Sally Sedgwick seems to be incapable of writing dull books, and she has once again given proof of this. She has written a short but very ambitious book, nominally on Hegel’s philosophy of history, but really about Hegel in general and how we should understand him. Her idea is that Hegel’s philosophy of history is a special entry point to Hegel’s thought as a whole so that instead of Hegel-the-philosopher-of-the-necessary-Absolute, we should see Hegel as fundamentally a philosopher of finitude, a proponent of the contingency and historical situatedness of all of our thoughts, who, as a philosopher of finite humility, did not think that we could ever assume the viewpoint of God as he is sometimes alleged to have tried to do.

This is part of the attractive revisionist project she has been working out—recently in Hegel’s Critique of Kant: From Dichotomy to Identity where she set herself the task of showing how Hegel’s concern with the unviability of the various dualisms in Kant (particularly that between concepts and intuitions) set the terms for Hegel’s alternative. She had Hegel claiming that

In her new book, she wishes to deepen that view to the claim that all of thought is historically and temporally conditioned, and that unlike Kant, Hegel’s ‘a priori ideas are not insights of pure reason; they carry no claim to self-evidence, nor are they immune to revision’ (TH: 66).Footnote ¹

Realizing that any number of her readers will immediately arch an eyebrow at all of this, she is nothing if not careful and attentive to the need to marshal all the evidence for her interpretation and to take all the possible objections into account. If there is a Hegelian text or a secondary work that needs to be consulted on this, one would be hard pressed to find any that she has omitted. Furthermore, the position she ultimately attributes to Hegel is itself very attractive, having the virtue of giving a unitary account of Hegel’s theoretical and practical philosophy that both avoids anachronism and also puts the Hegelian in the position of being able to work out responses to contemporary concerns even when those concerns very obviously do not find any literal expression in Hegel’s own writings.

Sedgwick has two different Hegelian views in mind in her book. Hegel’s philosophy of history is well known for its identification of history as ‘the progress of the consciousness of freedom’. For the most part, Sedgwick downplays that part of his philosophy of history and focusses more on what I would call a kind of ‘historicity’ thesis (typically ascribed to Heidegger) according to which all thought must always be indexed to its own social, political and cultural time. (The term, ‘historicity’, itself is missing from Sedgwick’s account, and Heidegger is mentioned only in passing in a footnote.) Most of Sedgwick’s book is concerned with what she calls the ‘temporality’ of all thought for Hegel.Footnote ² Generally those influenced by the Heideggerian ideas of the historicity of thought reject or ignore Hegel’s own claim about the necessarily progressive nature of world history, but Sedgwick argues that the two points (progress and temporal conditioning) belong together. Because most of her interest is in demonstrating the temporal boundedness of Hegel’s philosophy and its compatibility with Hegel’s ideas about progress, she devotes almost no time to Hegel’s actual philosophy of history itself with its stages of the consciousness of the progress of freedom (from the East to the West).

She realizes at the outset that the Hegelian texts offer up prima facie a problem for the historicity thesis. In the ‘Introduction’ to the Philosophy of History, we have Hegel saying ‘The general perspective of philosophical world history is not abstractly general […] for it is the spirit which is eternally present to itself and for which there is no past’ (LPWH: 24). Because of this, Sedgwick notes that Hegel’s concept of philosophic history seems at first as if it contains a deep, self-undermining contradiction. On the one hand, Hegel stresses that ‘we must be sure to take history as it is; in other words, we must proceed historically and empirically’ (LPWH: 29). Yet on the other hand, he also clearly claims that in some sense his ‘philosophic history’ is a priori. If the empirical and the a priori are mutually exclusive of each other, then Hegel seems to be in trouble.

