To accommodate the numerous changes Hegel made to his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences after it was published, as well as remarks gathered from the lecture notes of his students, the Encyclopedia was posthumously broken up into three separate books each corresponding to one of its major parts—logic, nature and spirit. This critical guide, edited by Marina F. Bykova, attempts to renew attention to the systematic presentation of Geist in the third of these books, the Encyclopedia Philosophy of Spirit. There is no question that Encyclopedia Philosophy of Spirit covers many topics of deep interest in contemporary philosophy. Under the aegis of ‘subjective spirit’, we find the most detailed presentation of Hegel's mature philosophy of mind. The abbreviated but substantive treatment of ‘objective spirit’ adds to our understanding of his social and political philosophy. And although the treatment of art, religion and philosophy in ‘absolute spirit’ is quite sketchy compared to the lectures he gave on these topics, it is the only place where we see this crucial notion treated in its proper context, as the culmination of spirit's attempt to know itself.
Although these aspects of Hegel's philosophy of spirit have been studied with enormous care and sophistication, Bykova rightly insists there is a marked tendency to analyze these topics in a misleadingly compartmentalized way. This is especially so with respect to objective and absolute spirit, which are more typically approached from outside the Encyclopedia. Bykova's volume attempts to aid the reader who wants to understand this material in its systematic context, thus acquiring a better grasp of how the philosophy of spirit fits into Hegel's overall system, and of how its various parts comprise a whole.
Though the essays are uniformly excellent and of very high quality, they contribute to this overarching project to different degrees. Some of the contributions focus on other sources (like the concluding essay by Robert Williams, which offers a rare engagement with Hegel's history of religion, but somewhat strangely does not touch on the Encyclopedia treatment of religion). Others focus on individual sections of the Encyclopedia without raising these more general, systematic concerns (like Allegra de Laurentiis's detailed and convincing exegesis of Hegel's comments on the soul, which form part of her much-anticipated book-length treatment of Hegel's anthropology). That, of course, is no criticism. But since a short review must be highly selective, I will focus on the contributions that most directly address the more systematic issues to which Bykova's introduction draws our attention.
One of the most important of these issues concerns the position of the philosophy of spirit in Hegel's system as a whole, which Paul Redding addresses in the first essay. Redding rejects a “linear” understanding of this system, which views the logic as autonomous, and the philosophy of spirit as dependent on the logic, in favour of a “circular” model, which views the two as interdependent. Redding argues that Hegel believes that a concept must be present in certain instances in order to have content, and that this implies that the logic cannot be understood without recourse to his Realphilosophie. This shift from a “linear” to a “circular” way of reading Hegel's system, makes it possible to show that Hegel would agree with Robert Brandom that determinate conceptual thought depends on language-use despite the fact that Hegel treats the former in the logic and the latter only in the philosophy of spirit. This is a richly suggestive essay, though certainly controversial in its basic claims.
Another major issue concerns the very concept of Geist. In the second essay, Michael Forster provocatively argues that Hegel's concept of Geist is an inferior copy of Herder's. Forster's case for the Herderian roots of Hegel's concept of Geist rests on a rather slight textual basis: there are fewer than a dozen references to Herder in the twenty volumes of Hegel's collected works, none of which refer to Geist or occur in the pages of the Encyclopedia Philosophy of Spirit. Forster makes up for this shortfall of hard evidence with some exegetical ingenuity. However, despite Forster's ingenuity, one cannot shake the feeling that it is somewhat perverse to emphasize Herder's influence to quite this degree. Forster's subsequent case for the superiority of Herder's notion of Geist over Hegel's rests heavily on his interpretation of Hegel as a behaviourist, an interpretation Forster defends in his earlier book on the Phenomenology of Spirit, but which has never gained many adherents.
