Hegel's Philosophy of Science

To appreciate the importance of Hegel's philosophy of science, one may usefully be encouraged to note the circumstances of its emergence. Findlay refers to Hegel as a German Romantic, (Findlay, 1977, p. xxv) and Hegel was either an exact or just younger contemporary of such Enlightenment and Romantic philosophers as Hume and Kant. He lived in the important transitional years that saw the dissolution of absolute monarchy as the typical continental state form in France. This was the period of the American and French Revolutions, as well as the Reign of Terror, the rise and not yet the fall of Napoleon, and the growth of German influence in European politics owing to French imperial ambitions on the continent. Mozart and Beethoven were composing during Hegel's lifetime, and Beethoven was making the transition from classical to Romantic musical forms. This positioning of Hegel in intellectual history, and of that history as an aspect of political and social history, is important because Hegel's approach to philosophy, or what he called s

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nvoluted and verbose corner, for so much reduction of concept involves so much qualification, adumbration, backtracking, explaining, and so on. Nevertheless, the Hegelian vocabulary is fundamental, and this seems to be why Hegel is at such pains to get at the root meaning of the terms that he uses to explicate his philosophy. Thus it is that Hegel reifies and functionalizes his vocabulary, beginning with elemental Consciousness, or sense-perception and proceeding quickly to the fundamental nature of Understanding; thence to Self-consciousness as an inflection of elementary Consciousness; thence to Reason, which is an externalized adumbration and critique of the achievements of Self-consciousness; thence to Spirit, which is further externalization of Reason and itself a test and critique of Reason in social, moral, and ethical contexts; thence to Religion, which is critique of Spirit inasmuch as its ethical, moral, aesthetic environment offers a challenge to the Spirit as opposed to and derived from Reason; thence and decisively to Absolute Knowing (i.e., science). It is Science that is the expression and challenge of synthesis of Reasoned Spirit as against the apparent metaphysical absolutism of Religion. When one has reached
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Approximate Word count = 5478
Approximate Pages = 22 (250 words per page)

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