This motivates Sedgwick’s move to one of her most central theses, namely, that Hegel’s a priori is not immune to revision, that it is in all cases (‘without exception’) only a relative a priori. There simply is no bright line dividing knowledge into the empirical and the a priori (see TH: 152). Nonetheless, she takes Hegel to be saying that ‘at the basis of all thought are pure or a priori concepts—concepts constitutive of all thought and that therefore enjoy a certain permanence’ and ‘that they nonetheless rest on assumptions that are historically contingent’ (TH: 156). This in turn helps to persuade us of ‘the contingency and instability underlying even our most stable concepts and laws’ (TH: 157). The picture that emerges here (as in Hegel’s Critique of Kant) is something vaguely akin to Quine’s ‘web of belief’ in which all propositions are in principle revisable but those that have the appearance of unrevisability (‘a priori’) are merely those that are more entrenched in our systems of beliefs and theories—closer to the centre of the web and thus harder to move. Her overall point is that ‘difficult to revise’ does not mean ‘immune from revision’, and with that, the contradiction is resolved.

However, as Sedgwick argues, that alone (although crucial to her interpretation of Hegel) would not give us the kind of ‘philosophic history’ at which Hegel is aiming. If there is a philosophical conception of world history as a whole, then it has to be more than methodological advice about how to look at past events and shapes of consciousness. There has to be an account of the meaning of world history as a whole, and that has to do with the historical development of Geist itself. That supposes that there is a meaning to world history, but that itself cannot serve as an unrevisable a priori truth. It too must be shown by careful attention to the historical facts to be the case. Or, in Sedgwick’s terms, a ‘philosophic history’ must show that Geist has a purpose that is internal to it as Geist. A purpose is external if it ‘identifies a feature of an object that […] cannot be said to capture the essence of the object. A feature is inessential if it can be abstracted away without compromising the object’s true nature’ (TH: 93). What is thus essential to Geist? Its purposiveness. Does Geist have an essential purpose? The obvious Hegelian answer: Actualizing its freedom. Thus, ‘a specific idea of freedom gives world history its necessity’ (TH: 96). But what kind of necessity? The response: A specific kind of conceptual necessity, namely, where ‘world history is a narrative and purposive unity’ (TH: 90). She glosses this further by noting that ‘the necessary connection Hegel discovers among historical events refers to their purposive connection, their connection through the idea of purpose’ (TH: 91). Geist internally or intrinsically seeks freedom as its basic end, and the events of world history are to be viewed in terms of what Geist had to do to actualize its freedom.

It is a bit unclear how the necessity is supposed to work as a conceptual necessity. It seems at first more like a kind of aesthetic necessity, somewhat in the way that people sometimes claim that the end of a successful novel or play shows that although it might have seemed in the course of the novel that things could go a lot of different ways, the ending suddenly discloses ‘this is the way things had to be’. Or perhaps it is something like Beethoven’s famous lines he wrote in the score of his sixteenth string quartet, ‘Must it be?’ and then later, ‘It must be’,—which has been taken by some to express Beethoven’s attitude to fate and its acceptance. If anything, Sedgwick seems to take the Beethoven route since she has an entire chapter on Hegel’s fatalism in which she argues that fate for Hegel is neither blind (we can know it) nor is it external (imposed on us from without). But she also argues that our fate is our freedom (which, although she does not make this connection, seems very similar to the famous Sartrean idea that we are condemned to be free) so that world history is a narrative about how we are fated to be free and to live with the consequences.

Yet on Sedgwick’s account even this narrative involves large helpings of contingency. (Another subtitle for her book might have been: Taking Contingency Seriously). If everything could have gone much differently, then in what sense is there in history any kind of conceptual necessity—especially since all of our concepts themselves are deeply contingent?

Now there is no doubt, I would think, that Sedgwick is substantially right about Hegel’s incorporation of contingency into his philosophy. However, consider this passage that comes from Hegel’s own handwritten lecture notes:

This tells us that prior to looking at the facts and determining what they are, we must be in possession of ‘a priori’ concepts, and Kepler’s had to do with ellipses, squares, etc. Now, how ‘temporally conditioned’ are those ideas? On the one hand, it seems they are not. To be temporally conditioned or indexed would mean that the truth or appropriateness of what is said depends on the time it is said. ‘Now is day’ (a Hegelian example) is true when said at some times and not at others. But a² +b²= c² is true no matter when I say it. To be sure, I had to learn it at a point in time, and Pythagoras (at least in myth) had to discover it, and it is a truth of Euclidean but maybe not all geometry, but that is irrelevant to its a priori truth as a statement about Euclidean triangles. On the other hand, Quine and Hegel on Sedgwick’s account would deny even that. The Pythagorean theorem, they would say, is simply well entrenched, i.e., is at the very centre of the web and cannot be displaced without rearticulating the whole web itself. As Quine would put it, our best accounts of experience have to take things like the Pythagorean theorem for our purposes as basically immovable but not as in principle immune to revision. On Sedgwick’s account, so must Hegel.

