History, for Hegel, is the history of the ‘spirit’. It is the history which the spirit itself creates and in which the spirit takes on an ‘objective’ shape in the world. The objectivity of what Hegel calls ‘objective spirit’ is realized in the form of world history. The term ‘world history’ refers less to the history of the whole world, and more to the historical sequence of ‘worlds’, or epochs. World and history thus have an asymmetrical relationship in the Hegelian understanding of ‘world history’: it is one history, which divides everything on earth into many worlds, into local and temporally limited world cultures. What makes it one history—what makes it unified—is the unitary concept of the spirit. The contributions brought together in this special issue discuss Hegel’s theory of world history, taking different approaches to the question of the relationship between the incomplete and the completed, between ‘actuality’ as a rational state and ‘existence’ as a reality that lacks rationality. In all texts, Hegel’s method of developing a philosophy of history represents a central problem.

In recent years, the ancient concept of second nature has become the focus of a growing volume of Hegel-related work in ethics, social philosophy, philosophy of mind, and action theory. And for good reason: second nature allows us to think across, and seeks to bridge, fundamental antagonisms that have haunted modern philosophy since its inception – between the realm of law and the realm of reasons, necessity and freedom, inclination and duty. In social philosophy, in particular, second nature holds the promise of reconciling the painful modern rupture between the individual and her political community, reviving the goods and comforts of what have been called the freedoms of the ancients in the context of a modern Sittlichkeit.

Hegel’s ‘science of right’ is a philosophical account of spirit’s ‘world’. Accordingly, in this essay, I propose to take it as the model of what I call a ‘political cosmology’. In Hegel’s dialectic-speculative philosophy, cosmology becomes a practical, worldly science. It becomes the account of the ways in which spirit immanently constructs, produces and comes to know its own world and itself as the actuality of the world.

In this paper I will first argue, with reference to Hegel's Jena writings, that the notion of recognition, and the constitution of practical self-consciousness, emerge from the process of first nature and presuppose the capacities of a pre-reflexive self. Then I will show that both the notions of habit and second nature, which Hegel in the Encyclopaedia and the Philosophy of Right places at the basis of his understanding of the social and historical world, and his conception of embedded freedom as liberation, are themselves not intelligible except in their dialectical relation to the first nature of which they are reconfigurations. I will then show how the dialectical relation to first nature accounts for processes of social reification, understood as deadening forms of forgetting the living root of sociality, and thus how it can account in a social diagnostic sense for some aspects of the contingency, plurality and fragmentation of contemporary social processes.

This paper answers the question of how, according to Hegel, we can do philosophy of right. The first part of the paper deals with a critical dimension of Hegel’s understanding of the method of the philosophy of right. In the second part, it is shown that in the philosophy of right we consciously look at the present as forming a comprehensive context, as something that is resistant to mere thought and as something that is temporal. According to Hegel, what we consider in this way is concrete.

In what sense can human beings be conceived of as social beings? I argue that sociality is not merely an attribute of the species to which we belong; rather, the way in which we belong to our own life-form is itself socially mediated. To bring this other sense of sociality into view, the article (I) distinguishes the logical sociality of all living beings from the material sociality of social animals and the political sociality of self-conscious social animals. (II) The political sociality characterizing human beings requires a complex second-personal articulation through which alone we can exist as members of our life-form and determine its content. (III) Constituted in this way, the human form of life is characterized by a particularly open and at the same time precarious character. (IV) Against this background, forms of objective spirit are necessary which grant us a generalized recognition and relieve us from the contingency of particular second-personal recognitions, without abandoning the openness of the sociality of the human form of life. This double requirement has led to paradoxical institutions in modern society which strive to protect and ensure the sociality of the human form of life precisely by naturalizing and individualizing our access to it.

