Despite Hegel’s great admiration for Schiller and Schiller’s influence on Hegel’s philosophy of art, Hegel rarely praises Schiller’s tragedies and is indeed often critical of Schiller’s dramatic works. These criticisms for the most part concern characters who fail to live up to Hegel’s criteria for tragic heroes, as they vacillate, come to an unheroic demise, or are inwardly conflicted about their aims or actions. Despite these criticisms, this article argues that some of Schiller’s tragic heroines are nonetheless beautiful by Hegel’s own lights. Using Schiller’s Mary Stuart (1800) and The Maid of Orleans (1801), I argue that a deep spiritual beauty is exemplified in Schiller’s Joan of Arc and Mary Stuart, who overcome an inner conflict to achieve spiritual reconciliation, affording us the experience of Hegel’s ideal. Schiller’s tragic heroines present the beautiful triumph of an individual’s subjective freedom over great spiritual conflict, which is Hegel’s definition of artistic beauty. It is hoped that this article offers a new perspective not only on Hegel’s philosophy of art, but also on the power and beauty of Schiller’s tragic heroines.

For both Hegel and Badiou, love is one vehicle through which the transition from substance to subject concretely occurs, despite their respective conceptions of this transition differing drastically. Although (amicably) critical of Hegel’s Logic, Badiou—the first systematic continental philosopher since Hegel—never expressly reproaches Hegel’s conception of love, as outlined in both the Logic and the Realphilosophie lectures, but it is not Hegelian love which Badiou champions. His possible criticisms of Hegelian love can only be discerned through his explicit critiques of the Logic, in which he faults Hegel’s denial of absolute difference. Given that Badiouian love is conceived precisely as the subjective experience of absolute difference, his critique of Hegel must play a more significant role in his conceptual rehabilitation of love than is immediately evident. This paper teases out Badiou’s critique of Hegel and examines what it illuminates regarding his conception of love, as well as Hegel’s. I conclude that Badiou’s conception highlights an aspect of Hegelian love which Hegel himself does not sufficiently emphasize, but it remains too one-sided on its own and thus forces one to continue to decide in favour of Hegel.

I reconfigure Hegel’s distinction between Tat (deed) and Handlung (action) to illuminate Oedipus’s enigmatic formula: ‘I suffered my deeds more than I acted them’. Most interpreters hold that Oedipus mistook his Tat for a Handlung and wrongly took responsibility for parricide and incest. I argue against the merely causal reading of Tat presupposed by this view that the tragic Tat also has an intentional structure. On the Restrictive Intentionalism about Action (RIA) which underlies Handlung, what counts as my action is only the realization of a conscious intention, accomplished with reasonable knowledge of the relevant circumstances and foreseeable consequences of realizing my intention. On RIA, Oedipus killed the charioteer and married Iocasta: parricide and incest happened to him. By contrast, on the Inclusive Intentionalism about Action (IIA) which underlies the tragic Tat, what counts as my action is everything I bring about in realizing a conscious intention, regardless of reasonable expectations about knowledge of the circumstances or foreseeable consequences of realizing my intention. On IIA, parricide and incest are part of the ‘whole compass’ of Oedipus’s deeds. I argue that Oedipus is right to take responsibility for his deeds and draw on Tony Honoré’s conception of ‘outcome responsibility’ to characterize the responsibility at stake as blameless liability. Where Oedipus errs is in taking ethical responsibility for his deeds. I show that in Oedipus at Colonus the older Oedipus reverses his position and holds, somewhat surprisingly, that he is innocent and ‘did nothing’. I argue that this reversal presupposes an implicit shift from IIA to RIA, and that this shift helps to finally make sense of Oedipus’s enigmatic formula: Oedipus suffered his deeds (on RIA) more than he acted them (on IIA). I conclude by widening the perspective beyond ancient Greece and engage with Bernard Williams’s interpretation of the same formula.

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.

