I argue that Hegel’s immaterialist metaphysics provides a viable alternative to those dissatisfied with a “disenchanted” materialism. I defend a “minimalist critique of materialism.” I show that what Hegel criticizes in materialism is not the reality of matter, but only its ultimate reality. I show that he maintains a “minimalist conception of immateriality.” I argue that he operates with a very specific notion of matter referring to mutually independent entities formed by means of external action upon them. So he is referring to entities that are not material, i.e. that are not mutually interrelated and/or are formed by means of their internal activity upon themselves. Adopting this “minimalist conception,” Hegel thinks, changes how we see the way things are. He thus starts to speak about how all things strive toward some ultimate immateriality. This is the “transformational conception of immateriality.” While this part of Hegel’s critique is problematic, I contend that Hegel’s extravagances are just his way of incorporating an expansive, “re-enchanted” conception of nature that allows material reality to exist alongside immaterial entities as Hegel conceives them.

In the Introduction to his 1817 Encyclopedia, Hegel tells us that philosophy as a whole can be understood as “the science of freedom” (¶ 5).  In this paper, I consider what Hegel could mean in describing one branch of his system, the logic, as the science of freedom.  It is not obvious what this purely theoretical science has to do with freedom, at least if we associate freedom with human action.  I argue that, in common with the other two branches of his encyclopedic system, Hegel’s Logic can be characterized as “the science of freedom” because it shares features he associates with the nature of free subjectivity.  In particular, I focus on his account of how thought develops and is capable of generating its own form.

Hegel’s Groundwork for a Philosophy of Right has become, perhaps, the most widely read of the books he published in his lifetime. Many regard it as a work that stands alongside a handful of others as classics of modern political philosophy. Hegel, of course, did not conceive this work as a stand-alone piece of social and political theorizing, as it was effectively an expansion of the section “Objective Spirit” from the “Philosophy of Spirit”, forming Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. As such, in structure and content, it was meant to be understood as giving further determination to a conceptually articulated edifice presented in Part One of the Encyclopaedia, “The Science of Logic”. But more than this, as the presentation the Encyclopaedia follows a pattern in which subsequent sections reveal the “truth” of earlier ones, the “truth” of the determinations of Objective Spirit should further be illuminated in the later Encyclopaedia sections on “Absolute Spirit”, treating Art, Religion and Philosophy. This chapter attempts to illuminate Hegel’s ideas concerning objective spirit by examining them in this broader context.

The logic of the Concept has three parts. The first (“The subjective concept”) examines (apparently following the divisions of traditional logic) the concept as-it-is, the types of judgement and the reasoning (“syllogism”) constructed from judgements; but the notions of judgement and syllogistic reasoning are as deeply transformed as that of the concept itself. Far from any formal approach, how thought informs reality should be examined. The second part (“The object”) examines how this conceptual shaping of the real happens. It occurs at three levels, seemingly corresponding to the great divisions of classical science: mechanism, chemism, teleology. The third part concerns “the idea”, a notion that is completely transformed, being defined as “the absolute unity of the [subjective] concept and objectivity” (Encyclopedia §213). Hegel describes how subjectivity and objectivity, thought and reality, interfere, to the extent that it becomes impossible to separate them, except at the cost of a great abstraction, that of the “understanding”. Hegel calls this interpenetration of thought and being the “absolute idea”, thus redefining the terms in which philosophy had hitherto been thought.

Given recent naturalist readings of Hegel’s metaphysics and Spinoza’s rather widespread reputation as being the most consistent rationalist, the question arises in what sense Hegel can be called a ‘Spinozist’. An analysis of Hegel’s notion of philosophy reveals that despite Hegel’s and Spinoza’s common commitment to the notion that philosophy is “the self-comprehension of universal and unconditioned truth”, Hegel thinks that Spinoza’s substance-based account renders the finite philosophers entirely explicable in terms of universal truth’s self-causing and thus undermines individual autonomy. In contrast, Hegel’s commitment to concept-metaphysics is supposed to enable him to argue that individual philosophers still exert control over their thought and remain autonomous in their acts of channeling truth. Hegel thus aims to retain Kant’s allegedly anti-spinozistic commitment to individual autonomy by grounding his notion of philosophy on concept- rather than substance-metaphysics.