The final pages of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia announce a particularly fraught transition. Hegel is describing a move from the concrete world of social and political institutions to the sublimated spheres of art, religion and philosophy—the transition from ‘objective’ to ‘absolute’ spirit. This transition is intricate, partly because, like all transitions, it works in both directions—in this case, from politics to culture and back again. Transition is always difficult to grasp in Hegel, not least because it takes such a variety of appearances: as an inexorable process, as an unexpected leap, or as an invisible movement that seems to take place behind our backs at moments of greatest stalemate. But this particular transition is especially challenging—not simply because it is so unprepared but also because it complicates the idea of the absolute as consummation of the encyclopaedic system. Hegel clearly explains why absolute spirit requires objective spirit. Art, religion and philosophy all depend on a world of pre-existing social practices from which they must nonetheless wrest a special kind of independence. But why the reverse? Why does objective spirit need to surpass itself in forms of spirit that overreach and may even, as we will argue, undermine it? What is the insufficiency in politics that requires the supplement of cultural practices that will destabilise it? Conversely, what is the specific autonomy that absolute spirit requires for its absolution, and what are the political stakes and risks of this autonomy?

Katherine Angel has recently challenged contemporary conceptions of erotic desire by suggesting that sex is a learning process in which we discover what it is to be a person. This paper brings her suggestion to bear on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. It offers an interpretation of what Hegel calls ‘immediate desire’ and the experience an immediately desiring consciousness makes by reading a key paragraph through the lens of erotic desire. What the paper hopes to show is that Hegel’s analysis of the experience of desire and the example of sexual encounters can be mutually illuminating.

Based on Hegel’s thesis of the ‘end of art’, this paper aims to explore how to study Hegel’s philosophy of literature by carrying out a dialogue with Francesco Campana. In his recent book, The End of Literature, Hegel, and the Contemporary Novel (2019), Campana demonstrates how literature resists its end by continuous self-transformation and provides a framework of ‘philosophization’–‘poetry’–‘ordinariness’ in understanding the contemporary novel. While, to some extent, I agree with him on the understanding of the ‘end of art’ thesis, I object to his idea that ‘philosophization’ and ‘ordinariness’ are two poles between which poetry moves. I defend the view that, from the perspective of Hegel’s absolute and taking Hegel’s philosophy as a totality, ‘philosophization’ and ‘ordinariness’ are inseparable. Furthermore, I emphasize the significance of Hegel’s thesis of the ‘end of art’, which I argue lies in revealing the problem of modern subjectivity. Literature, as a unique form of art, also reveals this problem and helps to solve it. Therefore, in the study of Hegel’s philosophy of literature, I insist on adopting the perspective of Hegel’s absolute and taking Hegel’s philosophy as a whole so that we can build connections among different disciplines and among different art-forms and art-types. With this perspective, I make some proposals, which include several paradigms for the study of Hegel’s philosophy of literature. Finally, in terms of the thesis of the ‘end of art’, I maintain that the study of Hegel’s philosophy of literature is to address the problem of modern subjectivity.

At the beginning of his discussion of childhood and childrearing, Hegel confronts the reader with a provocative view: marriage without children, Hegel argues, is incomplete (PR: §173, §173Z). It is tempting to disregard this view as yet another old-fashioned thing that Hegel has to say about marriage—yet another example, that is, of one of Hegel’s nineteenth-century convictions that are better left in the past. But in this paper, I want to make the case that Hegel’s view for the incompleteness of childless marriage, despite many shortcomings, contains a grain of truth. This grain of truth consists in the thought that a committed love relationship comes with a general social requirement: to truly care about one another as a couple, we also have to jointly care about somebody else. In that way, romantic love—contrary to appearances—has to always include a social ‘We’.

Explicating a concept that Hegel coins in his early writings, this paper shows how death—which initially appears as an absolute limitation on human freedom—can be understood as its condition. Understood as ‘the power to die’, our mortality becomes the freedom to negate any determination whatsoever, much as to own and value some determinations. The last section juxtaposes this agentive understanding of mortality against Hegel’s ideal of modern Ethical Life, sketching the ways in which modern ‘second nature’ is better grounded in our mortal ‘first nature’.

