1 - Introduction: Hegelianism?

Summary

The essays in this collection refer to, defend proposals about, and attempt to link two topics that have become relatively unpopular and quite variously interpreted recently: “modernism” and “Hegelianism.” The issues relevant to both terms have become so contentious that the following preliminaries are no doubt necessary.

Modernity has come to refer both to a contested historical category and to an even more contested philosophical and civilizational ideal, some historically distinct, collective human aspiration. Various defenses and dissatisfactions with this ideal have always involved a number of explicit or implicit philosophical claims. In the essays that follow, I take issue with some prominent assessments of what is or is not philosophically at stake in the idea of a modern revolution in Western civilization, and begin to suggest an alternate view.1 A reconsideration of the original German Idealist formulations of the problem of modern philosophy (which I interpret as the problem of freedom), especially what I shall propose as Hegelian alternatives in such disputes, will form the basis of this discussion.

Such an approach and such a suggested response raise two immediate, potentially discussion-ending objections. To many, the idea of a topic like “philosophical modernism” is so vague and misleading that it is better avoided than embraced. To others, perhaps the same skeptics, post- Kantian idealism is an episode in Western philosophy of interest only for historical reasons; the last attempt at systematic, a priori philosophy about “how things really are,” the very excesses of which finally revealed the foolishness of such attempts.