Stephen Houlgate’s research while affiliated with University of Warwick and other places

Stephen Houlgate is one of the leading Hegel scholars of the English-speaking world. In this interview he explains how he became a “Hegelian” while studying in Cambridge, and he offers a fundamental profile of his account of Hegel. The interview addresses the following questions: Why does Houlgate consider Hegel’s philosophy to be the “consummate critical philosophy”? What are the main barriers to a proper access to Hegel’s thought? Why is logic as dialectical logic still indispensable for philosophical thought? And finally, what can both analytical and “continental” philosophers learn from Hegel?

In this essay I examine Hegel’s conception of perceptual experience and respond to criticisms by John McDowell of an earlier essay of mine on the same topic. I argue that, for Hegel, sensation takes in the look or shape of things, but that consciousness and intuition actively “posit” what we see and feel as a world of objects. In McDowell’s view, this commits my Hegel to “subjective idealism.” I argue, by contrast, that Hegel avoids such idealism, because in positing what we see to be an object, consciousness thinks it to be the object it is: the activity of consciousness presents us with the object itself. I also argue, pace McDowell, that, for my Hegel, human beings do not first admit sensory content to an antechamber of the mind and then admit it to consciousness at the cost of being conceptualised, but that sensory content is taken into consciousness, and endowed with objectivity, as it is being received. To conclude, I note that, whereas, for Hegel, sensory content is received into consciousness by being actively taken up into it, for McDowell, experience involves no such activity but conceptual capacities are drawn into operation passively in the deliverances of sensibility.

G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) was the last and greatest of the German Idealists and exercised an unparalleled influence on nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century thought. His legacy includes the idea that human existence is essentially historical, that history is the development of the consciousness of freedom, and that true freedom involves living in an ethical community whose members accord one another reciprocal recognition and respect. Through his emphasis on human historicity and freedom, as well as his analysis of concepts such as “alienation” and “dialectic,” Hegel's thought helped spawn such divergent philosophical movements as Marxism, existentialism, pragmatism, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. He also had a profound impact on modern social theory and modern (especially, Protestant) theology; and he has even been called the “father” of art history.

According to Hegel, true freedom consists not just in arbitrariness, but in the free willing of right. Right in turn is fully realised in the laws and institutions of ethical life. The ethical subject, for Hegel, is a practical subject that acts in accordance with ethical laws; yet it is also a theoretical, cognitive subject that recognizes the laws and institutions of ethical life as embodiments of right. Such recognition can be self-conscious and reflective; but it can, and indeed must, also be a felt recognition and as such it takes the form of trust. In Hegel’s view, therefore, the proper stance to adopt towards ethical institutions is that of trust; moreover, there is a distinctive freedom to be found in trust itself. Trust is appropriate, however, only when the institutions of ethical life are themselves worthy of it. Hegel is well aware that not all states and their institutions merit trust, but in his view a life without trust in institutions is a life without true freedom.

Hegel argues that Kant’s antinomies of pure reason are important because they implicitly show the categories of thought to be contradictory. In so doing Hegel disregards much of what interests Kant about the antinomies and interprets the latter “against Kant’s intention”. He also gets Kant wrong when he claims that Kant’s “trivial” resolution of the antinomies simply shifts contradiction from things in themselves to appearances. Nonetheless, I contend that Hegel’s interpretation is defensible, insofar as the antinomies do, indeed, show (what Hegel regards as) the categories of the “infinite” and the “finite” to be both opposed to and inseparable from one another. I also argue that Hegel is right to maintain that Kant’s proofs of the theses and antitheses in the antinomies assume what they are meant to prove and that Kant’s resolution of the antinomies is unsatisfactory.