HEGEL, GEORG FRIEDRICH WILHELM. — He is the principal representative of modern idealism: born in Stuttgart on 24 August 1770, died in Berlin on 14 November 1831.
CONTENTS:
I. Life
II. Writings
III. Doctrine
IV. Problems of Hegelianism.I. LIFE
H.’s life marks, in its stages, the principal moments in the formation of his thought. Having completed his elementary studies at the gymnasium of his native city, in 1788 he entered the Theological Seminary of Tubingen, remaining there until 1793: this was the period of the initial elaboration of his thought, through the comparative study of Greco-Roman civilization and revealed religion (Judaism and Christianity), and of his friendship with Hölderlin and Schelling, whose influence upon him was profound. From 1793 to 1796 he was in Bern as a private tutor, and in the same capacity he moved to Frankfurt for the years 1797–1800. His first academic activity was at Jena from 1801 to 1807, a period that constituted the maturation of his philosophy and his progressive detachment from Schelling’s naturalism. After the brief interlude in Bamberg (1807–1808) as editor of the Bamberger Zeitung, in 1809 he was appointed director of the Nürnberger Gymnasium; in 1816 he assumed the chair of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, and finally, in 1818, obtained the coveted chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, of which he was also rector in the academic year 1829–30. His sudden death was caused by a cholera epidemic.II. WRITINGS
They may be divided into four classes with regard to chronology and doctrinal importance.1) Early writings. Remaining unpublished, they were discovered and described as a whole by Dilthey at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1905 and published in their entirety by H. Nohl in 1907 under the title H.s theologische Jugendschriften. They include the following essays: Popular Religion and Christianity (pp. 1–72); five fragments; The Life of Jesus (pp. 73–136); The Positivity of the Christian Religion (pp. 137–240); The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate (pp. 241–342); Systematic Fragment, known as the Frankfurt fragment, of 1800 (pp. 345–51). Some fragments of lesser importance were collected by Nohl in an appendix (pp. 355–402).
2) Preparatory writings from the period 1801–12, which may be divided into three stages: a) the Erste Druckschriften (the principal ones being Differenz des Fichte'schen und Schelling'schen Systems der Philosophie, published separately in 1801; Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie [1802]; Glaube und Wissen [1802]). These two extensive essays were published as articles in the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, which H. directed together with Schelling. b) The System der Sittlichkeit of 1802 and the substantial body of the Jena lectures (Jenenser Logik, Metaphysik u. Naturphilosophie [1802–1803] and Jenenser Realphilosophie [1804–1806]). c) Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807), which is the first exposition of the system and marks the definitive break with Schelling. The Nuremberg lectures, bearing the title Philosophische Propädeutik (1809 ff.), belong to this new period.
3) Systematic writings published by H.: a) Wissenschaft der Logik, the most characteristic work of Hegelian philosophy; the 2nd ed. was prepared by H. with a new preface in 1831. b) Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse of 1817, divided into three books (I, the science of logic; II, the philosophy of nature; III, the philosophy of spirit) in the form of an academic textbook. A successful work on account of its concision and strength of style, which H. expanded in the two subsequent eds. of 1827 and 1830.
4) Berlin lectures. a) Grundlinien der Philos. d. Rechts oder Naturrecht u. Staatwissenschaft im Grundrisse, written in full in 1820 and published by H. in 1821. b) The imposing body of Vorlesungen on the various fields of spirit (aesthetics, philosophy of religion, history of philosophy, and philosophy of history), collected and published by his disciples after H.’s death on the basis of fragments and notes left by the master.