However, Hegel may be distancing himself simply from the Kantian conception of the a priori as something we ‘impose’ on experience rather than rejecting the idea of the a priori itself. On that view (the more ‘a priori’ rather than ‘entrenchment’ account of Hegel’s approach), Hegel would not be indulging in a priori history in terms of prescribing a priori the path that history had to take. Sedgwick is as clear as she can be that she rejects the idea that Hegel entertains any such thesis. But right after the Kepler quote above, Hegel adds:

On that view, to view history philosophically is to look at it in light of how it displays the a priori concept of freedom in various concrete circumstances—how it moves, in terms of Hegel’s shorthand for his students, from ‘one is free’ to ‘some are free’ to ‘all are free’. That itself does not imply that history has actually had to move in the direction Hegel imputes to it. It might have simply stagnated at ‘one is free’, or moved to ‘some are free’ and then gone back. But do note that Hegel’s own qualifications in the citations about the a priori—‘so to speak’ (‘wenn man es so nennen will’) and ‘so-called a priori’ (‘die sogenannten Apriorität’)—seem to tilt the interpretation in Sedgwick’s direction. Even in the Logic—the most ‘a priori’ of all the parts of the Hegelian system—Hegel explicitly says: ‘The objective logic is therefore the genuine critique of such determinations—a critique that considers them, not according to the abstract form of apriority against the a posteriori, but rather considers them themselves according to their particular content’ (WdL I: 62).

As Sedgwick argues, Hegel is opposed to the strict and inviolable opposition Kant establishes between the a priori and the posteriori, but that itself does not automatically render the entrenchment view as the correct reading. Instead of ‘a priori’, Hegel usually substitutes a series of other related terms to distance himself from the dualistic Kantian system: He speaks of a thinking consideration of X, of the pure thought of X, of Denken, Nachdenken, and so on. On that view, we are said to have an ‘a priori’ conception of agency which we then deepen as we see it develop in history. This is also in keeping with one of Hegel’s basic themes: The Concept must actualize itself in the Idea, which he defines variously as the unity of Concept and Objectivity and the unity of Concept and Reality (Realität). We could put his point in this way: The meaning of thick terms are grasped in terms of their use, but their use never exhausts the meaning of the terms themselves; or, in Hegel’s own way of putting that point within his own more expansive systematic terms: ‘The shape which the concept assumes in its actualization, and which is essential for cognition of the concept itself, is different from its form of being purely as concept, and is the other essential moment of the Idea’ (EPR: §1, 25). Just as Kepler had to have knowledge of a priori concepts of ellipse, square, etc., the practical philosopher has to have a priori knowledge of free agency and in neither case is one simply applying the rule (the concept) to a given case (supplied by empirical intuition). Rather, one is seeing how the specific use of the concept helps to reshape and deepen our understanding of an a priori concept as it is actualized.

In one of his best-known dicta, Hegel says that ‘world history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom—a progress whose necessity it is our business to comprehend’ (LPWH: 54). Sedgwick claims in several places that progress in history is to be measured in terms of ‘advances in development and realization of freedom’, which is not exactly what Hegel says in his little dictum. For him, the measure is progress in the consciousness of freedom. It is a subtle point, but it makes a difference. As Hegel says in §482 of his Encyclopaedia, entire regions of the world have never had the Idea (the unity of concept and reality) of freedom. His examples of Africa and the Orient are outrageous by our standards, but, surprisingly, he also says that the Greeks and Romans also lacked it—even Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics lacked it. This is surprising if for no other reason than that the Greeks gave the world, as so many including Hegel allege, the very concept itself. Aristotle and others indeed thought that some were free—but, as Hegel puts it, for Aristotle and his like, freedom comes from birth within an elite, or by strength of character, or by wisdom acquired through the study of philosophy but not intrinsically through being human. Hegel puts this rather forcefully in his claim that ‘[T]he only difference between African and Asiatic peoples and those of Greece, Rome and modern times is just this: That the latter know, [that is,] it is for them, that they are free. The former are also free, but they do not know it, and they do not exist as free’ (VGesch: 40). Freedom is not a specifiable property that some have and others do not. It is a form of self-relation, however, hard that is to make out.

