought and identity has a determinate forward direction, the
understanding of that transformation is necessarily retrospective. The irresolvable tensions
and contradictions that emerge in a given social setting only come to light through clashes of
the kind we get in Sophocles’ Antigone, colonial conquests, or public contestation about
specific issues and principles and so on. The attempt to make sense of these forces, the norms
governing one’s action or the principles animating a social order requires a reflective
standpoint that is necessarily retrospective; that is, it comes to see how things have come to be
the case.

Among the issues that emerge from the effectively retrospective way in which our individual
and collective self-understanding is achieved, is the lack of fit between the limited and
retrospective capacity of our explanatory potential (the reasons we can articulate for why
something is the way it is) and the space of reasons. The space of reasons is used by Pippin
and Pinkard to capture Hegel’s idea of the Concept, which is the socially and historically
mediated space in which the determinations of our experience are forged. By definition it
cannot be explained by the explicit reasons we give to one another within that space, even if
that space also includes intuitions, which are on this view determinations of norms that are in
the process of being made discursive. But Nature and innumerable human created events that
are effectively outside the space of reasons necessarily impact on this space – there are factors
determinative of our self-understanding which are completely beyond the discursive. The
space of reasons is much more porous and heterogeneous than the language of commitments
and discursivity suggests. But our capacity to explain this is severely restricted on the model
Pippin gives in which no explanatory potential can be assigned to anything outside the space
of reasons.

Hegel and Poststructuralism

Poststructuralists’ critiques are directed at the dichotomy they believe Hegel sets up between
the meaning created by conscious subjects or mind and worldly experience. For them, Hegel
establishes an expanded version mind that dominates experience without compromising itself
in any way. That is, Hegelian spirit is just the subject writ large and texts such as the
Phenomenology present an account of experience in which the subject is engaged in an
elaborate internal monologue. The focus of Hegel on Spirit’s self-determination and the
difficulty of defining the role for any non-conceptual content gives some credence to that
criticism. Nevertheless thought and experience on Hegel’s account are able to be affected by
‘singularities’ (nature, the empirical, social pathologies and so on) that are not able to be
circumscribed in syllogisms or made the object of universal rational presentation. The reasons
and concepts employed in our judgments and in our understanding cannot grasp singularities
because of the necessarily mediated and universal nature of language. Nevertheless, despite
the inability of discursivity to engage with the non-discursive, in any way other than
conceptually, that does not mean that the non-discursive has no role in Hegelian Spirit.
Hegel’s Phenomenology can be understood as a struggle to make our pre-conceptual
engagement with the world into something conceptual and this is not a relationship that is
straightforwardly won by our discursivity, in which it converts a static pre/non-conceptual
domain into concepts leaving nothing behind.

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One prospect for the future of Hegel research is to take from poststructuralism its concern
with the heterogeneity of experience. Experience so conceived provides a useful counter to
the overly conceptual reading of Hegel presented by much recent Hegel scholarship.
Poststructuralism may present a new direction for the non-metaphysical interpretation of
Hegel, by reconfiguring the openness of thought in a much broader way. The freedom or
‘self-determination’ of thought, which allows the world to be considered as perpetual
becoming, and the factors involved in experience, which underwrite thought’s self-
transformation, need to be conceived in far broader terms than discursivity or the space of
reasons if one is to capture the character of experience and the fullness of what Hegel means
by Spirit. Such a criticism was at the heart of Schelling’s (and Kierkegaard’s) critique of
Hegel, which can be traced through Heidegger and into poststructuralism. In contrast to much
of the recent commentary on Hegel, experience has been interpreted by poststructuralism in a
much less ‘conceptualised’ manner. In the work of figures such as Deleuze and Derrida
experience is not framed in terms of the language of norms and commitments, it is much more
heterogeneously conceived. While I have some serious reservations about the way that
heterogeneity is expressed in poststructuralism,xxvi the breadth of their concerns (religion, art
and literature) and the way they try to show the limits of the discursive (without reverting to
the given) captures more of the richness of spirit than taking Hegelian spirit to be
straightforwardly equivalent to the space of reasons. Hegel and poststructuralism are engaged,
and one might include in this all of German idealism and German Romanticismxxvii as well, in
an anti-naturalist project. In Hegel’s case that anti-naturalism is not just apparent in how he
conceives of the self-determining subject and the freedom at issue in modernity, it is much
broader, involving idealist theories of religion and art. Hegel reserves an important place for
these two not because he is a Christian or thinks that art re-establishes a lost unity with the
natural world, but because they are distinct and legitimate manifestations of the human desire
to understand the world as well as being concrete ways of living in this world. It is certainly
the case that they way Hegel conceives the hierarchy of freedom’s expression that philosophy
is supreme, yet despite its pride of place intuition, religion and art all have an important role
in spirit’s aspiration to realise itself and in its self-understanding.