In this text, I interpret Hegel’s concept of the family within the context of his theory of freedom. I take family life to entail a certain tension between freedom and nature that makes it necessary to reflect on the role of nature in our understanding of the family. For this, I examine two ways of understanding the family’s relation to nature, a conservative and a liberal one, to then offer a third, dialectical way as an alternative. My central argument is that Hegel’s concept of the family can be read as a response to the problem of our entanglement with nature and is thereby an integral part of his theory of ethical life and freedom. For this, I outline the normative principle underlying Hegel’s family concept that I will call ‘the notion of a self-conscious genus-process’ (Gattungsprozess). This notion enables an immanent critique of Hegel’s concept of the family without abandoning his dialectical conception of the relationship between freedom and nature.

This paper seeks to mediate two current interpretations of Hegel: a recent, resurgent, ‘re-theologizing’ reading and a more established ‘de-theologized’ reading. In doing so, I aim to substantiate a metaphysical reading of Hegel from a different angle. My mediation does not amount to arguing for a theological Hegel, but attempts to reinforce certain metaphysical elements by pointing out the implication the representation of God has in Hegel’s system, which is that God is taken to be the truth and essence of things on the level of representations. This implication aligns with metaphysical readings according to which the absolute is the truth and the essence of things on the conceptual level, and that it is this truth that philosophy recognizes. I pursue my mediation in three steps. Firstly, I defend the re-theologizing interpretation by focusing on a recent paper by Clinton Tolley. Secondly, I address tensions in Tolley’s re-theologizing account that concern the deflationary role of finite subjectivity. I argue, along the lines of a de-theologized, non-metaphysical reading, that it is the dialectical reasoning of finite subjectivity that enables and pursues the task of speculative philosophy. However, leaning again towards a re-theologizing reading, this speculative reasoning aims at the philosophical knowledge of the absolute which in the realm of representation corresponds to God. Thirdly, I argue that this recognition of the absolute or God through the method of dialectical-speculative philosophy represents a third interpretative option, namely a speculative re-theologizing reading, which holds that Hegel does not proceed theologically, yet recognizes an absolute that corresponds to the theological representation of God.

In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel places the concept of utility at the centre of his analysis of the Enlightenment period. Utility does not appear merely as a criterion of individual action, but describes a social context of mutual support, realized in a collective referred to by Hegel as a ‘troop’ (Trupp). In Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of a reason fixated on utility, the Hegelian image of the ‘troop’ came to symbolize a repressive equality which removes the freedom of the individual and seals the failure of enlightenment. In contrast, this article demonstrates that Hegel’s concept of utility cannot be reduced to an attitude which instrumentalizes everything and everyone. In fact, utility refers to a mode of interaction which also takes account of the heterogeneity of each individual. Drawing on Hegel and going beyond his analysis, the article develops a post-Hegelian concept of utility as a formation of social practices that neither instrumentalizes people, nor simply represents an instantiation of social freedom, but rather establishes a constitutive relation between caring for oneself and being useful to others. From this perspective, the concept of utility is not only part of the problem of enlightenment, but also contributes to the endeavour to which Adorno and Horkheimer committed themselves: to work towards an affirmative understanding of enlightenment.

The aim of this article is to show that Hegel’s understanding of ontological dependence can solve what Jonathan Schaffer calls the ‘problem of heterogeneity’. While a solution to this problem is crucial to ensure the plausibility of any monist theory, canonical versions of monism in the history of Western philosophy have struggled to provide such a solution. First, the paper argues that the solutions offered by contemporary monist theorists such as Michael Della Rocca, Terry Horgan, Mathjasz Potrč and Jonathan Schaffer, are also inadequate. While acknowledging the promise of Schaffer’s revision of traditional understandings of ontological dependence, the paper argues that the understanding of dependence as priority, which Schaffer proposes as an alternative, is indeed insufficient to solve the problem of heterogeneity effectively. Secondly, the paper considers Hegel’s relevance to this debate. Offering a monist interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysics, the paper shows that Hegel identified the problem of heterogeneity as a central challenge for his philosophy. Finally, the paper argues that, while building on a criticism of traditional understandings of ontological dependence similar to Schaffer’s, Hegel’s notion of ‘reflection’, or ‘absolute negativity’, provides a better alternative understanding of ontological dependence than Schaffer’s priority, overcoming the shortcomings of traditional understandings of dependence while also not incurring the problems weighing on Schaffer’s notion of priority.