III. DOCTRINE
1. The genesis of Hegelian thought. — Hegelian philosophy contains, brought into synthesis and made operative, the deepest motives of classical thought, Christian theology, and modern thought: such as the necessity of the concept as the truth of the particular, the presence of the Absolute in the finite, and the productivity of consciousness as the definitive affirmation of the autonomy of human thought. Viewed within its cultural milieu, H.’s work appears almost as the concluding dialectical moment following the domination of Absolute Reason, proclaimed by the Enlightenment on the one hand, and the Romantic irrationalist appeal to the dynamism of the real and to its profound original sources in the Absolute itself on the other. In this thought there is a continual oscillation or tension (Spannung) between a multiple and diverse reality that tends to attain absolute unity and identity, and the Absolute itself which—as the concept or idea of the whole—embraces and penetrates the reality of nature and human history, actualizing itself in their forms and stages of development: Hegelian idealism therefore begins from multiplicity and diversity, from doubt and contradiction as they are given in the immediate presentation of reality, and seeks to establish Absolute Truth in the supreme identity of the true, which is the totality of being and the life of the Absolute Spirit.H. draws this metaphysical formulation of the problem of truth from various currents: a) First of all there is the Lutheran principle of faith, with which H. declares his complete solidarity, considering his own philosophy as its development and maturation: “What Luther began as belief in feeling and in the testimony of the spirit is the same thing that the Spirit, further matured, has striven to comprehend in the concept” (Philosophie des Rechts, Vorrede, ed. E. Gans, Berlin 1840, p. 19). “Luther,” H. further declares, “by breaking the religious vows in Christendom and the hierarchical structure of the Church [with the ‘we are all pastors!’] obtained the freedom and autonomy of the spirit which unfolds in and for itself and is therefore divinity itself. Only with Luther did the freedom of the spirit begin in germ... Thus, in the innermost part of man, a place was made where he is solely with himself and with God, and with God he is solely insofar as he is himself: in consciousness he must find himself with himself as in his own home” (Gesch. der Philosophie, ed. C. L. Michelet [*Werke, 15], Berlin 1844, pp. 227 ff., 230 ff.). The task was to raise Lutheran faith from the condition of closed subjectivity and immediate feeling to the absolute certainty that embraces all its content and expresses it “as absolute objectivity,” and this is the work of objective idealism (cf.: Philosophie der Religion, I. Begriff der Religion, ed. G. Lasson [Sämtl. Werke, 12], Leipzig 1925, p. 288). b) Secondly comes the Spinozist principle of the unity of substance, which Romanticism and, above all, the idealism of Fichte and Schelling had rediscovered by overcoming the dualism of Kantian epistemologism. For H., “to be Spinozists is the beginning of philosophizing”: Spinoza’s merit is that he affirmed, in a more concrete manner than the Cartesian cogito, the metaphysical identity of thought and being (the unity of attributes and modes in Substance), thereby ensuring the essential presence of the Absolute to itself in its manifestations. According to H., Spinoza’s enormous advance lies in the methodological principle: “Omnis determinatio est negatio,” by which Being is given solely as the “Totality of all its modes and forms” (Gesch. der Philosophie, ed. cit., I, p. 460 f.). The Spinozist standpoint must therefore be recognized as essential and necessary before proceeding further to the formation of the complete system (Wissenschaft. der Logik, II, 2nd ed., edited by G. Lasson, Berlin 1934, p. 218). H. reproaches Spinoza’s Substance for its rigid, intellectualistic, and pantheistic conception of divinity, identifying the latter outright with things (“God is everything, he is this piece of paper!”), thereby falling back into the indeterminate of Indian religion and into the motionless öv of the Eleatics (Philosophie der Religion, ed. cit., I, p. 191 f.): Spinoza’s Substance lacks “the return to itself” from its modes and attributes and is therefore not conceived as the absolute Subject that differentiates itself (Wissenschaft. der Logik, ed. cit., I, p. 337). c) Third comes the speculative and truly decisive principle, namely Kant’s “I think,” or the transcendental unity of consciousness, conceived not, as in Kant, in an epistemological and instrumental form with respect to the determination of Being and truth, but as productive and constitutive of them; Kant is also responsible for clarifying the antinomic structure of “reason” (Vernunft): from