Reading Hegel

The project defended in this article is a forty-plus year attempt to argue for the continuing philosophical importance of the positions in theoretical and practical and aesthetic philosophy defended in what has come to be known as ‘German Idealism’ (or ‘post-Kantian German philosophy.’) For the most part this has concerned Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and the relations among them, with most of the attention focused on Hegel. The Hegel interpretation has been criticized for its claim about the influence of Kant on Hegel’s account of apperceptive judgment, for the nature of the idealism ascribed to Hegel, and for the Kantian-Hegelian insistence on the autonomy and self-grounding authority of pure reason. The interpretation of Hegel’s practical philosophy has been criticized for defending an excessively social theory of agency, and the theory of modernization ascribed to Hegel has been criticized for claiming that philosophy could and should have a historically diagnostic task. The interpretation of Hegel’s theory of art argues that elements of Hegel’s basic philosophical position puts one in the best position to understand the meaning and importance of post-Hegelian pictorial modernism, that his general approach can be of great value in understanding his claim that great art had become ‘a thing of the past.’ A clarification of these positions, and a brief case for their philosophical importance comprises the substance of this recapitulation.