This collection of essays, resulting from the 2016 conference of the Hegel Society of America, is an attempt to address the scholarly ‘neglect [of] Hegel's relation to ancient philosophy’ (2). To this end, it presents us with thirteen articles, covering the period from the Pre-Socratics to Stoicism, by both established and junior scholars in this field.
Seven of the essays deal with Hegel's relation to Aristotle. While the importance of Aristotle's thought for Hegel's philosophy is widely recognized, the essays aim to offer novel interpretations of the connections between the two. But the book also attempts to show what is lost if we solely focus on Aristotle. Hence, we find two articles on Plato, two on Pre-Socratic philosophers, an essay on Socrates, and an essay on Stoicism. Speaking generally, some authors see Hegel's interpretations as anachronistic or self-projecting, while still arguing that a lot can be learned about Hegel's philosophy from his interpretations of Hellenic figures. Others try to show that Hegel's readings still express the ‘truth’ of a philosophical system in question.
We start with two essays on the Pre-Socratics. Robert Metcalf provides a general criticism of Hegel's reading of the Pre-Socratics through focusing on Xenophanes, who, according to Metcalf, ‘disrupts the developmentalist schema that has been imposed on Presocratic thought’ (10). For Metcalf, Hegel's treatment of Xenophanes as merely a precursor to Parmenides reveals his over-reliance on non-authoritative ancient texts. It also reveals something deeper about the limits and constraints on Hegel's method of reading the history of philosophy and the interpretation of what counts as ‘thought’ within that history. Andrew A. Davis focuses on Anaxagoras. As with Metcalf, Davis also sees Hegel as relying too heavily on the Platonic-Aristotelian ‘progressivist’ reception of the Pre-Socratics. Hence, Hegel downplays the interesting aspects of Anaxagoras's philosophy. On the other hand, Davis argues that understanding Hegel's downplaying of Anaxagoras in favour of Aristotle helps us to better understand Hegel's conception of history which is said to be ‘not progressive but developmental’ (36). It further motivates his curious claim that there is (in Alfredo Ferrarin's words) ‘parallelism’ between the history of philosophy and the Science of Logic (34).
The next three chapters deal with Socrates and Plato. Paul T. Wilford discusses Hegel's treatment of the Trial of Socrates, arguing that for Hegel the conflict between Socrates and Athens expresses ‘the tension between the principles of Moralität and Sittlichkeit’ (39). The tension is not exclusive to ancient Athens, since ‘the modern state's central claim to validity […] is the political reconciliation of the principles underlying Socrates's conflict with Athens’ (50). Jere O'Neill Surber presents Hegel as the first modern philosophical reader of the Platonic dialogues and, in order to identify the origins of Hegel's views on Plato, asks the question ‘how, in fact, did Hegel read the Platonic dialogues’ (58)? According to O'Neill Surber, Hegel's reading ‘is based upon a single philosophical assumption’ that all genuine concepts are concrete universals, i.e., unities of form and content (ibid.). This allows Hegel to reject any possible ‘two-world’ interpretation of Plato (59), and explains his apparent preference for ‘metaphysical’ dialogues that point towards his own system, such as Parmenides, Timaeus, and the Republic. In contrast, Lawrence Bruce-Robertson puts Meno and Phaedo on the same level as the Republic and Parmenides, arguing, perhaps controversially, that we should place more emphasis on Plato's rather than Aristotle's influence on Hegel's system. While Aristotle might be more helpful for elaborating specific Hegelian doctrines, Bruce-Robertson argues ‘that looking to Plato is more helpful in understanding Hegel's approach at a programmatic level; that is to say, in understanding the context of such doctrines’ (71). Hegel's speculative dialectic is hence seen as a completion of Plato's project of a science of the Good, and Bruce-Robertson attempts to show how this Platonic project features in aspects of Hegel's philosophy beyond the lectures on its history.
After chapters on Socrates and Plato come two essays on Aristotle's Metaphysics. Andy German asks how we should understand Hegel's importing of potentiality into Aristotle's conception of God, through which God is transformed into a ‘self-positing Absolute Spirit’ (88). This is not simply a misreading or Hegel's self-projection. For German, reading Metaphysics Λ and Aristotle's claim that life is the energeia (activity) of the intellect, in conjunction with Hegel's notion of Lebendigkeit (vitality), Hegel's interpretation suggests itself as a plausible, unificatory reading of Aristotle's Metaphysics. Similarly, Joshua Mendelsohn attempts to show some non-trivial parallels between Hegel's Logic and Aristotle's Metaphysics. The ‘Stripping Argument’ from Metaphysics Z is investigated, and Mendelsohn finds it paralleled in Hegel's discussion of Absolute Indifference. Both Hegel and Aristotle reach the conclusion that it is insufficient to understand particulars primarily as substrata. They also ‘navigate similar terrain’ (111) in their attempts to avoid the pitfalls associated with separating things from their determinacies.