Kant H. also learned the dissolving critique of positive revealed religions. H. reproaches Kant for shattering truth into a dualistic system of abstract intellectualistic oppositions without any means of reconciliation (subject-object, understanding-reason, matter and form, thing-in-itself-thought, nature-God, freedom-necessity, etc.), incapable of rising to a higher standpoint (cf.: Enzyklop. der philos. Wissenschaft., especially §§ 56-60; ed. L. von Henning, Berlin 1840, pp. 11-725). Yet H. praises the Critique of Judgment without reservation, where Kant, in presenting the “kingdom of ends” proper to the life of the spirit, presents purposes as “life,” and this is also Aristotle’s position (Philos. d. Relig., ed. cit., I, p. 216): the issue is to determine what the driving principle of the process is, which for H. is dialectic. Böhme exerted a powerful influence in this direction, in continuity with the Spinozist principle (“omnis determinatio est negatio”); H. expressly attributes to him the conception of dialectic as a process of synthesis of opposites through the mediation of negativity, and the consideration of everything in terms of the “sacred trinity”: “In him the principle of the concept is perfectly alive... everything indeed lies in thinking the negative as simple, since it is at once an opposite: torment (Quol) is therefore this inner division, and at the same time the simple”; and it is H. himself who brings Böhme close to Proclus, the theorist of triadic dialectic. H. further admires in the mystic of Görlitz the discovery that God, in order to be God, must become, through a process of “return to himself” across opposites; and in this the Trinitarian mystery of the Christian religion, creation, Redemption, etc., have meaning and truth—a principle that H. enunciates in a felicitous expression: “God’s sundering within himself” (Gottes Diremption seiner selbst: Gesch. d. Philos.*, ed. cit., I, p. 297). The most immediate influence that his thought received from the idealisms of Fichte and Schelling could mature his detachment from them and the conception of an objective metaphysical idealism only through reflection on the themes and principles just indicated, which give his philosophy an interest of universal historical significance.
2. Dialectics. — The purpose of philosophical consideration is to “eliminate the accidental,” that is, the manifold and contingent character of immediacy, and to attain an absolute universal principle: “A content that gives and bears within itself testimony to itself, and in which everything that man can regard as his own interest has its foundation” (Vorles. über d. Philos. d. Geschichte, I, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, ed. G. Lasson, Leipzig 1930, p. 5). Earlier philosophies either stopped at the immediately given (empiricism, theories of feeling), or isolated the true in the abstraction of particular formalities, each outside the others, or in formal categories that precede rather than arise from the original determination of being (Verstandesmetaphysik). It is from this that one must take one’s beginning (Anfang) in order to pass over (übergehen, hinausgehen) from the finite to the Infinite; this is the path of dialectics.
a) The principle of consciousness. — Granted that the Absolute is the goal, and not the starting point (as Schelling maintained), of knowledge, the organ, or rather the principle, of truth is not the understanding (Verstand) but reason (Vernunft): that is, thought, in unfolding itself from form to form, is no longer a subjective activity that reveals something other than itself, which would be being itself, but is this very being; and every form of being is a form of knowing, while the totality of being is the totality of know-
ing. Truth must no longer be separated from being (Kant), subjectivity from objectivity (Fichte’s I and Not-I), nature from consciousness (Schelling); rather, the Absolute is their higher identity insofar as it is their thought. One must therefore hold firmly that “thought is the sole truth and the supreme reality” (Philos. d. Gesch., cited ed., I, p. 6). Then the categories, the content, and the forms of thought are resolved in thought itself, in its activity; and this is what thought does by returning into itself according to the necessity of its nature as “concept” (Begriff): “No object,” H. writes, “would be capable in itself and of itself of being presented with such rigor of immanent plasticity as the development of thought in its necessity, even more than mathematical deduction” (Wissenschaft. d. Logik, cited ed., I, p. 19). H. arrives at this through his conception of consciousness as an absolute principle, which he expounds systematically in the Einleitung to the Phenomenology of Spirit (cf. J. Hoffmeister’s ed., Leipzig 1937, pp. 69–73). Here are its essential stages.