In his Encyclopaedia, Hegel’s section “Objective Spirit” is crucial for our understanding his more elaborated ethical and political philosophy in the Philosophy of Right. The latter assumes a familiarity with key ideas found only in the Encyclopaedia, including (a) a proof of the free will and the need to develop a philosophical account for distinguishing between a free will and an arbitrary will, (b) the wider context of how ethical and political philosophy sits within his philosophical system and (c) its link beyond itself to other parts of Hegel’s philosophy. Unlike other philosophers, Hegel’s work is systematic, and a deeper appreciation of Objective Spirit and its place within the system – made clear in the Encyclopaedia – illuminates crucial ideas in his Philosophy of Right.

Both in the 1807 Phenomenology and in the original 1817 Encyclopedia, Hegel did not grant art any special status as one of the basic forms of absolute spirit. Yet, we know that by 1820, two years after his arrival in Berlin, he was lecturing on art along the lines that now are familiar to us, as one of the three essential components of absolute spirit. I will argue that this shows us something crucial in the development of Hegel’s systematic philosophy, which has to do both with his systematic concerns and with the dramatic shift in the world around him after the Congress of Vienna in 1815. In a nutshell: the modern world which he had delineated in 1807 had been vindicated by the failure of the Congress to turn the clock back to pre-revolutionary times, and this raised the question of what role art could play in that world which would be different from the religious role it had formerly played. This turn of events required him to rethink his political philosophy, his philosophy of religion, and, of course, his philosophy of art. It also led him to his historical and rather “phenomenological” conception of art that he presented in his Berlin lectures.

This chapter examines the principal differences between the Encylcopaedia Logic (EL) and the larger Science of Logic (SL). It will focus especially on the section on “essence” in which the categories are ordered in a somewhat different way from the way they are ordered in the SL. The chapter will consider whether these differences are just due to the different aims of the EL and SL, or whether Hegel develops an altogether new conception of essence in the EL.

Especially in the Zusätze and the 1827/8 Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit, Hegel notes that cultivation is associated with minimizing the effects of natural determinations on one’s body. Insofar as nature is associated with particularity and reason with universality, idiosyncratic embodiments may seem incompatible with the kind of mastery of the body Hegel envisions. However, given that the “Anthropology” focuses on development of the soul rather than on the body, various compatible bodily possibilities may exist. This raises the question of how much the body’s comportment ought to correspond to an ideal, and of the implications for those whose embodiment marks them out (in Hegel’s system) as closer to nature. Since coming to own our natural determinations is an ongoing process throughout a lifetime, despite the location of the “Anthropology” in the Encyclopedia, it is important to consider the role of our free decision-making in the transformation of our body. Attending to the story of the body within the “Anthropology” helps us appreciate it more fully as a crucial link between the Philosophy of Nature and the rest of the Philosophy of Spirit.

Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is interesting for three primary reasons: (1) its theory of space and time; (2) its theory of physical mechanics; and (3) reconstruction of biological categories. With respect to (1), the primary interest is its connection (a) to intuition and thus to Kant and prior theories of space and time; and (b) to the mathematical categories of the Science of Logic. With respect to (2), the primary interest is (a) the relation to important predecessors, particularly Leibniz and Newton, and (b) the relevance of Hegel’s comments on mechanical explanation for contemporary practice. With respect to (3), the primary interest is (a) the relation of Hegel’s account to past conceptions of organism in Leibniz and Aristotle and (b) the tenability of Hegel’s theory in the light of contemporary biology and Deleuze’s criticisms of the Aristotelian and Hegelian theories of organic life. A further question on the relation of mechanical and organicist explanation is whether the relation between the two supports Kreines’s influential reading of Hegel’s metaphysics as distinguishing between two orders of explanation and therefore of phenomena and dependence relations.

