Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Book 49) by Peter Singer (PDF)

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Many people regard Hegel’s work as obscure and extremely difficult, yet his importance and influence are universally acknowledged. Professor Singer eliminates any excuse for remaining ignorant of the outlines of Hegel’sphilosophy by providing a broad discussion of his ideas and an account of his major works.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐There are certainly better ways of understanding Hegel than this, but I did get some points out of this compared other sources. I have little against Peter Singer’s utilitarianism and animal ethics, but I find hisatheism to be quite disingenuous or insincere. How can an avowed atheist write a good book about one of the most theistic philosophers and call him great? Something is amiss here.

⭐The Australian moral philosopher, Peter Singer, does his best to make Hegel more accessible. In some ways, Singer is the obvious man for the job, a philosopher at Princeton who served as Chair of the Philosophy department at Monash University, who is obviously versed in both analytical and continental philosophy. In other ways, Singer seems the odd man out of the job, working in moral philosophy more than philosophy of history and religion, and working primarily in preference utilitarian theory, which is many metaphorical miles away from the Hegelian tradition. Furthermore, to simplify Hegel is a huge a task as Hegel is not only systematically complex, but uses language idiosyncratically and often overlays meaning in his words so that they have both a possible religious and a secular interpretation. To make matters worse, Schiller, Fichte, and Kant get read “into” Hegel as Hegel was in dialogue with all of them, but differed on key points. Then, adding even more complication, there are several traditions of interpreting Hegel which often get read back into the text: the Marxist reading, the Feuerbachian one, the analytic response, the transcendentalist reading, the British idealist reading, etc.Singer tries to do this with a bit of bait and switch. His first two chapters he focuses on Hegel’s biography and philosophy of history. However, Singer does not quote Hegel very much during these chapters. Focusing on Schiller, Marx, and even F.H. Bradley to simplify the point. Furthermore, Singer allows one to think Hegel’s definition of freedom were standard, and even implies that Hegel’s economic values were closer to Marx’s than Philosophy of Right and Science of Logic actually indicate.Then, Singer backtracks and goes to Phenomenology, and he decides to translate Giest as mind to avoid religious implications. Now, it view Hegel solely in orthodox religious context is a problem and thus translating Giest as spirit can be misleading, but as Glenn McGree has illustrated in his “Hegel and Hermeticism,” to translate it solely as mind is just as problematic. Singer must answer philosophical problems created by ignoring the fact that Hegel means both spirit and mind in almost all uses. This is clear when he talks about absolute, which has both a epistemic and metaphysical reality. It is both secular and religious as Hegel sees history as moving in that direction. Singer bracketing sides out, which he does honestly and explicitly, still causes several interpretative problems.So far, nothing entirely misleading. There is Singer’s very, very brief attempt to talk about Hegel’s logic. Singer states that Hegel’s view of dialectic is “thesis-antithesis-synthesis.” Frankly, this is wrong. Hegel only mentions this formation once, and it is quoting unpublished views of Kant. Fichte and Schiller relied on this formation, but as even the Hegel critic Walter Kaufman realized, Hegelian dialectics is much more complicated. It is something closer to the formulation “Abstract-Negative-Concrete” with the negative moving through to complete the idea and make it real. This is crucial to understanding both Hegel’s critique of Schiller and Kant, but also Marx’s logical models do not work on “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” model, but on the Hegelian model. I have a hard time believing Singer did not know this problem because he sites some of Kaufman’s work on Hegel which mention this distinction. Still, it is a common misconception about Hegelian thought and Singer would be hardly the first person to make it.The last chapters on Right and Left Hegelianism as well as the few mentions of Popper’s critique are insufficient for understanding much. While Singer does show that Popper was relating a particularly problematic and literalistic reading of Hegel’s lecture notes by his students, he does not really divide into the differences between left and right Hegelianism in a way that is clarifying to influence Hegel had on the 19th and 20th century. Indeed, Hegel is the reason for the analytical and continental divide in English philosophy departments in the first place. Furthermore, even the left Hegelians, cannot be summarized in the opinions of Feuerbach and Marx. Hegel’s profound influence on transcendentalism is not discussed either.In short, Singer is an excellent reader and he does clarify many elements of Hegel’s philosophy, but he also obscures many in his simplification. Singer may also be making Hegel more amendable to Utilitarian and secular communitarian models of liberalism than he actually is, and he definitely has some severe missteps in his explanation of Hegel’s logic. It is still worth reading though and does not take much time commitment to do so. The bibliography is also quite useful. If one really wanted to deal with Hegel more seriously, I suggest a few books: Justus Hartnack’s “An Introduction to Hegel’s Logic,” Robert B. Pippin’s “Hegel’s Idealism” and “Hegel’s Practical Philosophy,” Stanley Rosen’s “The Idea of Hegel’s “Science of Logic,” Micheal Allen Fox’s “The Accessible Hegel,” and Horst Althaus and Michael Tar’s “Hegel: An Intellectual Biography.” These would be useful after reading this very brief introduction by Singer, and if you are truly adventurous and want some mad-cap views of Hegel, Zizek’s “Less Than Nothing” would be a starting point if one remembers that this is Zizek’s Hegel as much as Hegel-in-himself. In short, one can does worse than this book, but if one is interested, I would not stop with Singer’s very brief introduction.

