Hegel’s Groundwork for a Philosophy of Right has become, perhaps, the most widely read of the books he published in his lifetime. Many regard it as a work that stands alongside a handful of others as classics of modern political philosophy. Hegel, of course, did not conceive this work as a stand-alone piece of social and political theorizing, as it was effectively an expansion of the section “Objective Spirit” from the “Philosophy of Spirit”, forming Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. As such, in structure and content, it was meant to be understood as giving further determination to a conceptually articulated edifice presented in Part One of the Encyclopaedia, “The Science of Logic”. But more than this, as the presentation the Encyclopaedia follows a pattern in which subsequent sections reveal the “truth” of earlier ones, the “truth” of the determinations of Objective Spirit should further be illuminated in the later Encyclopaedia sections on “Absolute Spirit”, treating Art, Religion and Philosophy. This chapter attempts to illuminate Hegel’s ideas concerning objective spirit by examining them in this broader context.

The role played by Hegel’s Logic within those parts of his “Realphilosophie,” philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit, is puzzling and controversial. In this essay, I argue against the idea that we should be able to understand his Logic as charting some entirely autonomous domain without any help from the areas of Realphilosophie that presuppose it. This mistake here I take to be a consequence of failing to heed Hegel’s demand that we understand the system of his Encyclopaedia as circular, moreover as containing “circles within circles” such that the circular structure is iterated into its parts, into the parts of those parts, and so on.

It is said that reading her husband's posthumously published lectures on the philosophy of religion had caused the devout and pious widow, Marie Hegel, considerable distress (Pinkard 2000: 577). How could the man she knew to have been a good Lutheran express the heretical views that were to be found there? This anecdote captures well the apparent ambiguity that marked the attitude to religion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), an ambiguity that was at the heart of the undoing of the ‘Hegelianism’ of his followers in the years after his death.

As is well known, after Hegel's death in 1831, his followers soon split into ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ factions, and while this split is now remembered in terms of its political consequences (it was from the Left Hegelian faction that the doctrine of Marxism was eventually to emerge), the context of the split was a religious one. A contest over the properly ‘Hegelian’ philosophical attitude to religion had been sparked by the publication in 1835–6 of David Strauss' The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. While the conservative Right defended Hegelianism as a philosophy that reflected Christian orthodoxy, the Left came to see it as a humanistic doctrine of the historical emancipation of humanity. However, while this was the first internal breach of Hegelianism, the implications of Hegel's philosophy for religious belief had been contentious since his rise to prominence in the 1820s.

This sentence commences, and anticipates the key lesson from, what is perhaps the most-read section of any of Hegel's texts: the eight or nine pages titled, “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage,” which is embedded within chapter 4 of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The chapter itself, which is titled “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” is the only chapter of a section that is labeled “B: Self- Consciousness” and that follows the three-chaptered “A: Consciousness” and precedes “C: Reason.”

The general idea summarily introduced here - that we are the sorts of beings we are with our characteristic “self-consciousness” only on account of the fact that we exist “for” each other or, more specifically, are recognized or acknowledged (anerkannt) by each other, an idea we might refer to as the “acknowledgment condition” for self-consciousness - constitutes one of Hegel's central claims in the Phenomenology. This is a substantial claim indeed, and is at the heart of the thesis of “the sociality of reason”. It is, however, introduced in a seemingly arbitrarily way in the paragraph prior to the “Independence and Dependence” section, and at the conclusion of a discussion examining “desire” as a model for self-consciousness.

Kant's legacy within analytic-styled theoretical philosophy tends to be centred on those parts of the Critique of Pure Reason that are dealt with in the ‘Transcendental Analytic’. From this point of view, the lessons of the even longer ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ can be summed up in its generally anti-metaphysical purport: one cannot discover truths about the world from pure thought alone – or at least, pure thought when it is restricted to reasoning schematized by syllogistic logic. Viewed from this perspective, Hegel looks to be a regression, as he seems to want to re-instate some sort of metaphysics just on such syllogistic logical grounds. While Kant had warned in the ‘Paralogisms’ and ‘Antinomies’ that pure reason conceived theoretically (‘metaphysics’) would be wrecked on the reef of contradiction, Hegel seems to have taken this entanglement in contradiction as revealing something about reality itself – its contradictoriness – and this alone has commonly been taken as sufficient warrant to exclude his response to Kant from serious consideration. But as we have seen, working from Sellars's critique of any idea of an intuitable logical ‘given’, Brandom claims to have resurrected the rational ‘inferentialist’ core of Hegel's very appeal to ‘Reason’ over ‘the Understanding’. While Hegel's controversial approach to contradiction will be examined in later chapters, in this chapter I trace the complicated relations between Kant and Hegel on the status of inferential reason.

Should it come as a surprise when a technical work in the philosophy of language by a prominent analytic philosopher is described as ‘an attempt to usher analytic philosophy from its Kantian to its Hegelian stage’, as has Robert Brandom's Making It Explicit? It can if one has in mind a certain picture of the relation of analytic philosophy to ‘German idealism’. This particular picture has been called analytic philosophy's ‘creation myth’, and it was effectively established by Bertrand Russell in his various accounts of the birth of the ‘new philosophy’ around the turn of the twentieth century.

Russell's accounts of his first eight years at Cambridge culminating in his rebellion against idealism convey a familiar picture of the precocious young man coming to find his distinctive voice.

In 1994, the year of the publication of Mind and World, another path-breaking work in analytic philosophy was published which was grounded in the work of Sellars and which signalled a radical realignment of analytic philosophy with respect to the idealist tradition. Again, Hegel was invoked as a thinker relevant for the resolution of deep problems within late twentieth-century analytic philosophy, but in Making It Explicit, Robert Brandom seemed to invoke quite different aspects of Hegelianism than had McDowell in Mind and World, and had drawn rather different consequences from Sellars's critique of the myth of the given.

Brandom describes the programme initiated in Making It Explicit as a post-Sellarsian ‘inferentialist’ alternative to the dominant ‘representationalist’ paradigm within modern philosophy, an alternative based upon a form of pragmatism that he describes as both rationalist and linguistic. Representationalists typically think of awareness in terms of mental contents that somehow represent or picture worldly things, events, or states of affairs. However, the representationalists’ picture, claims Brandom, is vitiated by its acceptance of the myth of the given. In contrast to representationism, the inferentialist approach to semantic content invokes Frege's ‘context principle’ as developed in mid-twentieth-century analytic philosophy in the generally pragmatic approaches to language found in Wittgenstein and Sellars. Following Frege, Wittgenstein had, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, regarded the proposition as the basic meaningful unit – ‘only in the nexus of a proposition has a name meaning’.