In the Spirit of Hegel Quotes

“Each person would like to be certain of the approval of the other, but to be certain of the other is already to lose that sense of the other as an independent judge. I want you to say 'I love you', but the last thing I would want to do is to ask you, much less force you, to say it. I want you to say it freely, and not because I want you to or expect you to. But then, you know that I do want you to say it, and I know that you know that I want you to say it. So you say it; I don't really believe you. Did you say it because you mean it? Or in order not to hurt my feelings? And so I get testy, more demanding, to which your response is, quite reasonably, to become angry or defensive, until finally I provoke precisely what I feared all along, - an outburst of abuse. But then, I fell righteously hurt; you get apologetic. You seek forgiveness; I hesitate. You aren't sure whether I will say it or not: I'm not sure whether you mean it or not, but I say, 'I forgive you'. You wonder whether I'm really forgiving you or just trying to keep from hurting your feelings, and so you become anxious, testy, and so on.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“In a world that has come to see ideas and collective enthusiasm with horror, Hegel becomes a gateway to a new world, where ideas are the key to conciousness, where the philosopher becomes the spokesman for the times and the prophet of a united humanity. It is a world in which archaic terms like "harmony" and "humanity" still make sense—indeed, still give us something to hope for. It is a world worth, at least, considering.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“Indeed, I want to argue that no single image has been more detrimental to our understanding of Hegel—or our ability to accept him—than the self-congratulatory idea that his philosophy is the spiral staircase upward to the Absolute, not only because there is no Absolute, but because there is no "upward" either, and no staircase. Whatever else their disagreements, the one view of Hegel's philosophy that seems wholly taken for granted by almost all the commentators is the idea that the dialectic is going somewhere; but to move is not necessarily to move in any particular direction, and increasingly to comprehend the complexity and expanse of the world is not always an improvement or progress. One of the more obnoxious features of philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to such modern stoics as Spinoza and Schopenhauer, is their unabashed tendency to declare their own profession, thinking, as indubitably the "highest" human activity, and "thinking about thinking" (or, as many of these thinkers think,
"thought thinking itself") as the very purpose of the cosmos itself. But once one steps outside of philosophy (and indeed, sometimes inside of it, too), there is no justification whatsoever for this self-
congratulatory view. To think with increasing clarity and comprehension is an undeniable desideratum of thought, and increasingly to appreciate both the unity and differences of what we call "humanity"
may be an important goal in a world which is quickly shrinking, getting more crowded and more violent. But none of this justifies the arrogant pretentiousness of some philosophers, that philosophy alone is the answer to the world's problems, and that thinking itself is what makes us uniquely "human." Hegel may have believed these things, but the Phenomenology presents us with a very different image; the
dialectic is more of a panorama of human experience than a form of cognitive ascension. It has its definite movements, even improvements, but it is the journey, not the final destination, that gives us our
appreciation of humanity, its unity and differences. And if, as in Goethe's Faust, there is a sudden but unanticipated divine act of salvation at the very end of the drama, this is more poetic license than the conceptual climax of all that has gone before it.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“Similarly, Hegel's dialectic of "the concept" or "forms of consciousness" is an attempt to "think through" our ideas about the world, and about ourselves, developing these ideas—or letting them develop—to the point where we can see their consequences, their inadequacies, their inconsistencies. And by doing so, our comprehension "grows," it becomes more encompassing, letting us see things we did not see, letting us appreciate ideas we could not accept, forcing us to see connections we had not seen before. And the goal of this process, or "Absolute Knowing," is to gain a single all-encompassing conception, which makes sense of everything at once. But though this may be the goal of the Phenomenology, it is not its result; there is no end to the process of understanding life, while we are still living it. Hegel began looking for the Absolute, but what he discovered was the richness of conceptual history.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“Freedom, for Hegel, has to do with identification—how one sees oneself (as citizen, as rebel, as stoic, as master, as slave), it is not the political question of societal restraints and duties.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“Here is the personal source of "the two Hegels." On the one hand, there is Hegel's sense of particular contexts, communities, and cultures; on the other hand, there is his Enlightenment sense of humanity, this all-embracing conception that had become, in Kant for example, the key to morality, rationality, politics, religion, and simply "being human." There is, again, this extreme tension in Hegel's Spirit, in other words,
between his sense of unity and his sense of differences. And I shall argue in the pages that follow that this essential temperamental tension emerges in the writing of the Phenomenology itself, literally splitting the work in two. The incoherence of the Phenomenology, I want to argue, is nothing less than the epic philosophical tension of the age—something far more important than the lack of organization of a single philosopher, and something far more earth-shaking than an academic confusion concerning the proper "systematization" of German Idealism.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“What is discontinuous in Hegel's text is not just the text itself, but the whole of human history, for it is Hegel who sees, or begins to see, that it is the process of thought that is everything; its results are only part of the process, and the final result—"the Absolute"—is an illusion.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“I want to emphasize the second Hegel, the Heraclitan Hegel, the Hegel of endless change, and what he calls "the bad infinity," running on without end. This is the Hegel who said, in effect, that there is no unity except through differences and there is no end to philosophy.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“Hegel's Phenomenology is not so much about experience as it is about changes in experience, changes in the forms of experience, transformations of the concepts through which we give form to our experience. Total and unified comprehension is the principle behind this series of changes and transformations, but this is not Hegel's principle; it is rather the principle or goal intrinsic to all human experience and, in particular, what defines reason (which Hegel sometimes defines as "the search for unity").”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“Hegel rejects the very idea of a single world-view, and though he does indeed give us what he considers to be the "best" world-view, it is rather a meta-view, a view about the correctness of views, rather than a view as such.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“To say that Hegel is an idealist is to say that, at every turn, he argues that the world is thoroughly knowable, and it is nothing "beyond" the realm of conscious experience.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“Hegel calls the truth of his Phenomenology a "bacchanalian revel"; it is, in other words, an orgy of ideas, a conceptual debauch.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel

“If Hegel could not be taught to ordinary intelligent people, then I for one would not find reason to read him at all.”
― Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel