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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2015
What is coming to assert itself as the mainstream reading of Hegel's philosophy at the start of our century is the picture of a reaction to, elaboration of, and finally solution to, Kantian problems. What goes hand in hand with this reading is a rejection of metaphysics as supposedly uncritical pre-Kantian baggage unaware of its presuppositions and unable to examine its own sources and the legitimacy of its claims.
However complex this perspective and intelligent its merits, even if the intention is the well-meaning one of liberating Hegel's philosophy from whatever smacks of traditionalist views fuelling the various Hegel myths and legends and of making Hegel palatable again to a naturally suspicious English-speaking world, I think that this picture does Hegel a disservice. It is also detrimental to our understanding of the pre-Kantian tradition, which is all too often misconstrued as indistinguishable from Wolffian metaphysics. While I do not intend to dispute in any way the crucial importance of critical philosophy for the genesis of absolute idealism, or suggest that this appropriation of Hegel is merely instrumental, I am saying that it is one-sided in that it ignores Hegel's extraordinary attempt at understanding his own philosophy as digesting what is best about our tradition, assimikting it, and making it speak for us again in a new voice.
So I am not denying that trying to update or appropriate Hegel might shed considerable light on select deeper meanings of a thought whose opacity still makes us regard it as an inert and surd obstacle to straight and unambiguous philosophical practice. But all too often one gets the impression that for most proponents of such a view metaphysics is the naive description of a sort of formal ontology, which does not question its fixed meanings but adopts stable substrates represented as such from ordinary experience, and understands thought as a description, as the realistic mirroring of an objectivity that is given to it.
This paper isolates one aspect of Hegel's interpretation and assimilation of Aristotle's energeia, the logical metaphysical understanding of being as activity, without going beyond occasional remarks on the main differences between Hegel's and Aristotle's philosophies or the limitations of Hegel's understanding of Aristotle. For a fully-fledged account of such issues, and for a detailed analysis of the relevant texts as well as of the wide-ranging secondary literature, I refer the reader to my book Hegel and Aristotle (New York; Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001), on which this article is based.
VGPh is the abbreviation for the first edition of the Lectares on the History of Philosophy in the Suhrkamp edition of Hegel's works (G.W.F. Hegel, Werke in 20 Bänden, edited by E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel, Frankfurt a.M. 1969–71), and is meant to refer to volume 19.
I read an earlier draft of this paper at the Hegel Society of Great Britain annual conference in Oxford in September 2005. I wish to thank the participants for their stimulating questions and comments.
1 This paper isolates one aspect of Hegel's interpretation and assimilation of Aristotle's energeia, the logical metaphysical understanding of being as activity, without going beyond occasional remarks on the main differences between Hegel's and Aristotle's philosophies or the limitations of Hegel's understanding of Aristotle. For a fully-fledged account of such issues, and for a detailed analysis of the relevant texts as well as of the wide-ranging secondary literature, I refer the reader to my book Hegel and Aristotle (New York; Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001), on which this article is based.
VGPh is the abbreviation for the first edition of the Lectares on the History of Philosophy in the Suhrkamp edition of Hegel's works (G.W.F. Hegel, Werke in 20 Bänden, edited by E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel, Frankfurt a.M. 1969–71), and is meant to refer to volume 19.
I read an earlier draft of this paper at the Hegel Society of Great Britain annual conference in Oxford in September 2005. I wish to thank the participants for their stimulating questions and comments.