Hegel's Apocrypha

Chapter 3 Hegel’s Apocrypha 1 A Rediscovery The term Jugendschriften—writings of youth, is used to refer to a series of texts and fragments produced during Hegel’s years as student and private tutor from the period 1793 to 1800 which he did not himself publish. In 1801 Hegel moved to Jena with the help of Schelling, published his first book, took his habilitation and began his academic career. The Jugendschriften were first published by Hermann Nohl in 1907.1 Nohl was a student of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), the advocate of the philosophy of life and of hermeneutics, who is also important as one of the founders of historicism. Dilthey himself held the view that a philosophy is best described in terms of the history of its development and hence that the biography of a philosopher is often the key to his philosophy. In 1905 he published a work with the title Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels—The history of the young Hegel,2 which was based on the documents in the Royal Prussian Library in Berlin that Nohl published two years later. Dilthey’s concern with Hegel’s early works was thoroughly determined by his own philosophy. For instance, he found that Hegel’s interest in the importance of biography to history was comparable to his own. Hegel had written a Life of Jesus, which means that Hegel tried, just as Dilthey did in the history of philosophy, to consider Jesus Christ not as a dogmatic ‘object’ of theology, but historically, as a matter for historical investigation. He even found a kind of pendant to his own philosophy of life; the concept of life certainly did play an important role in Hegel’s early writings as one of the concepts designating that totality sought by the three Tübingen seminarists. Thirdly, tied to the concept of life, Dilthey found a pantheism in the young Hegel to which he was himself sympathetic, a kind of thinking that was not dogmatically fixed. Many of the readers of Hegel’s early texts regard them with similar enthusiasm precisely because they show him in a very different perspective from the ‘system philosopher’. Some interpreters even claim to have found an ‘alternative Hegel’ in this early period, someone 1 Hegels theologische Jugendschriften nach den Handschriften der Kgl. Bibliothek in Berlin, ed. Hermann Nohl, Tübingen 1907, reprint Frankfurt am Main 1991. T.M. Knox in G.W.F. Hegel— Early Theological Writings, London 1940 translates much but not all of this material. 2 W. Dilthey, Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels—The history of the young Hegel, Berlin 1905, reprint Göttingen 1990. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi ��.��63/9789004300736_004 50 Chapter 3 with whom they would far rather have a convivial drink than the author of the works the philosopher actually published. Hegel’s early texts are indeed written in a style that is far more accessible than most of the later writings, with the notable exception of the popular lectures in Berlin, especially those on history and art. The early writings display a rhetorical brilliance that becomes rare in those later works, so full as they are of the labour of the concept. Moreover, they handle the material in a way that is fresh and immediate, without being explicitly dialectical or indulging in serious methodological reflection. Before turning to the writings individually a hermeneutic proviso must be made against the dominant tendency in the reception of this material, which is important to our orientation in the case of Hegel. He always considered very carefully the question of whether he should publish a text or not. He chided his friend Schelling with having “received his philosophical education in public”,3 but Hegel himself declined to publish, although the manuscripts were piling up already in the 1790s. In Jena he announced the forthcoming publication of his system virtually every single year without actually publishing it, although he was certainly not inactive. The Jena system drafts edited from Hegel’s papers now fill three big volumes of the new Gesammelte Werke edition. Clearly, we have to proceed on the assumption that Hegel would not have wished to see his early writings published and that for our philosopher himself, these writings in no way represent a ‘more authentic’ Hegel than the books that made his name. Hegel would surely have said that in reading his works there can be no question of a more or less authentic Hegel, only of a more or less authentic philosophy. The fact is then that we encounter his philosophy in Hegel’s early writings in statu nascendi, not yet in a mature form and not on the systematic level that would become the minimal benchmark for him later. That benchmark was first achieved in Hegel’s publications in the early period in Jena beginning in 1801; and if one prefers stronger standards, then we should jump to the end of the period, for it is the Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807 that offers the clearly stated, genuine Hegelian philosophy. So Hegel took his time and despite the fact that he had been declaring his intention to intervene in the philosophi- 3 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie—Lectures on the history of philosophy, TW 20, 421, in the article on Schelling. The TW edition is based on the original edition of the Association of Friends, which was translated into English by E.S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson in three volumes, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, London 1892–6. It is freely available on the internet, e.g. on the website of the University of Idaho, unfortunately without page numbers, so the page numbers of the print version are given along with sec- tion and paragraph numbers. In this case; vol.III p.513; the article on Schelling at the end of volume III, part 3, D. ¶ 3..

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