Sedgwick glosses this by saying that freedom is a ‘capacity that derives from our natural ability to stand back and reflect on our desires, to make them objects of consciousness’ (TH: 133). She adds in other places that freedom is a kind of causal power of self-motion that is lacking in animals and consists in the ability ‘to produce ideas and actions that are genuinely new’ (TH: 141). However, that all sounds a bit too Kantian. In ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Kant, for example, says that we are free when we think for ourselves but, basically, we have been too lazy up until now to seize the day. Hegel on the other hand does not blame the Greeks and Romans for being too lazy (although he does something like that for Africa and the Orient) but for simply getting the ‘Idea’ wrong because of the state in which the ‘Concept’ had up until then been actualized (in good part in terms of an economy that demanded slave labour and in terms of some religions that did nothing to challenge that). Our freedom is not so much our ‘standing back’ but consists in the way our actions and thoughts express a self-conception of our own form. Our form is that of self-consciousness, a thinking conception of our own form which involves the thinking of what is good for us. This and not a Kantian ‘stepping back’ is our basic freedom, an sich, in itself, as Hegel would say. We have a conception of the good as what befits our nature, and (again as Hegel puts it), even if ‘no new content’ is produced by this form, this form of being-for-itself, self-consciousness is so crucial that ‘the whole difference [that matters] in world history depends on this difference’ (VGesch: 40). What both Plato and Aristotle failed to grasp was that the logic of freedom as thinking of the good for oneself intrinsically pushed toward the more adequate consciousness of freedom as something that was fitting for everyone, not just some. To think that it was fitting only for some confused freedom as an achievement in self-conception with freedom as a property that was natural and which some did not possess. ‘Natural slaves’, so Aristotle claimed, failed to have the ‘property’ of rational deliberation and therefore required guidance from others. However, freedom is not a property—not even a special capacity for self-motion—that is independently recognizable and which some things may simply lack. (Hegel also claimed that the change in collective self-conception that followed the logic out to the universality and equality of freedom was brought about by Christianity, but that is another and even more controversial story.)

Sedgwick’s version of the ‘entrenchment’ interpretation of Hegel manifests itself in the way she uses it to come to terms with the evergreen controversy about the rational and the actual, which she says is ‘one of interdependence rather than of absolute opposition’, and which ‘mirrors his treatment of the fundamentally interdependent components of human cognition’. There are no intuitions that are not conceptually mediated, and there are no concepts that are ‘wholly a priori or pure’ (TH: 164). Her summary judgment is thus:

What needs filling out there is that ‘somehow’. The ‘entrenchment’ conception of the ‘web of belief’ fills it out as ‘interdependence among distinct things’.

However, her conception of the way in which ‘the fundamentally interdependent components of human cognition’ play off against one another is also manifested in what I think is her misreading of the distinction Hegel makes between original and reflective history. Original history, according to Sedgwick, displays a naiveté that ‘ignores the role of concepts in getting at the facts’. Reflective history ‘attaches to the subjective origin of our concepts the implication that they are incapable of getting at what is’ (TH: 159). In other words, original histories suppose they possess a conceptually unmediated access to the empirical facts whereas reflective histories think that their reflections can proceed without attention to the empirical facts. She claims this to be a textual support for her overall view of Hegel’s method. Is it? Original historians, Hegel says, are those who write histories about their own times, not historians who think they deal with conceptually unmediated facts, and he in fact calls attention at the very beginning of his discussion to Herodotus and Thucydides as prime examples of original historians, neither of whom can plausibly be said to be making claims about their histories as free from conceptual mediation. (One might also think in our day of Adam Tooze’s Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy or Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neo-Liberal Order as examples of original histories that in no way rest on assumptions of a conceptually unmediated grasp of the facts.) Likewise, reflective historians write about the past, not the present, and since they are not part of that past, they have to reflect on what life was like at that time in an attempt to get at what is so extraordinarily hard to get at. As Hegel himself points out, ‘we will never be able to sympathize with the Greeks and to share their feelings in the most important issues of all […] we cannot share their feelings when they prostrate themselves before Zeus, Minerva, etc’ (LPWH: 17). That does not imply or even suggest that we are therefore free-floating with regard to what they felt or what things were like at that time.