a) Consciousness is its concept for itself. Thus, not only does the object of thought not refer to a reality outside thought itself, but the concept, which is identical with being, is in turn identical with consciousness. Finding itself, therefore, in every object and act, consciousness “is the act of transcending the limited and, since this limited belongs to it, is the act of transcending itself” (p. 69); and it is precisely this continual “transcending of the limited” that constitutes “reason,” which, however it may move, always remains within itself, so that “the concept corresponds to the object and the object to the concept.” Every alleged “beyond” (Jenseits) of consciousness ultimately falls within consciousness itself.
b) Consciousness gives itself its own measure. So long as truth is conceived as an “application” of a form to matter, or of a universal to a particular, one must despair of truth itself, since one of the terms is never the other. When, by contrast, the relation between the objects and forms of consciousness is conceived as intrinsic to consciousness itself, then “the inquiry will be a comparison of consciousness with itself,” and H. can say: “What consciousness designates within itself as the in-itself, or the true, is nothing other than the measure which it itself establishes for measuring its knowledge.” It follows that the “being-for-another,” which is the law of consciousness, is actualized within consciousness itself and, once the path has been completed, is resolved into a “being-for-itself” (p. 71).
c) Consciousness tests [verifies i] itself. This is the conclusion of the two preceding principles. Granted that consciousness, in its advance and in determining objects, does not leave itself and is its own “measure” (Mäusstab), one must admit that the test of consciousness’s truth is its own movement and actualization. H. therefore says that “consciousness of the object and consciousness of the subject, or of consciousness itself, consciousness of what is in it and of its knowledge, are both the same thing (beide für dasselbe sind), and it itself is their comparison” (p. 72). Only in this way can truth be secured; otherwise—in the hypothesis of a difference between being and consciousness—one must admit either that reality, in being known, alters consciousness, or that consciousness, in knowing, alters reality. The conclusion, therefore, to which the “principle of consciousness” leads is that what presented itself to consciousness as the in-itself (of things) is nothing other than the in-itself-and-for-itself (Anstehundfürstich) of consciousness itself.
d) The moments of dialectics. — The immense mass of Hegel’s work constitutes an attempt to describe this itinerary of consciousness’s return to itself, according to the various points of view that may be adopted in philosophical reflection. It remains established that “reason,” of which we have spoken, is the same human spirit understood in the fullness of its spiritual activities and in the totality of its cultural “moments” and historical periods: being, which is the content of truth, is precisely the “becoming” of this spirit, and philosophy is the consideration of this becoming. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, one proceeds from “apparent knowledge” (sense-certainty, perception, the understanding) to self-consciousness and then to reason and its actualization in the life of the spirit, up to “absolute knowledge.” The Logic studies the formal aspect of this path. In the preface to the second edition of the Logic (1831), at the end of his career, H. warns that the principle of the autonomy of thought must be carried through to the end, so that the “beginning” of philosophizing may be “without presuppositions, utterly simple, simplicity itself” (Wissenschaft. d. Logik, cited ed., I, p. 20 ff.). Thus the Phenomenology, which was originally intended to constitute the “first part of the system,” seems absent from the structure of Hegelian Logic, perhaps the most sumptuous edifice that the human spirit has raised to pure thought. Here dialectics is presented systematically: it is the sole method of philosophy.
e) The first moment is pure being (das reine Sein), absolutely indeterminate and empty. This is the only valid logical beginning because it is absolutely without presuppositions: it is made “in the element of thought that is freely for itself, that is, in pure knowing” (Wissenschaft. d. Logik, ed. cit., I, p. 53). This pure knowing—H. specifies—is “being in general, being and nothing more, without any determination or filling” (ibid., p. 54). Is it an immediate or a mediated? From the logical point of view, pure being is the immediate itself, because only pure being can be the beginning. On the other hand—H. acknowledges—this pure being “has arisen by way of mediation, and precisely by way of a mediation that is at the same time its own self-sublation” (loc. cit.). H., it seems, does not contradict himself, because the beginning of the Logic is the immediate of reflection, and therefore a retracing—with reflection—of the path or process that the real follows forward in its becoming. Thus the pure being of the beginning is already the “result” of mediation, insofar as the removal from being of every accidentality and particularity is required through the moment of negativity. H. can therefore say that “in philosophy, proceeding forward is rather proceeding backward and grounding” (Wissenschaft. d. Logik, ed. cit., I, p. 55). To this pure empty being corresponds the sphere of Dasein, with which the First Part of the Logic is concerned.