⭐Peter Singer is a world class philosopher and moral theorist, albeit one whose main works I find unconvincing. Nor do I regularly read Oxford’s “Very Short Introduction” series. But I really enjoyed Singer’s short book on Karl Marx (

⭐), which is the best overview I know of the thoughts of Das Kapital’s author. I may disagree with Singer’s philosophy, but he is a clear thinker and talented writer.Unfortunately, Singer’s book on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) while still well written, is less lucid than his book on Marx. This is mostly due to the difference between the philosophies of Hegel and his those of his later day disciple: Marx’s ideas were frequently wrong, often bizarre, and sometimes naïve, but they were, mostly at least, intelligible. Despite Singer’s great efforts, most of Hegel’s writing remains utterly mysterious, a blur of surreal concepts about the destinies of such ill defined entities as Geist, and concepts (such as ‘Freedom’) taken far from their regular usage.Freedom, for example, does not mean the ability to do as you please. Since what you please is conditioned on your genetic makeup and upbringing, it is not ‘you’ who chooses. Your choice is only free if you cleanse yourself of all these influences and follow only the dictates of pure reason. But this bizarre concept of Freedom is not all that Hegel meant by Freedom. Freedom is also an element of the human condition that is developed throughout history; It is the condition of a society organized along rational principle. Such utopian society is the (or one of the) goals of history (why would anyone think that history has goals is never satisfactory explained), and so Hegel’s “Philosophy of History” is a phantasmagorical historical account of various civilizations which purports to show how freedom evolved through the ages until it reaches its pinnacle in the Prussian state. Or, to be entirely fair to Hegel, in a somewhat more liberal version of the Prussian state.As far as I can tell, Hegel gave no arguments for believing in any of his wild theories. He could sometimes make vaguely plausible critiques of the wild theories of his predecessors, but never marshal any positive evidence for any of his own. His theories are not only wild, they are also Delphic; Singer repeatedly admits that he can’t make sense of Hegel’s work.And yet, despite his opacity and evidence-free fantasizing, or maybe because of them, one can almost find parts and passages of Hegel that are enlightening or interesting. I strongly suspect that these passages are interesting because blurry – like abstract art, their meaning is in the eye of the beholder. So unlike Marx’s philosophy, Hegel’s might mean something because it is meaningless.On the other hand, Hegel’s concept of the “dialectical method” – that ideas come in the form of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, is interesting and worthwhile. Obviously not all ideas develop in this form, and sometimes ideas are presented as a synthesis of previous ideas to make them seem moderate and considered, but the dynamic is apparent.Singer’s book about Hegel is less satisfying than his book on Marx also because Singer doesn’t engage as much with Hegel’s ideas; He does defend Hegel from the criticism leveled against him by Karl Popper (although he doesn’t whitewash him as a previous reviewer implied), he criticizes a few of Hegel’s wilder ideas and talks a little about his successors, particularly, of course, Marx. But Singer never tries to assess or contextualize what is still worthwhile of Hegel’s thought. He settles for clearing the fog around Hegel’s ideas, and paradoxically risks eliminating the only thing that gives them meaning.

⭐I’m taking a philosophy class at the university, and we’re covering major western philosophers, and I urgently needed a quick introduction to some of them.Peter Singer does a marvelous job introducing Hegel, one of those philosophers that most find it really difficult to understand. Singer really empathizes with the target audience of the book. He puts himself in the shoes of a reader, completely unfamiliar with Hegel’s thought and who wants a quick introduction to his major philosophical ideas. This book is a quick guided journey through the monumental museum of complex ideas of one of the most influential minds of western philosophy. It is truly a joy to visit every room of that museum at the hands of such a knowledgeable and wonderful teacher as Peter Singer.This is indeed the starting point for anyone looking to get a general understanding of Hegel in as short a time as possible.

