It is often assumed that Hegel's philosophy contains no practical dimension, no doctrine of how human beings should live, but is concerned exclusively with showing that human existence, as the product of reason, is already fully rational. As a consequence, even though Hegel's social and political thought (which is set out mainly in his Philosophy of Right) has been the subject of extensive and detailed study over the years, few commentators have ever tried to develop a Hegelian ethical theory to place alongside those of Aristotle, Kant and Mill. In his book, Hegel's Ethical Thought, Allen Wood has set himself the task of remedying this situation and, in my view, has succeeded in producing one of the most thoughtful, informative and provocative accounts of Hegel's Philosophy of Right to date.

Wood's achievement is extraordinary. He offers a coherent and sophisticated account of virtually all the major elements of Hegelian “objective spirit”, including freedom, happiness, recognition, right, property, punishment, morality, conscience, civil society, poverty, the state and history; and in the process he engages Hegel in a fascinating and highly instructive dialogue with a whole host of thinkers, including Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Fichte, J F Fries and J S Mill, in a way that exceedingly few commentators have succeeded in doing (or have even tried to do). As a result, I believe that Wood has shown conclusively that Hegel is an ethical theorist who is every bit as sophisticated as Aristotle, Kant and Mill, and whose contribution to ethical theory can no longer continue to be disparaged or ignored (as is largely the case) by contemporary students of the subject.

The philosophical understanding of nature is a key concern of both Plato and Hegel. Their elaborations of the identity and status of nature within their respective philosophies exhibit significant affinities to which Hegel himself draws attention in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Hegel and Plato, indeed, are fundamentally at one in theorizing nature as both displaying and obscuring the principles of reason which they take as providing the foundations of a coherent explanation of reality. In his lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel takes great pains to emphasize the profundity of Plato's idealism as residing in its identification of the objectively real with the rational. Plato, according to Hegel, is to be revered, above all, for having “… grasped in all its truth Socrates' great principle that ultimate reality lies in consciousness, since according to him the absolute is in thought and all reality is thought.” The Timaeus, for Hegel, articulates how the world of nature is necessarily structured by reason, just as the Republic is seen by Hegel as providing a philosophical explanation of the rationality of the traditional, organic community of the Greek polis. Hegel's recognition of the Platonic foundations of his own version of “absolute” idealism in which the universality of thought assumes an explanatory priority over the material phenomena of nature as well as informing the spiritual activities of human beings has been noted, rightly, by a number of subsequent commentators. Michael Rosen, for instance, in his book, Hegel's Dialectic and Its Criticism, while carefully distinguishing between aspects of Hegel's and Plato's conceptions of nature, intimates the continuity of Hegel's idealism with Plato's by observing how Hegel's language in effecting a transition from the categories of pure thought in the Logic to the material world of nature constitutes an “… echo of Plato's Timaeus.” Certainly, Hegel's cryptic account of the transition from the Absolute Idea, the categorial terminus of the Logic's interrogation of the determinations of pure thought, to the externality and materiality of nature evokes Plato's construal of the construction of the world in the Timaeus, both by the indeterminate character of the God which is invoked, as well as by the clear subordination of material phenomena to a separately articulable order of reason. In the account of the construction of the world developed in the Timaeus, Plato deploys the image of the divine demiurge imparting order to the world by referring to a pre-existing pattern of ideas. Hegel conceives of the Absolute Idea which at the outset of the Philosophy of Nature he likens to God, as, “… freely releasing itself…” into the externality of space and time, in which movement the Idea is seen as suffering neither a transition within nor a deepening of its character such as the mediated categories of the Logic incur in the process of their integration within the Absolute Idea.

Michael Petry has observed that “until 1970 there was nobody among the hegelians, not to mention the philosophers of the Naturwissenschaften, willing to recognise Hegel's philosophy of nature as an area of investigation to be taken seriously.” An analogous fate seems to have afflicted Aristotle's Physics, if one agrees with Heidegger that: “The Aristotelian Physics is the arcane (verborgene) fundamental book of Western philosophy and, insofar as arcane, it has never been studied sufficiently.”

Fortunately, the past neglect has been amply compensated for by the considerable degree of interest shown, in more recent years, towards both Hegel's and Aristotle's philosophy of nature. With reference to Hegel, that interest may have been nourished initially by the recognition of some isomorphic traits obtaining in Hegel's doctrine and in the methodology of structuralism and gestaltism. Furthermore, part of that interest must have also been triggered by the overall state of bankruptcy and disrepute which have befallen mechanistic, quantitative, empirical or neo-empirical and neo-positivist explanations of reality and of nature. Think of the developments of genetic biology, pathology and genetic engineering. Quantum Mechanics, the highly speculative turn in physics, cosmology, mathematics. By now, the assumptions, methods and findings of these sciences seem to be more kin to Aristotle and Hegel than to Newton and Galileo. Other hypothetical reasons could be offered, to explain the renewed attention paid to Hegel's philosophy of nature.

One point, to begin with, emerges from the panorama of recent research on Hegel, namely that - regardless of and despite the recurrent mythical, hyper-animistic, anthropomorphic images, sustained by analogies and metaphorical diction; also despite of the frequent obscurities and downright factual mistakes - the philosopher cannot be sweepingly accused of scientific ignorance, nor of endemically gratuituous a priori, abstract reflection.

