Hegel's Antiquity
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Published By Oxford University Press

9780198839064, 9780191874925

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Will D. Desmond

Hegel is one of the most influential thinkers of modernity. Less recognized, but equally significant is his life-long engagement with ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. As a student of the Stuttgart Gymnasium, sometime headmaster of the Nürnberg Gymnasium, contemporary of philhellenes like Goethe and Hölderlin as well as seminal classical scholars like August Wolf and Niebuhr, Hegel developed his encyclopedic system at a time when classical scholarship was being institutionalized as Altertumswissenschaft, and when Hellenic studies in particular were experiencing a ‘renaissance’, especially in Germany. This chapter surveys Hegel’s life, education, publications, and persistent ideas, placing these in their immediate context in the revolutionary era after 1776. Hegel’s persistent and many-faceted return to antiquity—to the Romans as well as the Greeks—is clear in his Berlin lecture series on politics, art, religion, philosophy, and history. These themes form the core of Hegel’s philosophy of ‘spirit’, and are here outlined as the focus of subsequent chapters.


2020 ◽  
pp. 43-110
Author(s):  
Will D. Desmond

Hegel’s exposition of the ‘rational’ state in The Philosophy of Right draws on ancient ethics, politics, and history, and cannot be fully understood without reference to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. This chapter seeks to explore the many ‘moments of antiquity’ in the Philosophy of Right, when ancient practices or ideas infiltrate Hegel’s more abstract analysis of ethico-political phenomena. It does so by following the tripartite division of the Philosophy of Right: for example, the analysis of property in ‘Abstract Right’ is incomplete without appreciating Hegel’s response to ancient forms of slavery and the Roman ‘law of things’; the second section on ‘Morality’ is primarily Kantian, yet is also implicitly in dialogue with Socratic thinkers for its evaluation of virtue, the Good, and conscience; finally, Hegel’s innovative concept of ‘Ethical Life’ is significantly indebted to his understanding of the Greek and Roman families, ancient constitutional arrangements, and Justinian’s Code. Turning from these and other ‘moments of antiquity’, the chapter then offers a more continuous presentation and evaluation of Hegel’s understanding of Greek and Roman histories, explaining how his concept of the ‘beautiful’ Greek polis and ‘lawful’ Roman empire were for him the two historically necessary stages in the development of the modern ‘rational state’.


2020 ◽  
pp. 329-352
Author(s):  
Will D. Desmond

Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History explore the legacies of ancient history and historiography, at the levels of both theory and empirical detail. Their threefold typology of histories into ‘original’, ‘reflective’, and ‘philosophical’ constitutes a concise argument that history has and must, in the course of its development, become theoretical, and that therefore history and philosophy have essentially converged in the modern era—not least in Hegel’s own deeply historical style of thinking. With their vision of a Spirit that develops through four essential stages of the ‘Oriental’, Greek, Roman and ‘Germanic’ worlds, these lectures reveal that, for Hegel, the middle (Greek and Roman) stages are pivotal to the story of progressive human freedom and self-knowledge. The Mediterranean as the ‘middle sea’ (Mittelmeer) is a central historical fact and metaphor for Hegel (long before Braudel), and it was as peoples of the Mediterranean that his Greeks and Romans proved so historically significant—the Greeks with their humanistic art, anthropomorphic religion, philosophical depth, and ‘invention’ of history as a genre; the Romans with their law, inclusive citizenship, universal histories, inclusive empire and pantheon, and ultimately Christianity. This narrative is, in many respects, simply Hegel’s systematization of a long-held consensus. It also looks forward to the even grander narratives of global and ‘big history’, which temporalize the notion of ‘evolution’ and extend it from (human) ‘Spirit’ to all of nature. If so, this serves as a reminder that many facets of Hegel’s antiquity have been revived in new, unexpected forms.


2020 ◽  
pp. 111-194
Author(s):  
Will D. Desmond

Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art offer a veritable ‘world history of art’, and have led to his being called the real ‘father of art history’, but at their heart is a close identification of beauty with ‘the ideal’ and of art with ‘the classical’—and hence with (Greek) antiquity. With reference to the legacies of Winckelmann and Kantian aesthetic theory, this chapter begins by explicating the main features of Hegel’s aesthetics: the notion of ‘the ideal’ and of art’s vocation to reveal ‘the truth’ sensuously; the classification of artistic styles into Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic; and the division of basic art forms into architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry. The chapter tackles each of these art forms in turn, focusing on Hegel’s sources and understanding of their role in Greek and Roman civilizations. His discussions of the Greek temple, Greek sculpture, epic, lyric, and comedy are relatively neglected, but all contribute as much as tragedy to his Winckelmannian understanding of the Greeks as ‘the people of art’ and of the ‘sculptural’ nature of the Greek mind. Here his Romans play counterpoint, as a derivative and aesthetically uncreative people—except in the genre of satire, which also fills out Hegel’s portrait of Roman ‘prose’, alienation, and increasing self-awareness. Though each of the art-forms peaks in a certain historical period, Hegel tends to associate each peak with the ‘classical’ ideal—an association that may help to illuminate his controversial statements about the ‘end of art’ in the modern, Romantic style.


2020 ◽  
pp. 195-242
Author(s):  
Will D. Desmond

Two-thirds of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion are given over to ‘finite’ or pre-Christian religions, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to them. This is particularly surprising given the importance that he gives to the Greek ‘religion of beauty’ and Roman ‘religion of expediency’, for along with the Jewish ‘religion of sublimity’, they form the immediate historical precedents and preparation for Christianity, which Hegel’s teleological history accepts as the final, ‘true’, and ‘infinite’ religion. This chapter seeks to help to remedy the scholarly gap, not only by summarizing Hegel’s understanding of Greek and Roman religions in themselves, in relation to each other, to Christianity and previous ‘Oriental’ religions, and in relation to Hegel’s conception of religion as such. In addition, it seeks to juxtapose some of Hegel’s remarks with those of more recent scholars, to suggest that in general his approaches to Greek and Roman phenomena remain insightful. Although his strong judgments may offend many (for a variety of reasons), his comparative architectonic can be exhilarating: his juxtaposition of Greek anthropomorphism and the Christian Incarnation is challenging for Hellenists and Christian theologians; and his argument that Christianity is fundamentally a product of the Roman world, with Roman religion as its immediate predecessor, is a thought-provoking blend of Christian apologetics and proto-sociological historicism.


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