The next group of essays treat subjective spirit. Ken Westphal's essay includes a discerning and valuable treatment of Hegel's debts to Aristotle and Kant on cognitive psychology. According to Westphal's interpretation, Hegel rescues the core of Kant's functionalist cognitive psychology by jettisoning Kant's transcendental idealism and interpreting it in line with Aristotelian naturalism about the soul. Markus Gabriel's essay offers an alternative vision of Hegel's basic methodology in the philosophy of spirit. His essay engages the recent debate between Stephen Houlgate and John McDowell about the role of conceptuality in Hegel's theory of perception, but it is perhaps most valuable as providing an accessible sketch, and a useful application, of Gabriel's own alternative to so-called ‘metaphysical’ and ‘non-metaphysical’ readings of Hegel. Gabriel's view is that Hegel is always working at both a second-order level (like non-metaphysical readers insist) and at a first-order level (as metaphysical readers suggest). Hegel's basic commitment is to the idea that these levels cannot really come apart—‘[r]eality cannot substantially differ from how we grasp it in thought’ (109). What is especially interesting about Gabriel's essay is that he shows how this kind of reading can be extended to the philosophy of spirit, to the question of consciousness at the center of the Houlgate-McDowell debate about the possibility of non-conceptual content in Hegel's epistemology and philosophy of mind.
The essays on objective spirit canvas an even wider range of different interpretive options. Christian Krijnen rejects Axel Honneth's attempt to divorce the philosophy of right from its supposedly dubious spirit-metaphysics, in favour of a resolutely metaphysical reading. This takes him about as far away from any liberal appropriation of the philosophy of right as is possible. For Krijnen, the philosophy of right is not about the freedom of individuals at all—it is about finding an adequate external manifestation for the freedom of the concept. Terry Pinkard's essay makes a perfect foil to this, downplaying the metaphysics of objective spirit in favour of his own brand of post-Kantian naturalism. In his usual graceful and modest way, Pinkard offers a reading of objective spirit as an account of the kind of laws and institutions humans must create once the idea that some people are naturally subordinated to others has become unintelligible. For Pinkard, the freedom of the concept manifest in objective spirit is nothing other than the realization of those institutions that correspond to the norm implicit in any such political association—the logic is doing no heavy-lifting here, it is certainly not entirely displacing practical questions (as Krijnen claims). The other essays on objective spirit fall between these interpretive extremes. Bykova's own contribution is a detailed and helpful analysis of the role that sociality plays in Hegel's account of the self, one that hews closely to the text; and the essay by Stephen Houlgate offers a careful reconstruction of Hegel's theory of the state that culminates in a fascinating reconstruction of Hegel's argument for the necessity of a hereditary monarchy and his correspondent criticism of the doctrine of popular sovereignty (all of this, surprisingly, without apology).
The last group of essays concern absolute spirit, which is given a comparatively abbreviated treatment in the Encyclopedia philosophy of spirit that stands in stark contrast with its overall importance as the culmination of Hegel's philosophy of spirit. Angelica Nuzzo's essay provides an illuminating treatment about what it means to speak of something as ‘absolute’ in Hegel. Nuzzo's account here draws on her previous writings on absolute knowledge (in the Phenomenology of Spirit) and the absolute idea (in the Science of Logic). She places emphasis on the point that the transition from objective spirit (more specifically from world history) to absolute spirit is not a transcendence of history, but an achievement of self-knowledge within history, a liberation that is simultaneously practical and theoretical (220–21). The penultimate essay, by Allen Speight, is one of the most valuable contributions to the volume, especially in terms of its stated aim. Speight has written much on Hegel's aesthetics, but here he carefully examines how the eight paragraphs Hegel devotes to art in the Encyclopedia change in the three editions that were published in his lifetime. This enables him to note subtle shifts of emphasis in Hegel's treatments, particularly those involved in art's promotion to an independent moment of absolute spirit in the 1827 edition, and Hegel's introduction of a new account of artistic activity. Speight offers a superb and fine-grained analysis of these paragraphs, one that rewards careful reading.
The reader who is interested in getting a sense of the range of work going on with regard to Hegel's philosophy of spirit, particularly in the Anglophone world, will no doubt find this an excellent place to begin.