⭐Some days (not often) I wake up and wonder if instead of being a Marxist, I should subscribe to Hegelianism. Trouble is, Hegel (1770-1831) is so hard to understand. Back in August of last year I ordered Frederick Beiser’s book,

⭐Hegel (The Routledge Philosophers)

⭐, but I over-reached. I now appreciate that Peter Singer is the place to start for the Hegel neophyte.After a biographical sketch (life and times) Singer starts the tour with the Philosophy of History. Here Hegel reviews world history from ‘oriental despotism’ through antiquity (Greece and Rome, not considered the same), continuing to Christianity and then to the modern post-enlightenment state. He sees history as marking a transition from initially complete unfreedom through to its final state as conscious, free and dutiful community. (Many people considered his ideal as not a million miles away from the Prussian state which sponsored him, although Singer makes a good stab at refuting this).Underpinning Hegel’s notion of the progressive nature of history is the evolution of consciousness. Singer now takes us through one of the more obscure but central of his works: The Phenomenology of Mind. Here Hegel’s Idealism (vs Materialism) is foregrounded as he examines historical consciousness developing towards completely self-awareness and the absolute. Hegel’s treatment here is notoriously opaque and tortuous, brushing with ideas of psychology and religion. Singer does his best to extract a coherent line of argument.The progress of history, expressive of the growth of mind/spirit, is a dialectical one, a transformatory logic which Hegel documented in the Science of Logic. Singer gives this work a more summary, concise treatment, drawing the links with Marx’s dialectics.The book ends with the aftermath. Hegel’s more youthful works were highly dialectical and abstract; his later thinking arguably more concrete (though remember, this is Hegel) and more engaged with celebrating the Prussian state. After Hegel’s death in 1831 his followers split into two camps. The Right Hegelians followed his mature thinking and vanished into obscurity; the Left Hegelians attempted to ‘rescue’ Hegel’ from inadequate radicalism: this movement gave birth to Marxism.Peter Singer’s book is excellent, almost the perfect scene-setter for further exploration. I now understand better Marx’s notes about turning Hegel on his head and removing the mysticism in his development of historical materialism.Singer successfully conveys Hegel’s overarching scheme .. but how convincing is it? Hegel’s preoccupation with consciousness, freedom and duty as the true foundations of a dynamic reality could only seem plausible in a culture steeped in religion and the immanent presence of the supernatural. When Marx reconceptualised history as the dialectical processes of men making history, but not under conditions of their own choosing, Hegel’s ungrounded abstractions lost their force. So I’ve ceased to feel any of Hegel’s gravitational pull on my thinking.

⭐Hegel is a notoriously difficult philosopher to understand however the effort to figure what he was saying has a huge payoff. Even if he was wrong about many things, the way he was incorrect is incredibly interesting and his influence on Existentialism and Marxism, make him vital to fully understand those areas of study.After listening to a few lectures online, I was struggling to bring to mind an overview of his entire work. When trying to explain Hegel many people reach for individual concepts, like the master/slave dialectic or his overview of history. This makes it hard to see how the entire system fits together.This is what makes Peter Singer’s short introduction so brilliant. Whilst impossible to cover everything in such a short work, Singer makes Hegel’s ideas accessable. This left me feeling for the first time that I had a mental framework to work with. Singer makes it feel like it was an easy book to write however he was dealing with a massively large and difficult oeuvre.Singer begins with Hegel’s Philosophy of history, as this is the most concrete starting points. He then draws out analogies with the ‘Phenomenonogy of Spirit’ and explains some of its key concepts. In the final sections he briefly outlines Hegel’s logic, views on reglion and influence on the the Right Hegelians and Young Hegelians. The only thing that would have been good to have a couple more pages about, is his his aesthetics.All things considered, I can’t imagine a better starting point, for understanding Hegel.

⭐This is an excellent book. Hegel’s thought is incredibly complex and difficult to present in a straightforward way. However, Peter Singer, the author of this work, manages to write a highly readable and engaging introduction to Hegel’s thought that is accessible, interesting, and very balanced. He covers all of Hegel’s key books as well as the connections between religion and philosophy that characterise Hegel’s work. If you want an easy-to-read overview of Hegel and his thought, this book is an ideal place to start. I would recommend it very highly.

⭐This is an EXCELLENT book. A very, very, rewarding read.The author has distilled out important concepts from Hegel’s often opaque writing, and written an introduction that is extremely clear and readable, but without dumbing down the concepts – a very difficult balance to strike.I didn’t know much about Hegel, which is why I bought the book, so I can tell you that this book is a great introduction to his philosophy, and is suitably academic but also approachable.I’m super-happy with this book. I know a few of the Very Short Introductions can be problematic, but this is one of the good ones.There are some truly life-changing concepts in this book, especially in chapter 4 “The Odyssey of Mind”, so fasten your safety belt! ;)I really can’t recommend this book enough.I’m just a random reader – no affiliation or anything, but credit where credit’s due. I am also not a philosophy major – never studied it officially.10 out of 10 for this one, Oxford.

⭐I have read a few of these books on philosophy from the very short range and this one us by far the most approachable. I don’t know if that is because of the author or because Hegel worked on more explainable concepts. The links with Marx, who apparently used Hegel’s ideas in particular for his own work, made the book more relevant to my own interests.

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