f) The second moment is nothing, but not the nothing of nothing; rather, the nothing that is linked to being. If the pure being of the beginning is “the indeterminate immediate,” in fact it is nothing, H. concludes, insofar as it is precisely the absence of every determination of that pure being, the impossibility of any intuition: nothing is therefore inherent in being, and the beginning contains them both; it is their unity (ibid., pp. 57 and 58). As a good disciple of Spinoza and Böhme, H. asserts that this unity of being with non-being may well be taken “as the first and purest definition of the Absolute”; but what is important to note is that nothing becomes the moving principle of the dialectic. If every particular entity, precisely insofar as it is determined, is a synthesis of being and non-being, then it is through the negation of determination that the authentic position of the real is attained: “This nothing,” says H., “is not that of the abstract intellect, but is the nothing of that from which it results (voraus es resultiert) and therefore in reality … the true result” (Phänom. d. Geistes, ed. cit., p. 68); and in this sense he speaks of “the enormous power of the negative, as the energy of thought, of the pure Ego” (ibid., p. 29). Nothing is the evil that is necessary to being so that the good may appear and assert itself.
g) The third moment is becoming as the (dynamic) unity of being and non-being. Becoming shows precisely that reality never rests upon the finite, upon the particular as such, because every finite thing passes over into something else; what was is now no longer, and what was not now is. The opposition between being and non-being therefore posits them together as inseparable, so that “immediately each of them disappears into its opposite” (Wissenschaft. d. Logik, ed. cit., I, p. 67). This mutual belonging of being and nothing is the reality of becoming, reality (Wirklichkeit) without qualification—not, however, as the passage from finite to finite into infinity (bad infinity), but in such a way that the being of the finite presents itself as that negative which passes over into the positive as such, namely, the Infinite. It may therefore be said that the dialectic as such is a tension of binary polarities (appearance and reality, essence and existence, parts and the Whole, finite and Infinite …), because the three moments belong to logical reflection, and it is known, moreover, that being and nothing are inseparable in becoming. Real dialectic lies in the continual
“nothingification” that one of the members (the finite) displays in becoming, whereby absolute reality, the Infinite, is revealed. Is the Infinite dialectical as well? H. ought to deny this if he does not wish to reopen a new process ad infinitum and in turn remain imprisoned in bad infinity; yet the formula of the Hegelian Infinite is that it is the unity of finite and Infinite, and of God H. says that He cannot be God without the world (Ohne Welt Gott ist nicht Gott: Philos. d. Rel., ed. cit., I, p. 148).
IV. PROBLEMS OF HEGELIANISM
It is not difficult to show how, whichever way it is considered, Hegelian dialectic presents a fundamental ambiguity. It is asserted that truth is the “result,” that it is in the whole (das Wahre ist das Ganze), and then one must assert that the Absolute is present from the very beginning and works “behind the back” (hinter den Rücken: Enzykl., § 25), that the Absolute is the unity of positive and negative, of finite and infinite. Not to mention the methodological ambiguity of wishing to eliminate every content of immediate experience, and then relying on concepts such as “movement,” “force,” “passing over,” etc., which derive their meaning solely from that experience (Trendelenburg’s objection, which wearied all the Hegelians from Michelet to Spaventa and Gentile). H. therefore did not resolve the fundamental problem of philosophy, that of the relationship between sense and reason, between the particular and the universal: Italian neo-Hegelianism, wishing to give Hegelianism greater internal coherence, sought with Croce to give value to the particular (historicism), whereas Gentile wished, through the doctrine of the pure act, to overcome every dualism, including the methodological; but in both cases the metaphysical foundation of dialectic was rejected.For H. — who learned it from Böhme — the authentic pattern of dialectic is the Christian dogma of the Trinity: in it the Father, Power, an abstract universal, divides into the Son, and the latter, contemplating himself, is the Holy Spirit — three moments that constitute a single reality (Philos. d. Gesch., ed. cit., I, p. 32 ff.). But H. places religion halfway between art and philosophy, because it remains bound to imagery and is therefore inferior to philosophy. Likewise, the dogma of the Incarnation, stripped of its representational content, is reduced to the self-awareness that consciousness has acquired of itself in Christ: this explains H.’s enormous influence on dogmatic and biblical liberalism (Wellhausen), and on secularism in general, as well as how he could also be accused of atheism.
