In this paper, I examine broad features of Hegel's interpretation of Plato from his Lectures on the History of Phihsophy, noting how these features resonate with current views of Platonic philosophy. Hegel formed his interpretation of Plato under very different circumstances than those of today. Serious study of the Platonic dialogues had come to the forefront in German Idealist philosophy. As Rüdiger Bubner notes: ‘It was this tradition of thought that discovered, in an original way of its own, the authentic Plato in place of the various mediated substitutes of before, and indeed saw him as a thinker who was to provide continuing inspiration to the needs of post-Kantian philosophy’. We find Hegel holds Plato in high esteem, most famously as a ‘teacher of the human race’ alongside Aristotle. His Plato is one who is fundamentally significant in the development of philosophy, raising it to the status of science, although not in a fully systematic manner. At the same time, Hegel distinguishes his Plato from the projects of his contemporaries, Tennemann's esoteric Plato and Schleiermacher's aesthetic Plato. Hegel also forms his view of Plato at a time just prior to the development of stylometric studies of the dialogues, begun in its earliest form by K. F. Hermann (1839) and pushed forward by Lewis Campbell and Friedrich Blass in the later half of the 19th century. (This is not to claim that questions regarding the ordering of the dialogues did not arise earlier than 1839, but that they became scientific and central in Platonic interpretation with Hermann.) The pressures Hegel negotiates in his interpretation are quite distinct, especially in this last respect, yet not altogether alien. There are, I think, interesting reasons for this. (One might think that given Hegel's strong opposition to Schleiermacher (and Hegel's disposition towards development), he might have been inclined towards a developmental reading of Plato. One also might think that given his opposition to Tennemann's esotericism, he might have had more doubts about discerning a system within Plato's unsystematic dialogues. But one would be wrong on both counts.)

Nearly every major philosophy, from Plato to Hegel and beyond, has argued that democracy is an inferior form of government, at best. Yet, virtually every contemporary political philosophy working today endorses democracy in one variety or another. Should we conclude then that the traditional canon is meaningless for helping us theorise about a just state? In this paper, I will take up the criticisms and positive proposals of two such canonical figures in political philosophy: Plato and Hegel. At first glance, each is rather disdainful, if not outright hostile, to democracy. This is also how both have been represented traditionally. However, if we look behind the reasons for their rejection of (Athenian) democracy and the reasons behind their alternatives to democracy, I believe we can uncover a new theory of government that does two things. First, it maps onto the so-called Schumpeterian tradition of elite theories of democracy quite well. Second, perhaps surprisingly, it actually provides an improved justification for democratic government as we practice it today than rival theories of democracy. Thus, not only are Plato and Hegel not enemies of modern democratic thought after all, but each is actually quite useful for helping us develop democratic theory in a positive, not negative, manner.

In the chapter on ‘Plato and Aristotle’ of the Lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel praises Aristotle's work for displaying a principle of ‘pure subjectivity’ in a manner that he considers to be largely absent from the Platonic corpus:

Elsewhere, Hegel refers to Aristotelian conceptions of organic life and of thinking as to the earliest speculative insights of Western philosophy. In § 378 of the Encyclopaedia (1830) he calls the De Anima ‘the best or even only work of speculative interest ever written on the philosophy of spirit’. In yet other places, however, Hegel attributes at least ‘intuitive’ forms of speculation to Plato as well.

In a preliminary way, a 'speculative relation’ in Hegel's acceptation is instantiated by a subject's theoretical and practical relation to itself — that is, theoretical self-knowing and practical self-will. ‘Speculative’ is any concept which grasps as a unity what other kinds of cognition keep asunder: for example, the subjective and objective dimensions of a phenomenon or state of affairs. But even independently of a detailed analysis of what ‘the speculative’ entails, one is struck by the apparent inconsistency of these claims regarding Plato or Aristotle with Hegel's overall view of the logical necessity of philosophy's historical development. This view is synthetically expressed in the 1820 Introduction to these same Lectures.

What is coming to assert itself as the mainstream reading of Hegel's philosophy at the start of our century is the picture of a reaction to, elaboration of, and finally solution to, Kantian problems. What goes hand in hand with this reading is a rejection of metaphysics as supposedly uncritical pre-Kantian baggage unaware of its presuppositions and unable to examine its own sources and the legitimacy of its claims.

However complex this perspective and intelligent its merits, even if the intention is the well-meaning one of liberating Hegel's philosophy from whatever smacks of traditionalist views fuelling the various Hegel myths and legends and of making Hegel palatable again to a naturally suspicious English-speaking world, I think that this picture does Hegel a disservice. It is also detrimental to our understanding of the pre-Kantian tradition, which is all too often misconstrued as indistinguishable from Wolffian metaphysics. While I do not intend to dispute in any way the crucial importance of critical philosophy for the genesis of absolute idealism, or suggest that this appropriation of Hegel is merely instrumental, I am saying that it is one-sided in that it ignores Hegel's extraordinary attempt at understanding his own philosophy as digesting what is best about our tradition, assimikting it, and making it speak for us again in a new voice.

So I am not denying that trying to update or appropriate Hegel might shed considerable light on select deeper meanings of a thought whose opacity still makes us regard it as an inert and surd obstacle to straight and unambiguous philosophical practice. But all too often one gets the impression that for most proponents of such a view metaphysics is the naive description of a sort of formal ontology, which does not question its fixed meanings but adopts stable substrates represented as such from ordinary experience, and understands thought as a description, as the realistic mirroring of an objectivity that is given to it.