Hegel references
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Edited by Allen W. Wood, translated by H.B. Nisbet,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1977.
Hegel’s Science of Logic, translated by A. V. Miller, Atlantic Highlands, NJ., Humanities Press,
1989.
The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans.
T. F. Garaets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis, Hackett, 1991.

References
Baugh, Bruce, French Hegel, London, Routledge, 2003.
Beiser, Frederick, Hegel, London, Routledge, 2005.
Bowie, Andrew, ‘German Idealism’s Contested Heritage’ in German Idealism: Contemporary
Perspectives, ed Espen Hammer, London, Routledge, 2007.
Brandom, Robert, ‘Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism’, European Journal of
Philosophy 7 (2), 1999, pp. 164-189.
Bubner, Rudiger, The Innovations of Idealism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
2003.

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Philosophy Compass 3/1 (2008): 51–65 Lumsden, ‘rise of the non-metaphysical Hegel’

Deranty, Jean-Philippe, ‘Hegel’s Social Theory of Value’, The Philosophical Forum, 36 (3),
2005, pp. 307-331.
Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1978.
Findlay, J.N., Hegel: a Re-examination, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1958.
Franco, Paul, Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999.
Hartmann, Klaus,‘Hegel: A Non Metaphysical View.’ In Hegel: A Collection of Critical
Essays, ed A. MacIntyre, London, University of Notre Dame Press, 1972.
Heidegger, Martin, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, Athens, Ohio
University Press, 1985.
Horstmann, Rolf-Peter, Die Grenzen der Vernunft, Frankfurt, Anton Hain, 1991.
Hylton, Peter, Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1990.
Hylton, Peter, ‘Hegel and Analytic Philosophy’ in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Kreines, James, ‘Hegel’s Critique of Pure Mechanism and the Philosophical Appeal of the
Logic Project’, European Journal of Philosophy 12 (1), 2004, pp. 38-74.
Lumsden, Simon. ‘Deleuze, Hegel and the Transformation of Subjectivity’, Philosophical
Forum 33 (2), 2002, pp. 143-158.
Lumsden, Simon, ‘Satisfying the Demands of Reason: Hegel’s Conceptualization of
Experience’, Topoi, 21 (1) 2003, pp. 41-53.
Lumsden, Simon, ‘Dialectic and Différance: The Place of Singularity in Hegel and Derrida’
Philosophy & Social Criticism, Vol. 33 (6), 2007, pp. 677-690.
Maker, William, Philosophy without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel, Albany, SUNY, 1994.
McDowell, John, Mind and World, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
Nancy, Jean-Luc, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press, 2002.
Neuhouser, Fred, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard
University Press, 2000.
Pinkard, Terry, Hegel’s Phenomenology: the Sociality of Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994.
Pinkard, Terry, ‘Virtues Morality and Sittlichkeit’. European Journal of Philosophy 7 (2),
1999, pp. 217-238.
Pinkard, Terry, German Philosophy 1760 –1860, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002.
Pippin, Robert, Hegel’s Idealism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Pippin, Robert, Idealism as Modernism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Pippin, Robert, ‘Naturalness and Mindedness’, European Journal of Philosophy 7 (2), 1999,
pp. 194-212.
Pippin, Robert, The Persistence of Subjectivity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
2005.
Redding, Paul, Hegel’s Hermeneutics, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1996
Redding, Paul, Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Siep, Ludwig, Der Weg der Phänomenologie des Geistes, Frankfurt, Surhkamp, 2000
Smith, H. Nicholas, Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, London, Routledge, 2002.
Williams, Robert, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, Los Angeles, University of California Press,
1997.
Winfield, Richard, Overcoming Foundations: Studies in Systematic Philosophy, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1989.