Departing from the Metaphysics into De Anima, Allegra de Laurentiis investigates Hegel's reading of Aristotle to gain a better understanding of Hegel's notions of Geist and Seele. For both, the soul is hylomorphic and entelechistic, i.e., a physical-immaterial ontological hybrid in which the immaterial pole leads the living individual towards completion of its potentialities. Not only does reading Aristotle clarify Hegel but, de Laurentiis argues, Hegel provides us with a convincing interpretation of Aristotle's claim that there is a kind of thinking independent of corporeity.
An apparent tension between Aristotle and Hegel is discussed by Antón Barba-Kay through the question of whether souls have parts. Barba-Kay claims that Hegel's pattern for rational integrity of the human soul comes from Aristotle. But, for Hegel, the soul is irreducible, whereas Aristotle seems to divide the soul into parts. On the contrary, Barba-Kay suggests that for both the unity of human form is primarily a form of activity rather than a mere collection of separate capacities. Both thinkers want ‘to shift the question from given parts to logically prior wholes’ (138), showing us that, from a Hegelian perspective, Aristotle's apparent partition of the soul appears in itself to be much more Hegelian than it seems.
A change of pace and focus comes with Richard Dien Winfield's paper on Hegel and the ‘allegedly irrefutable principle of contradiction’ (147). Beyond Aristotle, Winfield brings Sextus Empiricus and Kant into conversation with Hegel. Starting with the non-Hegelian exegesis of their arguments for its validity, Winfield argues that the historical acceptance of the principle reveals the fear of starting with indeterminacy, thereby paralyzing any possible ontology by conflating being qua being with determinate being. For Winfield, Hegel is the first to recognize the need to start with indeterminacy and, through this background, explains and justifies (i) Hegel's controversial ‘rejection’ of the principle of contradiction, (ii) the programme and the opening of the Logic, and (iii) the transitions between the books of the Logic.
From here we shift to Aristotle's practical philosophy. Federico Orsini asks whether Hegel's concept of thinking can sublate Aristotle's division of human activity into theoretical, practical, and poietic. The chapter starts with a non-Hegelian investigation into Aristotle's distinction between activities, comparing it with Hegel's conception of objective thinking. For Hegel, the relation between theory, practice, and making must result from, according to Orsini, both a dissolution and reconstruction of Aristotle's distinction. This results in absolute idealism, a systematic framework where ‘making’ is understood in terms of the spontaneity of reason, establishing ‘a simultaneous relation of disjunction and integration between acting and knowing’ (171).
Discussions of Aristotle finish with Angelica Nuzzo's essay on the Politics. Nuzzo argues that Hegel utilizes the first book of Aristotle's Politics to argue against modern theorists of natural right and Kant's moral philosophy. For Nuzzo, perhaps controversially, Hegel's later, Sittlichkeit-oriented practical philosophy does not constitute a radical break from Aristotle. Hegel is seen as employing Aristotle as an anti-Kantian resource, developing a modern concept of morality by conceiving of freedom on a different basis from Kant: reason's and Spirit's actualization outside of pure morality. For Hegel and Aristotle, moral ideas cannot be investigated in their abstract ideality. Rather, the investigations into them must start from the standpoint of actuality, from actual historical moral/political practices and institutions.
The book closes with Bernardo Ferro's chapter on Hegel's critique of Stoicism. Since for Hegel the history of philosophy is a ‘dialectical process whereby truth comes to be’ (189), Ferro discusses Stoicism as a philosophical stage in the development of reason. Similarly to the first two chapters, Ferro mobilizes Hegel's controversial reading of Stoicism to see what this tells us about Hegel's system more generally. Hegel's varied treatment of Stoicism shows that for him ‘[p]hilosophy's role is not to subordinate reality to the abstract unity of thought, but to recognize the thinking consciousness itself as the concrete union of selfsameness and difference’ (200).
Let me briefly conclude by mentioning what is absent from the book. While the essays cover most of what Hegel calls ‘Greek philosophy’, there is no direct treatment of Neoplatonism. The collection is very Aristotle-heavy, often acknowledging how crucial Plotinus and ‘Neo-Aristotelians’ (as Hegel refers to them) are for Hegel's interpretation of Aristotle. Unfortunately, we find no separate, direct treatment of Plotinus or other Alexandrians. Speaking more generally, while the chapters treat ‘ancient philosophy’ as synonymous with what Hegel calls ‘Greek’ in Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie II, Hegel tends to use the adjective ‘ancient’ [antik] in reference to art, rather than philosophy. In itself this is not a problem, but today ‘ancient philosophy’ can be understood in broader terms than ‘Greek philosophy’. Hence, this could be seen as a missed opportunity for addressing questions regarding the difference between our ‘Ancients’ and Hegel's ‘Greeks’, or regarding possible Hegelian readings of the philosophers who do not fit his historical taxonomy, either as Greeks or not at all.
In summary, the stated aim of the volume was to provide a ‘wide-ranging survey’ (3) of Hegel's writings on ancient philosophy, as well as to challenge some established assumptions that currently take hold in this under-researched field. Despite some shortcomings, which might simply arise from the challenges of converting a conference into a published volume, the collection succeeds in this task rather well. It is a good starting point for those interested in Hegel's philosophy in relation to his ancient predecessors.
