Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is a notoriously difficult thinker, and students sometimes ask me how I came to be interested in his philosophy, which I have now been studying and writing about for more than three decades. In fact, it was the difficulty that attracted me, and still does. When I was studying at the Université de Paris IV Sorbonne, almost every philosophy course carried some reference to the 19th-century German idealist. If the subject was politics, the professor referred to Hegel’s notion of the state. History? The reference was to the dialectical progression of something called Spirit. Religion? Art? The mind? Hegel seemed to have something pertinent to say about all these human pursuits.
And yet, when I turned to Hegel’s texts themselves, they were almost impenetrable or, at best, enigmatic, revealing their secrets only sparingly. Nonetheless, I always had the feeling that something was going on, that something important was there to be discovered. So I persisted. As I suspected, something important is indeed going on, and even after years of study, Hegel’s thought still provides rewards and insights along with new puzzles and challenges. In both its depth and breadth, Hegel’s philosophy is perhaps rivalled only by that of Aristotle.
I am sometimes also asked to provide a brief summary of Hegel’s philosophy. This is especially challenging given its encyclopaedic reach and conceptual difficulties. Where to start? Dialectics? History? Consciousness? Spirit? The idea of systematic science? The question has forced me to come up with something more fundamental, something simple, essential and generally understandable. Indeed, I believe that every great philosopher has some basic intuition or insight that animates their reflection and underlies their enterprise, regardless of how elaborate, intricate and systematic its form may be. For Hegel, it is a belief in the agency of thought. What does that mean?
It means that you have to imagine thought coming out of your head and into the world. Thinking is an activity that is not contained in the cerebral box. It goes out into the world and works on it, participates in it, transforms it. In Hegelian terms, thought negates, determines and elevates objectivity by making it meaningful. The pen on my desk is not just a piece of blue plastic with a metal nib that I understand as a writing instrument. In fact, in apprehending it, my thought has already configured it as a writing instrument, something that I can take up in my hand and use to make notes or write a grocery list or my memoirs. As agency, thought is inherently free and active. In fact, as we’ll see, it is virtually synonymous with freedom itself.
As agency, thought also implies the existence of an agent and, for Hegel, the agent of thought is simply selfhood. Channelling René Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am,’ Hegel gets rid of the ‘therefore’ so it becomes ‘I think and I am.’
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