Hegel, a Reinterpretation

by Walter Kaufmann

Book Overview

The continuing discovery of important Hegel manuscripts and advances in the criticism of Hegel's works have set the stage for a major reevaluation of one of the greatest philosophers of all time. This... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385020759
• ISBN13: 9780385020756
• Release Date: January 1966
• Publisher: Doubleday
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Materials for the Study of Hegel

Walter Kaufmann's study of Hegel is astonishingly erudite and highly-readable. It is not intended to be an overview of Hegel's thought; rather, it is a supplement to further study. Kaufmann is mostly occupied with correcting previous misinterpretations of Hegel's thought, providing useful philological material, and interpreting Hegel's philosophy in the light of extensive biographical research. It is clearly the outcome of many years of intensive study, and one comes away with the impression that Kaufmann pored over every letter and monograph he could find. What the book does NOT contain is a clear, flowing exegesis or interpretation of Hegel's thought. Unlike Kaufmann's "Nietzsche", Hegel's development is looked at chronologically. It is difficult to get a clear sense of Hegel's overarching thought from this study. Bursts of commentary and exegesis are broken by long, technical digressions. A wealth of footnotes provides extreme detail about discrepancies in different versions of Hegel's texts and comments on their editors and redactors. If you are looking for a tool to assist you in reading Hegel for yourself, this book will make a valuable companion. As an introduction to the thought of Hegel, I recommend Charles Taylor's Hegel and Modern Society.

A big footnote on the philosophical jack of hearts.

When I was young, I was taught that I should appreciate J. S. Bach and other musical geniuses about like Walter Kaufmann grew up thinking that Hegel was really something. Kaufmann and I have both noticed how reluctant Hegel was to admit who he was talking about, so he considers it an anomaly on page 490 of the J. B. Baille translation of THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND that the name Oedipus has been inserted into the sentence "In the story of *OEdipus* the son does not see his own father in the person of the man who has insulted him . . ." Walter Kaufmann lists the persons whom Hegel actually mentioned in his manuscript ("only thirteen men and women are named." p. 125). I would say Kaufmann left out Julius Caesar, since the preface happens to discuss historical facts like the year in which Caesar was born. Reading the translation of the preface by Walter Kaufmann in HEGEL TEXT AND COMMENTARY, a separate paperback volume with the same index as HEGEL A REINTERPRETATION, is the best approach for understanding Kaufmann's method of explaining Hegel. His commentary in that book is mostly in the form of notes at particular places in the text, and they do not always refer to persons that might have been meant by Hegel, as a lot of philosophy has happened since Hegel, and Walter Kaufmann was aware of various interpretations and more modern philosophers like Kierkegaard and Heidegger (who, "unlike Hegel, seeks to move philosophy closer to poetry rather than science." note 10 on Commentary page 93). Having HEGEL A REINTERPRETATION as a separate book allows Kaufmann to try to demonstrate the scope of philosophy in a way that Hegel attempted to do, encompassing it all as no one had tried to do since Aristotle.I learned a lot reading this book years ago, allowing myself to feel a lot like Fichte in the comparison, "Nobody today would rank Fichte with Kant;" (p.110). Self-consciousness in German is not quite what it is in America today, but a large part of how modern the intrusive nature of our media has allowed us to become is the constant measure of our own sorry self-consciousnesses becoming aware of each other, a very Hegelian philosophical theme. The appreciation of particular geniuses in our own day might be troubled by knowledge such as Kaufmann's, that "There are not many non-German composers in a class with Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; and during their era German poetry was coming into its own, too. The great achievements of the period were triumphs of the artistic imagination." (p. 114). Our own composers always seem to be thinking about something else instead of what it would take to make their music better.Did anybody notice how long the song "Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" was on Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks" album? If "the drilling in the wall kept up, but no one seemed to pay it any mind" could be applied to philosophy, it might be as a form of consciousness which seeks to avoid an overwhelming awareness of anything which is

If you have to read Hegel....

....do start here, for Kaufmann is an able Hegel commentator, clarifier, and critic.

A Valuable Road Map of the Vast Expanses of a Great Mind

Departing from his area of specialty, Nietzsche and the existentialists, Kaufmann is no less able to authoritatively present a balanced, masterful, thorough, yet concise analysis of the life and work of perhaps the least understood philosopher. As those who have assayed the Phenomenology or the Logic surely realize, exploring Hegel without a guide can be perilous. Kaufmann neutralizes many of the language barriers and ambiguities in Hegel's great works, clearly presents their core themes, and, much to the delight of this reader, locates them within the intellectual currents of the time and Hegel's own intellectual struggles and victories. As all soon find out, parsing a single work of Hegel's is less a challenge than understanding it in the broader context of Hegel's "system," let alone the movement begun by Kant and Fichte and carried onward by Schelling, Marx and others. Kaufmann brilliantly brings the reader from a tight focus on the many subtleties of Hegel's method to a broad view of the intellectual landscape of Hegel's Germany. An added bonus is a diligent if sometimes ascerbic analysis of key players in Hegelian scholarship.