In brief: The four objections hold – but they do not describe defects; they describe the points at which Hegel’s procedure breaks with the analytic one. Whether the break is justified can be tested. Denying it would be wrong.
1. „The terms are vague and used differently in different places.“
The analytic expectation: a concept is defined in advance, and the definition remains stable for the rest of the argument.
Hegel’s procedure: at the beginning there is no definition. The result of the Groundlines is the determination of what freedom means. Why this is not negligence § 2 note says with an argument every lawyer knows: definitions abstract from the representations at hand and become false as soon as those representations are false – „no definition of man would be possible under Roman law, for the slave could not be subsumed under it“.
The objection is nonetheless right in its observation: „right“ means something different in the First Part from what it means in the Third, where the state appears as the actualisation of right. Only this is not wavering but the subject matter itself. § 30 says so expressly: each stage in the development of the Idea of freedom has „its own peculiar right“, and the more abstract is the poorer.
Hegel’s own image for this stands in the Preface of the Phenomenology:
The bud disappears in the bursting forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; likewise the fruit declares the blossom to be a false existence of the plant … But their fluid nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, in which they not only do not conflict but in which each is as necessary as the other.
Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface
2. „No structure of argument can be made out.“
The analytic expectation: an argument is a linear chain – premise, premise, conclusion.
Hegel’s procedure: the premise is the subject matter itself; the argument is the demonstration that this subject matter contradicts itself; the conclusion is the stage that resolves the contradiction. At the transition from the First to the Second Part it can be checked step by step:
- Suppose that abstract right – property and contract – is sufficient unto itself (§ 34 ff.).
- Then there follows from it the semblance of right against right, that is, wrong (§ 82 ff.).
- Punishment restores right, but only externally – as the deed of a particular will that is not itself bound (§ 102–§ 103).
- The assumption of step 1 is thereby refuted: right has to be willed. That is morality (§ 104 f.).
That is a reductio, only not to a formal inconsistency but to the inadequacy of a determination to what it is supposed to achieve. Whoever wants to deny that it holds must show that one step does not follow – and that is a meaningful, checkable task.
3. „The sentences are confused, obscure and deliberately difficult.“
The analytic expectation: language is a neutral instrument for a thought that exists before it.
Hegel’s procedure: the speculative sentence is the thought in its movement. The sentence of the understanding, „right is property“, lets the subject rest and hangs a property on it. The speculative sentence forces the subject to pass over into the predicate. That is why reading falters; Hegel described this „counter-thrust“ himself and declared it necessary – see Why are Hegel’s texts so hard to read?
The charge of deliberate obscurity cannot be dismissed with this, only narrowed: much is difficult of necessity, some of it out of negligence, some out of regard for the censor. These three grounds have to be told apart case by case, and that is work.
4. „Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.“
Wittgenstein’s closing sentence of the Tractatus is – read from Hegel – the manifesto of the understanding in all its greatness and all its limitation. The understanding must fall silent where it reaches its limit, because about what moves – spirit, freedom, ethical life – it cannot speak in fixed determinations without producing nonsense. Hegel’s claim is that science only begins there.
That is a claim, not a proof, and the dispute about it is two hundred years old. It is no longer the same dispute as in 1950, though: since the 2000s the analytic tradition has again taken Hegel seriously, and from the inside.
What follows for reading
Not that analytic ability should be given up, but that it should be applied to a different object: not to fixed propositions but to determinations that develop. The most productive attitude is that of the examiner – asking at each stage whether the transition really follows. That is at the same time the only form in which the Groundlines can be refuted at all.
Sources. Groundlines § 2 note (against definition as a beginning), § 30 and note (stages of right), § 34 ff., § 82 ff., § 102–§ 104. – Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface (bud and blossom; the speculative sentence). – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, proposition 7. – On the recent analytic reception of Hegel above all Robert B. Brandom and John McDowell (the so-called Pittsburgh School); on the older rejection Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Hegel (1946). – In the glossary: The Understanding, Dialectic, The Speculative, Contradiction.