{"id":903136,"date":"2026-09-17T15:50:50","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:50:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/?page_id=903136"},"modified":"2026-09-17T15:50:51","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:50:51","slug":"does-this-sentence-come-from-hegel-at-all","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/does-this-sentence-come-from-hegel-at-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Does this sentence come from Hegel at all?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

More often than one thinks the answer is: no \u2013 at any rate not in the form in which it is quoted. That is not the fault of careless quoters but of the state of the transmission. Hegel\u2019s Groundlines<\/em> consist of several layers of text with different authors and different degrees of authority, and in printed editions they often stand beneath one another without being marked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The layers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

What Hegel himself published<\/strong> is the main text of the paragraphs and the notes printed with them in the first edition. For that alone he took responsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hegel\u2019s own lecture notes<\/strong> \u2013 marginalia in his own copy and sheets prepared for lecturing. By him, but not written for the public, and often in the form of catchwords.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Transcripts by his students<\/strong> \u2013 Wannenmann 1817\/18, Homeyer 1818\/19, Hotho 1822\/23, Griesheim 1824\/25 and others. What stands there is something Hegel may have said; the wording is the writer\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Additions<\/strong> \u2013 after Hegel\u2019s death Eduard Gans compiled continuous paragraphs out of such transcripts for the edition of 1833 and placed them after the paragraphs. In his preface Gans himself conceded that the choice of words is at times his own. These Additions are the most readable and therefore the most quoted part of the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One example in which everything shows<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The most notorious Hegel sentence of all runs, in its circulating form: \u201eThe state is the march of God through the world.\u201c<\/em> It counts as proof that Hegel deified the state. Two things about this one sentence are wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, it does not stand in Hegel\u2019s text. It stands in the Addition to \u00a7 258<\/a><\/strong>, that is, in Gans\u2019s compilation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, even the Addition does not say it. What stands there is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2026 for whether the human being knows it or not, this essence realises itself as a self-subsistent power in which particular individuals are only moments: it is the march of God in the world that the state is<\/em>; its ground is the power of reason actualising itself as will.<\/p>\nAddition to \u00a7 258 (compiled by Eduard Gans from lecture transcripts)<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

What is said, then, is: that there are states at all is not the work of human beings alone. That is a statement about the institution as such \u2013 not the claim that any particular state is divine. The circulating form turns a sentence about there being a state into a sentence about the state. The difference is the whole dispute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why this is more than pedantry<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The question decides the most influential charge against Hegel. In 1959 Walter Kaufmann examined the technique of citation with which Karl Popper declared Hegel a forerunner of totalitarianism, and showed that Popper works with montages in which sentences from different contexts are assembled by ellipses into an apparently continuous passage. In one case all eight fragments of a single such \u201equotation\u201c come from students\u2019 lecture transcripts<\/em> \u2013 not one word of it from the book Hegel wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What this edition therefore does differently<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It sets the layers side by side, separated and named. Under each paragraph there stands first Hegel\u2019s printed text, then his note, then \u2013 each of them marked \u2013 his own jottings, the transcripts of the individual lecture courses, and Gans\u2019s Addition. One sees at a glance who is speaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From this follows a plain rule for reading: before you use a sentence of Hegel\u2019s, look at which layer it stands in.<\/strong> That is not chicanery. It is the difference between a quotation and a rumour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sources.<\/strong> Walter Kaufmann, \u201eThe Hegel Myth and Its Method\u201c, 1959 \u00b7 Jon Stewart (ed.), The Hegel Myths and Legends<\/em>, 1996 \u00b7 Karl-Heinz Ilting (ed.), Hegel. Vorlesungen \u00fcber Rechtsphilosophie 1818\u20131831<\/em>, 4 vols., 1973\/74 \u00b7 authoritative today: Gesammelte Werke<\/em>, vols. 26,1\u201326,3, Meiner 2014\/15. \u2013 See also: Notes on the layers of the text<\/a> \u00b7 \u00a7 258<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n