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Philosophy Compass 3/1 (2008): 51–65 Lumsden, ‘rise of the non-metaphysical Hegel’

Wood, Allen, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Yovel, Yirmiyahu, Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology: Translation and Running
Commentary, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

i
Thanks to Paul Redding and Bill Schroeder for very helpful comments and suggestions for improvement.
ii
See P. Hylton, Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1990) and also his ‘Hegel and Analytic Philosophy’ in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel ed F. Beiser,
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993) and B. Baugh, French Hegel, (London, Routledge, 2003).
iii
See M. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, (Athens, Ohio University Press,
1985).
iv
Paul Redding’s Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2007) does just this job.
v
This Sellarsian legacy is at least in part why a commonality of interest has been forged between Hegel scholars
like Terry Pinkard and Robert Pippin with contemporary analytic philosophers like John McDowell and Robert
Brandom.
vi
See P. Redding Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought , especially chapter 8 for a detailed
discussion of these issues.
vii
See P. Redding’s insightful discussion of these issues, ibid.
viii
C. Taylor. Hegel, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 90, see also pp. 80-94.
ix
ibid. p. 110.
x
G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit, Translated by A. V. Miller. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §37.
xi
See R. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Idealism as Modernism
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997); T. Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760 –1860, (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Hegel’s Phenomenology: the Sociality of Reason, (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1994); P. Redding, Hegel’s Hermeneutics, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
xii
John McDowell’s discussion of coherentism in Mind and World, Harvard, 1994) deals directly with this
problem in a way fundamentally and explicitly framed by the problems that emerge from Kant’s critical system.
xiii
For more recent versions of this highly systematic approach see R. Winfield, Overcoming Foundations:
Studies in Systematic Philosophy, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) and W. Maker, Philosophy
without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel, (Albany, SUNY, 1994).
xiv
Allen Wood’s Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990), while an exceptional
and rich work, argues along the lines of Taylor that Hegel’s social, political and ethical thought can only live if it
is cut off from its metaphysical heart.
xv
See for example R. Pippin Idealism as Modernism and ‘Naturalness and Mindedness’, European Journal of
Philosophy, 7 (2), 1999, pp. 194-212.
xvi
R. Pippin The Persistence of Subjectivity, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 51.
xvii
As Hegel remarks “the objectivity of thinking in Kant’s sense is itself again only subjective in its form,
because, according to Kant, thoughts, although they are universal and necessary determinations, are still only our
thoughts, and are cut off from what the thing is in itself by an impassable gulf.” Hegel’s challenge is to correct
this dualism by presenting thoughts that “are not merely our thoughts but at the same time the in-itself of things
and whatever else is objective” §41z2. G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part One of the Encyclopaedia
of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. T. F. Garaets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris, (Indianapolis, Hackett,
1991).
xviii
Hegel’s Science of Logic, translated by A. V. Miller, Atlantic Highlands, NJ., Humanities Press, 1989, p. 45.
xix
R. Pippin, Persistence of Subjectivity, p. 53.
xx
I have tried to argue such a position in ‘Satisfying the Demands of Reason: Hegel’s Conceptualization of
Experience’, Topoi 21:1 (2003): pp. 41-53.
xxi
See for example J. Kreines, ‘Hegel’s Critique of Pure Mechanism and the Philosophical Appeal of the Logic
Project’, European Journal of Philosophy 12 (1), 2004, pp. 38-74.
xxii
F. Beiser, Hegel, London, Routledge, 2005, p. 112. Yovel’s recent commentary on the Preface to the
Phenomenology reasserts Hegel as a pre-critical metaphysician, see Y. Yovel. Hegel’s Preface to the
Phenomenology: Translation and Running Commentary, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005).
xxiii
Because of Robert Brandom’s philosophical concerns the concrete historical and socio-political conditions in
which self-determination takes place is underdeveloped.

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xxiv
Robert Williams gives a compelling account of Hegelian freedom that focuses more on the structures of
recognition than normativity, see his Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, (Los Angeles, University of California
Press, 1997).
xxv
This discussion of Hegel as concerned with trying to capture the movement of modernity is indebted to
extensive conversation and input from Amir Ahmadi.
xxvi
I have criticized this reading for its lack of appreciation of the radical nature of Hegel’s ‘dialectical’
exposition of experience in ‘Dialectic and Différance: The Place of Singularity in Hegel and Derrida’ Philosophy
& Social Criticism, Vol. 33: 6, 2007, pp 677-690 and ‘Deleuze, Hegel and the Transformation of Subjectivity’,
Philosophical Forum 33, 2002, pp. 143-158.
xxvii
See Andrew Bowie’s clear and interesting discussion of these issues in relation to recent developments in
Hegel scholarship and Romanticism in A. Bowie, ‘German Idealism’s Contested Heritage’ in German Idealism:
Contemporary Perspectives, ed Espen Hammer, (London, Routledge, 2007).

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