In the Hegelian conception of the life of spirit, the highest form or life of consciousness is not religion but politics, as it is realized in the history of peoples and in the various civilizations: the absolute Spirit is the Spirit of the world (Weltgeist), the sole individual of history, to which the spirit of every people (Volksgeist) is subordinated, and to this in turn individual persons. Thus God, the Spirit of the world, is the human-absolute that dominates nature: “If the divine essence were not the essence of man and of nature, it would be an essence that would be nothing” (Philos. d. Gesch., ed. cit., I, p. 38). H. therefore defends the subordination of religion to politics and of the Church to the State: the concept of individual immortality, moreover, has no theoretical content whatsoever, but derives solely from the extrapolation of a fanciful desire.
The most vigorous reaction to Hegelian idealism, outside Catholic thought, has been that of existentialism and Marxism: the former, with Kierkegaard, sought to vindicate the transcendence of Christianity and the freedom of the individual; the latter, with Marx, claimed to turn the “dialectic of spirit” into a “dialectic of sensible matter.” For this reason, Hegelian studies in Italy, Germany, and France have regained considerable vigor, especially research into the genesis of Hegelian dialectic.
BIBL. Complete editions of the works: Werke, vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freuden des Vereinigten, 18 vols., Berlin 1832–45. The edition of the Encyclopedia is in 3 vols. (VI, VII, VII) and includes the Zusätze collected by H.’s disciples during the lectures. — Sämtliche Werke, Jubiläumsmagake, in 20 vols., edited by H. Glockner, Stuttgart 1927–30; it is a reproduction of the text of the preceding edition with revisions. Vols. XXI–XXII constitute a study of H. by Glockner, and vols. XXIII–XXV (1935) a comprehensive H.-Lexikon by the same author. — Sämtliche Werke, critical edition based on the original manuscripts, edited by G. Lasson: thus far 20 vols., Leipzig 1923 ff. (in the Philosophische Bibliothek of the Meiner edition). The Phenomenology has been reissued under the editorship of J. Hoffmeister, who is also responsible for the edition of the Jenenner Realphilosophie (vols. XIX–XX), with an excellent introductory study on Goethe u. der deutsche Idealismus; he has likewise begun the reissue of the System u. Gesch. der Philos. (thus far only vol. I has been published; XV, Leipzig 1940, reprinted 1944), with new criteria for the use of the manuscripts. The youthful unpublished writings have been published and studied in: H. Nohl, H.s theologische Jugendschriften, Tübingen 1907; Jo. Hoffmeister, Dokumente zu H.s Entwicklung, Stuttgart 1936. — Italian translations: Enciclopedia delle scienze filosofiche, in 3 vols., edited by B. Croce (the Zusätze have been omitted), Bari 1906; Lineamenti di filosofia del diritto, edited by F. Messineo, ibid. 1913; La scienza della logica, 3 vols., translated with notes by A. Moni, ibid. 1925. Fenomenologia dello Spirito, 2 vols., translated, with introduction and notes, by E. De Negri, Florence 1933–36; Lezioni sulla filosofia della storia, translated by G. Calogero and C. Fatta (thus far 2 vols.), ibid. 1941–47; Lezioni sulla storia della filosofia, 3 vols. (vol. III consists of 2 parts), translated by E. Codignola and G. Sanna, ibid. 1930–44. I principi, edited by E. De Negri, ibid. 1949. — Studies: B. Croce, Saggio da una bibliografia hegeliana, in Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto nella filosofia di H., Bari 1907, pp. 211–71, partly abridged in: Saggio sulla H., Bari 1948. Also Überweg, IV, pp. 678–81; W. Windelband-Heinsoeth, Lehrbuch d. Gesch. d. Philos., Tübingen 1935, pp. xxx–xxxi. More recent general accounts: R. Kroner, Von Kant bis H., II (H.), Tübingen 1924; S. Hartmann, Die Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus, part 2: H., Berlin and Leipzig 1932; G. R. G. Hegel, An Introduction to H., Oxford 1940; F. Martinetti, H., Milan 1943; G. De Ruggiero, H., Bari 1948. — Specialized studies: G. Gentile, La riforma della dialettica hegeliana e altri scritti, 2nd ed., Messina 1923; B. Heimann, System und Methode in H.s Philosophie, Leipzig 1927; G. Della Volpe, H. romantico e mistico (1793–1800), Florence 1929; Th. Steinbüchel, Das Grundproblem der H.schen Philosophie, I, Bonn 1933; N. Hartmann, Aristoteles und H., Erfurt 1933; id., H. und das Problem der Realdialektik, in Blätter f. deutsch. Philos., Berlin 1935, p. 1 ff.; W. Sesemann, Zum Problem der Realdialektik, ibid., p. 29 ff.; A. Hartmann, Der Spätidealismus und die H.sche Dialektik, ibid. 1937; Th. Haering, H., sein Wollen und sein Werk, 2 vols., Leipzig and Berlin 1929–38; A. Dürr, Zum Problem der H.schen Dialektik und ihre Formen, Berlin 1938; J. Schwarz, H.s philosophische Entwicklung, Frankfurt a. M. 1938; R. Schneider, Schellings u. H.s schwäbische Gotteselomen, Würzburg-Aumühle 1938; L. Pelloux, La logica di H., Milan 1938; S. Contri, La genesi fenomenologica della logica hegeliana, 2 vols., Bologna 1937–39; W. Axmann, Zur Frage nach d. Ursprung d. dialektischen Denkens bei H., Würzburg 1939; W. Bauchert, Begriff u. Gestalt bei H., Kiel 1940; F. Alderisio, Esame della riforma attualistica dell’idealismo in rapporto a Spaventa e a H., Todi 1940; K. Domke, Das Problem der metaphysischen Gottesbeweise in der Philosophie H.s, Leipzig 1940; C. Höeschl, Das Absolute, in H.s Dialektik, Sein Wesen und Aufgabe, Paderborn 1941; S. Vanni-Rovighi, La concezione hegeliana della storia, Milan 1942; C. L. Corsi, Studi su H., Faenza 1942; H. Niel, De la médiation dans la philosophie de H., Paris 1945; H. Hippolite, Génèse et structure de la phénoménologie de l’esprit de H., ibid. 1946; id., Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire de H., ibid. 1948; H. A. Ogiemann, H.s Gottesbeweise, Rome 1948, pp. 191–207; Ph. Weindel, H. Der Mensch in Gott, in Der Mensch vor Gott, Düsseldorf 1948, pp. 191–207 (an important evaluation of H.’s thought from the Catholic point of view, linked to the initial controversy of anti-Hegelian Catholic theology represented by J. Sengler and Fr. A. Studenmaier); G. Lukacs, Der junge H., Über die Beziehungen von Dialektik und Ökonomie, Zurich–Vienna 1948 (a study of Marxist orientation); R. Kroner, Introduction, in Early theological writings (translated by T. M. Knox from a substantial portion of the Jugendschriften), Chicago 1948, pp. 1–66; M. Heidegger, H.s Begriff der Erfahrung, in Holzwege, Frankfurt a. M. 1950, pp. 104–92. The specific problem of the relationship between H. and Marx constitutes a separate topic. Cf. from the Catholic point of view: K. Bekker, Marx philosophische Entwicklung, sein Verhältnis zu H., Basel 1940; R. Heiss, H. und Marx, in Symposion, I, Freiburg im Br. (1949), pp. 169–206; K. Löwisch, Von H. bis Nietzsche, 2nd ed., Stuttgart 1950. Cornelio Fabro