This essay charts the main stages of the account and the unity of the “Psychology” with specific attention to the role of the Concept, Hegel’s signature conception of self-referring negativity and self-particularizing universality. I argue that “free mind” should be conceived as the capacity to make valid practical inferences, where those inferences have the form of the purpose that is the key to Hegelian rationality. In this paper I read the “Psychology” through the classic question of whether knowing the good is sufficient for acting on the good (the internalism question). The structure of the “Psychology” makes it an obvious place to look for Hegel’s answer, for his “free mind” just is the unity of the judging (and inferring) capacities of the intellect with the volitional capacities of the will. I argue that while the free mind, as the structure of the practical inference, does to a great extent identify the will with practical reason, Hegel is also able through the Concept to make room for the counternormative within the normative. Showing how the derivation of free mind gives us a new way to think about familiar capacities and the internalism question also provides an indirect proof of Hegel’s Concept itself.

This chapter explores and analyzes the notion of religion in the Encyclopedia of the philosophical Sciences. In so doing, it offers also an interpretation of Hegel’s thinking that emphasizes the importance of the religious dimension.

The chapter is divided in three major parts. In the first section, it introduces Hegel’s absolute idealism as a coherent philosophical articulation of a religious worldview.

In the second section, it considers the chapter on religion in its systematic context, i.e. absolute Spirit. There, it first concentrates on the transition from art to religion, presenting both the element of continuity and of difference that exists between the two spheres. Secondly, it offers an interpretation of the Hegelian conception of revealed religion as a form of modern scholastic theology.

In the third and final section the chapter considers the idea of “sublation of religion into philosophy”. Since this movement towards philosophy is connected with the cultic dynamic, the chapter also analyzes in which sense speculative thinking can be regarded as a form of cultus, or to use the Hegelian term, as “a divine service”.

The chapter deals with a crucial transition within Hegel’s Encyclopedia: the transition from its first part – the “science of logic” – to its second part – the “philosophy of nature” (§§244–51). My overall argument will be organized in three, consecutive steps. First I present a rational reconstruction of §244. Secondly I attempt to shed light on Hegel’s characterization of nature as presented in the first paragraphs of the Philosophy of Nature. My aim is to motivate and defend his claim that we can know a priori that nature must be a material space-time system. In the third part I address the question of what it might reasonably mean to claim, as Hegel does, that concepts or universals are “immanent” in nature. I argue that it is crucial, in this context, to take seriously his remark that “the concept” does not as such occur in nature, but only as “internal” (innerlich) or “immersed” (versenkt).

In his Science of Logic, Hegel treats life as a pure concept. This means that we know what it is to be a living being, and so how to distinguish living from non-living beings, non-empirically. We know it as an implication of the “science of pure thinking” that the Logic develops. The Philosophy of Nature in the Encyclopedia also treats living beings as categorically distinct, and the treatment is also not an empirical one. But it is not derived from the science of pure thinking as such. This suggests that the latter treatment is not absolutely a priori but, as is sometimes said of other aspects of Hegel’s work, “relatively a priori.” (Stated another way, The Philosophy of Nature is philosophy, not natural science.) What “relatively a priori” might mean is the topic here, and the aim is to show by such an analysis the general form of the relation between the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia. The main point of comparison and contrast will be Kant’s understanding of the relation between “Transcendental Logic,” The Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science and The Metaphysics of Morals, a similar, albeit quite differently conceived, tri-partite structure to Hegel’s system.

Speight has recently raised the question, which he himself leaves unanswered, how naturalism relates to spirit in Hegel’s philosophy of art. ‘Naturalism’ denotes an explanation that invokes aspects of nature that are (allegedly) irreducible or resistant to thought. I call nature ‘stubborn’ insofar as it evinces resistance to its being formed by thought and hence to its being united with it. This paper argues that §§556, 558 and 560 of Hegel’s “Encyclopedia” answer Speight’s question by specifying three elements of nature that, first, are present in art and, second, are resistant to thought. These are materiality, natural form, and genius. They exhibit nature’s stubbornness in art. This stubbornness, I argue, is what justifies Hegel’s claim that art is absolute spirit only implicitly (§556), which leads to the claim that art needs to be superseded by religion and philosophy. In this way, Speight’s question receives a precise answer.