Wilhelm Dilthey, the first scholar to study Hegel's early writings, most of which have been published by Herman Nohl under the title Hegels Theologische Jugendschriften, examined the thought of the young Hegel in the light of German idealism; Dilthey was interested in establishing the Kant-Fichte-Schelling-Hegel Entwicklungsgeschichte. Another line of interpretation, no doubt encouraged by the tide of Nohl's compendium, has been to see these writings as dealing with a religious experience and religious issues. Unique in the literature stands Laurence Dickey's study of intellectual history, in which he shows that the young Hegel was influenced by the culture of Old Württemberg – more specifically, by Württemberg's ideal of Protestant civil piety. Finally, Georg Lukács and Raymond Plant concentrate on the social and political concerns of the young Hegel. On the one side, Lukács, writing from a Marxist perspective, explores the political and economic ideas of the young Hegel as well as the way these have contributed to the development of the dialectical method. For his part, Plant has put forward the view that the essays compiled by Nohl in his collection constitute a series of attempts on the part of the young Hegel to comprehend and account for the cultural and socio-political crisis of his time. For Plant, Hegel sought the causes thereof in religion.

I propose to look at the young Hegel from yet another angle. I shall argue that what lies beneath Hegel's exegesis of the Scriptures is a Platonism. H. S. Harris has noted this aspect of Hegel's thought in his seminal study of Hegel's development, but the Platonism of the young Hegel has generally been under-researched. In this paper I shall try to bring this out. To do this, I shall explore the meaning and significance of ‘life’ and ‘love’ by focusing on ‘The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate’ essay, the fragment on ‘Love’, as well as some of the fragments in the appendix of Nohl's volume. Let us not forget that, despite his practical concerns, Hegel was also interested in theological doctrine, which, he thought, expressed substantial truths in metaphorical language; so in the ‘Spirit of Christianity’ essay, as well as providing an historical account of Judaism and a description of Christian ethics, Hegel also discusses theological tenets. Hegel always believed that theory and practice go hand in hand, and he was convinced that religion was as much about dogma as it was about practice. For this reason I deem it necessary to look at Hegel's interpretation of Christian theology in the course of this paper.

In this paper I want to explore a central line of reasoning in Hegel's early philosophy of religion, which he expounded in fragments he wrote while he was in Bern and Frankfurt in the 1790's. These fragments are known under the titles, Fragmente über Volksreligion und Christentum (dated around 1793–94), Die Positivität der christlichen Religion (1795–96), Entwürfe über Religion und Liebe, and a later essay entitled Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksat, they were written sometime between 1798 and 1800, a few years before Hegel published his seminal Jena texts, but they remained unpublished in his lifetime. These texts have, since Nohl's edition of 1907, come to be known collectively as Hegel's ‘theologische Jugendschriften’. I believe that they contain the inchoate system of Hegel's thought in general and his mature philosophy of religion in particular. My main claim here is that Hegel believes that there is an intimate relation between reason and religion, so much so in fact that one can argue that there is reason in religion.

In the first section of my paper, I elaborate on some general problems concerning the relation between faith and reason, in particular, concerning the criterion of truth and viewpoint-neutrality. In the second section, I introduce Hegel's well-known problematic of the sublation of conceptual oppositions, which in the context of an account of the positivity of religion he already articulates, in some form, in these early documents and which may provide a solution for the problems that, in the first section, I argue arise around the relation between faith and reason. This will be merely a rough outline. I subsequently discuss, very briefly, some central aspects of Kant's philosophy of religion, to which to an important extent Hegel's is indebted. In the fourth section, I go on to indicate, also very broadly, the sense in which Hegel attempts to improve upon Kant and thus apparently proves to be more consistent than him. I then raise an issue concerning Hegel's particularist position in his epistemology of religion, which does not sit well with the notion of rationality as viewpoint-neutral. To illustrate this, I look at Hegel's reading of the Eucharist. This is all very sketchy and is meant mainly to elucidate the sense in which, according to Hegel, there is reason in religion.

In section 82 of Being and Time Heidegger calls Hegel's account of time ‘the most radical way in which the ordinary [or vulgar] understanding of time has been given form conceptually’ (BT 480). For Heidegger, in the vulgar conception ‘the basic phenomenon of time is seen in the “now”; by contrast, Dasein's own “ecstatico-horizonal temporality temporalizes itself primarily in terms of the future (BT 479). Hegel's problem, it seems, is that he has no time for the future.

As Heidegger explains in his 1924 lecture on the concept of time, Dasein is futural because it is essentially possibility — ‘the possibility of its certain yet indeterminate past (CT 12). That future pastness is, of course, Dasein's death. Dasein is thus oriented towards the future because it is being-towards-death — the death that is certain to come, one knows not when.

The vulgar interpretation of time represents a flight both from Dasein's death and from its futural temporality, since it places the present at the centre of concern. Time, for the vulgar understanding, is simply ‘a sequence of “nows” which are constantly “present-at-hand”, simultaneously passing away and coming along’ (BT 474). The past and future are thus understood to be no more than the now that is no longer or is not yet. The future in particular is hereby distorted: for it is not thought to be the certain though indeterminate possibility in relation to which our present existence is first constituted, but is conceived as present existence that is yet to come.