Allen Wood's treatment of Hegel's ethics is one of the deeper, more informed and thorough treatments of the subject to come along in any language. Wood treats Hegel as offering something like an ethical theory in the sense in which ethical theory is done in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. Different themes - happiness, freedom, self-actualization - are treated in terms of how they fit into Hegel's own view and how they compare with alternative accounts (particularly, Kantian and utilitarian accounts). The usual treatment of Hegel's thought is almost always the opposite, following Hegel's own exposition of his ideas.

It is not due to accident, failure of nerve or slavish devotion to the text that most commentators closely follow Hegel's own exposition. In Hegel's case, this has a definite logic to it, since Hegel claims the really significant body of what we would call his “arguments” for his position are supposed to be found in his serial dialectical exposition of his ideas. Each new development is supposed to follow dialectically from the preceding one. Thus, if Hegel is right about what he says, then one should not be able to find any arguments on his part for his views outside of his dialectical exposition of them. To expound Hegel's reasons for holding his views quite naturally leads to the idea that we must expound them in the order he gave them.

It is not surprising that a book entitled Hegel's Ethical Thought (hereafter, “HET”) should attract the attention of Hegelians. But I hope the Hegelians who read HET will forgive me for the fact that they were not its intended audience. My principal aim in the book was to contribute to contemporary discussions of the history of ethics and ethical theory by showing the direct relevance of Hegel's thought to issues that still interest moral philosophers.

This aim does not presuppose (as Pinkard would have it) that philosophy consists of a “menu” of positions from which we are to choose arbitrarily. On the other hand, you can't expect a hearing from an audience of non-Hegelians if you arrogantly assume beforehand that Hegel's philosophy encompasses what is true in all others. (HET does include some attempts to argue that Hegel's ethical theory has such advantages, especially over eudaimonistic and Kantian theories. See HET, Chapter 3, §§ 7-8 and Chapters 8-9.) Hegel's thought is now taken more seriously among English speaking philosophers than at any time during my life, but a major obstacle to this welcome change has been the narrowminded sectarian arrogance often found among his admirers.

The same aim also dictated that I not read Hegel's ethical thought so as to make it dependent on his speculative logic. Here Hegelians must descend from the mists of speculation long enough to face up to some cold, hard facts. First, there is no generally accepted interpretation even of what Hegelian logic is about, not to mention matters of finer detail. Second, on no interpretation does Hegelian speculative logic have any credibility at all for philosophers today.

When the Ideal is understood as ontologically fundamental within the framework of an idealistic system, and the Real, on the other hand, as derived, then the first and foremost task of a philosophy of this kind is to prove the claimed fundamentally of the Ideal. This is immediately followed by the further demand to also substantiate on this basis the existence of the Real and particularly of natural being. These tasks have been understood and attempts made to solve them in very different ways in German Idealism - about which I cannot go into more detail here. Let me say this much: that Fichte and Schelling, it appears to me, already fail at the first task, ie. neither Fichte nor Schelling really succeeds in substantiating their pretended ideal as an absolute principle of philosophy. Fichte believes he has such a principle in the direct evidence of the self. However, as this is of little use for the foundation of a generally binding philosophy because of its ultimately private character, Fichte already replaces it with the principle of the absolute self already in his first Wissenschaftlehre of 1794. As a construction detached from the concrete self, this of course lacks that original direct certainty from which Fichte started in the first place, in other words: because the construction of an absolute self can no longer refer to direct evidence, it must be substantiated separately, something which Fichte, I believe, nonetheless fails to do. The same criticism can, in my view, be made of Schelling, who ingeniously substitutes constructions for arguments. His early intuition of an absolute identity which simultaneously underlies spirit and nature, remains just as thetic and unproven as that eternal subject on which he based the representation of his system in, for example, the Munich lectures of 1827.

Having studied Hegel's philosophy, as it is epitomized in the Encyclopaedia, many scholars would be in agreement with David G Ritchie who, in his book on Darwin and Hegel (1893), remarked: “Everywhere in Hegel we read about Entwickelung; but of Evolution he does not speak in so friendly a manner.” Bearing in mind the distinction between “Entwicklung” (“development”) and “evolution” and recalling Hegel's criticism of conceptions of natural evolution in the initial section of the Philosophy of Nature, it is certainly not immediately evident why a serious scholar like John N Findlay should maintain that “if any philosopher is a philosopher of evolution, that philosopher is Hegel.”

It can hardly be denied, however, that more recent studies in Hegel's philosophy can be used to support Findlay's statement to a certain extent. Not only has the relevance of Hegel's philosophy for an adequate understanding of organic life and its evolution been strongly emphasized; it has even been asserted that Hegel had at his disposal a concept of evolution essentially determining the methodic approach of his philosophy of nature.

Now I would not venture to ascertain whether or not Hegel's concept of evolution is of present relevance for our understanding of nature and even less would I dare to decide on the hypothetical question whether or not Hegel, if he “had lived a little later, … would have given us an evolutionary, teleological theory of Nature as he did of mind in history.” In my paper, I would like to deal with a subject matter of more limited scope. Discussions concerning the systematic importance and present relevance of Hegel's concept of evolution tend to be somewhat vague and abstract as long as the meaning of “evolution” in Hegel's philosophy is anything but unequivocal. Therefore, I am going to attempt to outline a systematic reconstruction of the function of Hegel's concept of evolution within the conceptual framework of Hegel's encyclopaedic Philosophy of Nature. More precisely, I will try to elucidate: 1) the question whether or not Hegel's criticism of philosophic and scientific concepts of evolution led him to his own positive concept of evolution; 2) the question in what sense a specific Hegelian concept of evolution is relevant for the understanding of the notional development taking place between the logical “absolute Idea” and “subjective spirit”.