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?

This contribution aims to relate an important topic of the Hegelian philosophy, that of second nature, to the gender question developed by Simone de Beauvoir. The core of the emancipation process described in The Second Sex lies in Beauvoir’s revolutionary idea of the artificial character of gender: the latter belongs to the culturally constructed sphere of social norms and not to mere fixed nature. In this assumption the French philosopher seems to recover the Hegelian theory of second nature: Hegel believes that through an individual and social Bildungsprozess, subjects liberate themselves from the immediate level of natural necessity and reach the free horizon of spiritual existence, in which they become self-conscious actors. Beauvoir accepts in her own existentialist view this extra-natural becoming and realizes that also gender participates in it: women are not by nature ‘immanent’ creatures that lack ‘transcendence’. Hegel, however, does not recognize the second nature of gender and falls into that same essentialism, denounced by Beauvoir, which relegates the woman to the biological plane, thus excluding her from the dialectic of second nature and self-consciousness. For this reason, Hegel’s understanding of freedom through second nature will initially be introduced, and then, employing this concept against Hegel himself, the path of emancipation from gender essentialism in Beauvoir’s account of biology and culture will be addressed. In the second part of the paper it will be shown how gender, in acting as a second nature, replays the same ambiguity of Hegel’s theory: are second nature and gender something that we individuals freely shape or are we victims of an externally imposed necessity just like in first nature? A dialectical solution will be presented in both thinkers, whose work aims to conciliate spirit and nature beyond any Cartesian dualism.

This article argues that Derrida’s critique of Hegel in Glas should be understood as a modified Neoplatonic critique. Specifically, Derrida claims that Hegel’s systematic philosophical account of the speculative identity of Thought and Being is in fact conditioned by the prior unconditional gift of Being, which necessarily lies outside the Hegelian system. I argue that this gift of Being should be understood in terms of the Neoplatonic conception of the One, which likewise gives the gift of Being, while itself remaining beyond Being. After reconstructing Derrida’s critique, I consider and evaluate possible Hegelian responses, drawing on Hegel’s own reading of Neoplatonism.

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.

Hegel is a complicated figure for considering the philosophical significance of sexual difference. On the one hand, he grants an essential place for sexual difference in his analyses of nature and spirit. On the other hand, he treats the telos of sexual difference as a kind of sexual indifferentiation. For Hegel, both life and spirit depend on sexual difference but as something to be sublated, that is, preserved but only in so far as it is negated for a higher truth or purpose devoid of it. This essay examines this sublation of sexual difference in what Hegel characterizes as the ‘universality’ of the living genus and the ‘universality’ of the rational activity of civil society. I argue that Hegel’s conception of this sublation of difference into universality relies in both instances on a teleological reduction of the ontological significance of sexual difference to reproduction and a contestable interpretation of the roles of male and female sexes in it. However, I claim that Hegel’s account of the relational identity of the sexes, each as not-all of the genus given the other, is a fundamental insight for an ontological analysis of sexual difference. As such, I open a critical reappropriation of Hegel's account of sexual difference for a more difference-affirming, non-hierarchal sexual ontology. I argue that overcoming the hierarchal implications of this Hegelian account of sexual difference requires rethinking the natural and rational universal, which amounts to rethinking what Hegelianism might mean today.

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.

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.

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 essay, I explore possibilities for phenomenology beyond Hegel with respect to questions of conscience, guilt, and ethics. In the first section, I briefly introduce Heidegger’s phenomenology. The next section provides an interpretation of conscience in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Like Hegel, Heidegger claims that conscience states my guilt prior to any specific wrongdoings; Heidegger’s ideas around the ‘call of conscience’ are thus considered next. Building on differences and connections between Hegel’s and Heidegger’s phenomenologies of conscience, the final section outlines implications for a phenomenologically responsive ethics.