So fears the fictional spectator within the third act of Ludwig Tieck’s Die verkehrte Welt (Tieck 1978: 87). By the time it nears its conclusion, the 1797 play has become a quadruple play-within-a-play-within-a-play-within-a-play, with the character audience unable to tell what is fiction and what is reality, with Tieck undermining conventional narration as a parable of poetic fantasy and Romantic irony, part of that comic heritage extending from Aristophanes and Cervantes, up to Ludvig Holberg and Laurence Sterne. A verkehrte Welt was a recurrent cultural motif, with a similarly titled play appearing in 1683 by Christian Weise, as well as another by Johann Ulrich von König in 1725, each of which also partook from the Italian tradition of commedia dell’ arte. Heinrich Heine would later, in 1844, give the title Die verkehrte Welt to his satirical poem from the verse cycle Zeitgedichte. Yet the formulation of an ‘inverted world’ after Tieck would go on to acquire a meaning and seriousness through the German tradition altogether independent of his literary whimsy.

Hegel’s early work The Life of Jesus (Das Leben Jesu) of 1795 presents Jesus as a teacher of Kantian morality and ends abruptly with his death, anointing of his body, and burial, such that Jesus could appear to be merely a figure of the remote past. However, within a few years Hegel’s view of the death of Jesus was to change radically. Writing of his death in terms of the ‘death of God’, this individual is transformed into the universality of Spirit who dwells in the community. This paper examines how this fundamental change in Hegel’s thought came about, how Hegel’s mature understanding of the death of Jesus was appropriated by Richard Wagner in his proposed opera Jesus of Nazareth, and how this ‘death of God’ became the model for the death of Brünnhilde in the Ring cycle. For both Hegel and Wagner, the death of Christ can only be understood as a self-involving enterprise, the bringing together of the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’. Further, Wagner largely shares Hegel’s immanent understanding of God, although under other influences he can affirm the idea of a transcendent God or a transcendent world.

Christopher Arthur’s 2022 book The Spectre of Capital presents a systematic-dialectical exposition of the capitalist economy, focussing on the forms of capital. The book is a specific synthesis of much of Arthur’s earlier writings (the relevant works are listed in Arthur 2022: 441–42). Inherently the book goes beyond those earlier writings, because ‘synthesis’ and the associated interconnectedness of ‘moments’ is the true art of the book.

Hegel contends that judgements are contradictory, finite and untrue. Prominent scholars argue that Hegel’s issue with judgements is resolved in the later stages of his Logic. Specifically, Ng suggests that this solution is found in Hegel’s discussion of life. In this article, I argue that not only does life fail to resolve Hegel’s problem with judgement—death highlights its insolubility. To support this claim, I examine Hegel’s discussion of judgements in the Logic, showing that judgements are inherently contradictory because they both unite and separate individuals and universals. Instead of being resolved retrospectively, I demonstrate that contradiction, finitude and untruth are intrinsic to judgements. Moreover, since judgements play a constitutive and determinative role in Hegel’s metaphysics, they pass their contradictions, finitude and untruth onto the objects they constitute. Specifically, I argue that for living beings, judgement is literally a matter of life and death, because the contradiction of judgements implies the finitude of the objects they constitute—namely, the perishability of things and the mortality of organisms.

I thank my interlocutors for the care and attention that they have given to my work, The Spectre of Capital; Idea and Reality.1 I also thank the journal for organizing this symposium. The book rigorously develops a systematic dialectical presentation (SDP) of capital as an Idea. The very first, perhaps, to explore the method of systematic dialectic were Tony Smith and Geert Reuten. This problematic always involves a nuanced reception of Hegel’s logic. My differences with Smith and Reuten on this particular issue are partially addressed below.