In brief: One can ignore him – only not on the ground that he did not know the standpoint. Hegel puts it at the beginning: his logic starts with nothing, his Phenomenology calls itself the path of despair, and the Groundlines describe in § 5 precisely the freedom that lets nothing count. The dispute begins only afterwards.
Hegel begins where nihilism ends
Other philosophers evade nothingness and look for a new firm ground – utility, faith, the ought. Hegel does not.
The Science of Logic begins with pure being – and pure, indeterminate being is not to be distinguished from pure nothing. The whole system sets out from this identity. And the Phenomenology of Spirit describes itself as the history in which consciousness loses every certainty it held to be true:
It can therefore be regarded as the path of doubt, or more properly as the path of despair; for what happens on it is not what is usually understood by doubting, a shaking of this or that supposed truth …
Phenomenology of Spirit, Introduction
The real point at issue: end or motor?
Here the paths part. For nihilism, nothingness is the last thing: everything is meaningless, full stop. For Hegel it is negativity – not dead emptiness but that which sets anything in motion at all:
[Identity] is only the determination of the simple immediate, of dead being; but contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality; only in so far as something has a contradiction within itself does it move, have drive and activity.
Science of Logic II, Contradiction
In the Logic nothingness is not the last word; the movement between being and nothing is becoming. In Hegel’s language: nihilism is the first half – the negation. What it overlooks is that this negation negates itself and becomes productive in doing so (determinate negation).
Whether that is an argument or a confidence is the open question. Hegel does not claim that nothingness is more bearable than it looks. He claims that it is not stable.
Why the philosophy of right in particular
Because there the standpoint is not merely described but worked through – and unkindly at that. § 5 determines the freedom that repels every content as a limit as „the boundless infinity of absolute abstraction“, and the note says where it leads:
It is the freedom of emptiness, which is elevated to actual shape and passion … in the political as well as the religious sphere the fanaticism of the destruction of every existing social order and the removal of individuals suspected of favoring an order … Only by destroying something does this negative will have the sense of its own existence.
Groundlines, § 5 note
That is the book’s sharpest objection to its own starting point: the freedom that lets nothing count has no existence except in destroying. Whoever takes nihilism for a private attitude has to answer this passage.
What follows is the proposal for how to go on. Abstract right (§ 34 ff.) is the first attempt to fix freedom onto something – in property. Morality (§ 105 ff.) tries it inwardly, in conscience – and fails on the arbitrariness of what conscience holds to be good. Only ethical life (§ 142 ff.) carries: institutions that are nothing other than freedom become objective.
The state is in this no given meaning that one is supposed to believe in. § 4 expressly calls the system of right „the world of spirit produced from within itself as a second nature“ – made, not found. That is the point at which Hegel’s proposal differs from a fallback on old authority.
What remains to be examined
Reading Hegel does not mean giving up nihilism but thinking it through to the end. The question on which everything turns is easy to put and hard to answer: whether the reconciliation that stands at the end follows from the course of the matter – or whether it was presupposed and the course arranged towards it. Whoever reads the book with this question reads it rightly.
Sources. Groundlines § 4–§ 7 (the three moments of the will; § 5 note on negative freedom and terror), § 34 ff., § 105 ff., § 142 ff. – Science of Logic I, first chapter (being, nothing, becoming); Logic II, second book, Contradiction. – Phenomenology of Spirit, Introduction (the path of despair). – In the glossary: Negativity, Determinate Negation, Being, Reconciliation.