Sedgwick claims that Hegel instead opts for a ‘hybrid’ conception of original and reflective histories in which concepts and intuitions play off against one another, a ‘hybrid’ which also holds for all cognition. But if Hegel’s ‘philosophic’ conception of history is not a hybrid of original and reflective history but a different conception altogether, the Hegelian text cannot serve as further evidence for that model. This raises a difficult point—difficult because it is hard to state very exactly. Sedgwick’s model is that of a cognizing and acting subject whose cognitions are essentially the result of an existential interplay between two different capacities. That would be a kind of ‘Kantian’ conception. Hegel, however, speaks of an identity between the two, something which figures in the very subtitle of Sedgwick’s other book. However, the ‘identity’ of which she speaks seems really to be just ‘unity’, and she is led to this conflation by Hegel’s own use of the metaphor of the organic. In an organism, all the organs have a function to perform with regard to the whole, but each organ is independently identifiable from the others. The cat’s heart is not its lungs, its lungs are not its liver, and so on, but if they do not function in a unified fashion, the cat dies. One can indeed think of a human as an organism with different cognitive modules that trade off perhaps against each other and which remain distinct, non-identical but nonetheless interdependent organs of cognition unified within a cognitive purpose. Her own phrase, ‘fundamentally interdependent components of human cognition’, seems to suggest that kind of interpretation. Hegel, on the other hand, speaks of the identity of these ‘components’ by which on one reading of what he says means that each is a partial manifestation of the whole, and each of the moments is different because each is equally the whole of which it is the manifestation. For example, in speaking a language, you may say this, I may say that, but each of us is manifesting the whole of the language we are speaking. The language as a whole shows itself in the individual speech acts of people, and people exhibit or manifest the language in what they say, how they go on, and so on. Hegel in fact says: ‘The determinateness of the spirit is therefore that of manifestation […] so that it does not reveal something, but its determinateness and content is this revealing itself’ (ENZ III: §383). Each speaker is the whole (the language) manifesting itself, and each of us in the diversity of what we say are identical in our being speakers of that language.

How deep does the ‘historicity’ thesis thus go? Hegel speaks of the ‘infinite freedom’ of pure thought in a variety of different contexts. Here is one such context: ‘But this breach, to which spirit proceeds, it is also able to heal. It generates out of itself works of fine art as the first reconciling middle term between pure thought and what is merely external, sensuous, and transient, between nature and finite reality and the infinite freedom of conceptual (begreifendes) thinking’ (LFA: 8; translation amended, boldfacing mine). How does one reconcile thought’s being ‘without exception temporally conditioned’ with the ‘infinite freedom’ of conceptual thinking? In that light, take one of the things Hegel says in his Logic about the Absolute: ‘For the sake of freedom, the Idea also has […] the hardest opposition within itself; its being at rest consists in the security and certainty with which it eternally creates and eternally overcomes that being-at-rest and therein brings itself together with itself’ (WdL II: 468). One way of reconciling that with Sedgwick’s historicity-contingency thesis would be to accept the idea that the Absolute is the formal activity of positing and dissolving itself and comprehending what that means—the Absolute is just initially the otherwise anarchic core of all thinking itself. Why else would Hegel conclude his Encyclopaedia with the famous passage from Aristotle’s metaphysics about divinity consisting in, as Ariel Kosman phrased it, thinking thinking thinking? Where do we go from there on Sedgwick’s account?

Sedgwick’s interpretation of Hegel is provocative, amply illustrated by selected Hegelian texts, clearly and boldly stated, and on its own is a very attractive position. It has obvious affinities with various lines of contemporary thought, perhaps especially with pragmatism and Quinean holism. In the end, we are left with the two questions around which Hegel scholarship usually rotates: Is this what Hegel really said? Is what we said he really said something we think we ought to say too?