{"id":903238,"date":"2026-09-17T16:21:02","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T14:21:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/?page_id=903238"},"modified":"2026-09-17T16:21:03","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T14:21:03","slug":"has-hermeneutics-made-hegel-superfluous","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/grundlinien.de\/en\/has-hermeneutics-made-hegel-superfluous\/","title":{"rendered":"Has hermeneutics made Hegel superfluous?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In brief:<\/strong> On the contrary \u2013 the philosophical hermeneutics of the twentieth century is not to be had without Hegel. Gadamer devoted a book of his own to him and took his central concepts from him. What hermeneutics denies is not Hegel\u2019s procedure but his ending: absolute knowing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What hermeneutics has from Hegel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Three pieces, and they are not small ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The concept of experience.<\/strong> Gadamer\u2019s determination of experience as that on which an expectation founders, and through which the one experiencing becomes another, is expressly taken from the Phenomenology<\/a>. Hegel calls the course of consciousness there \u201ethe path of doubt, or more properly \u2026 the path of despair\u201c \u2013 experience is in both a loss, not a gain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Effective history.<\/strong> That we never read a text without presuppositions but out of a situation which the text\u2019s own effect helped to produce is the hermeneutical version of what Hegel says in the Preface to the Groundlines<\/em>: philosophy is its time grasped in thoughts, and nobody leaps over his time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The doctrine of prejudice.<\/strong> The rehabilitation of prejudice as a condition of understanding is directed against the Enlightenment, not against Hegel. Hegel\u2019s own critique of immediate knowledge and of \u201eone\u2019s own breast\u201c as the source of right (\u00a7 2<\/a> note) points in the same direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where hermeneutics contradicts<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

At one point, and it is decisive: for Hegel spirit<\/a> arrives at itself in the end \u2013 absolute knowing<\/a> is the standpoint from which the whole path is recognised as necessary. For hermeneutics there is no such standpoint. Understanding remains finite, historical, always under way; a point at which interpretation would come to a close is in principle unreachable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is no dispute over details. If there is no close, Hegel\u2019s system loses its keystone \u2013 and with it the claim that the series of stages is necessary and not merely plausible in retrospect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What this means for the philosophy of right<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Astonishingly little. \u00a7 1<\/a>\u2013\u00a7 340<\/a> do not presuppose the close; they claim that each stage hangs on a problem of the preceding one. That can be tested without absolute knowing playing any part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end, by contrast, it becomes relevant. \u00a7 341<\/a>\u2013\u00a7 360<\/a> claim a direction of world history<\/a> and a standpoint from which this direction is recognisable. It is exactly there that the hermeneutical objection takes hold \u2013 and it strikes the same thing as the objection to \u00a7 347<\/a>, which declares the spirits of other nations to be without right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the practical yield<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For reading this edition hermeneutics is a tool and not a competitor. That a paragraph of 1820 is written against opponents one has to know; that the transcripts of the hearers are something other than the printed text; that the history of the work\u2019s effect \u2013 Haym, Marx, Popper \u2013 reads along when one reads today: these are hermeneutical insights, and this edition is built on them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hegel has not, then, become superfluous. He has become an author one reads with the means he himself helped to produce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sources.<\/strong> Phenomenology of Spirit, Introduction (the experience of consciousness) and chapter VIII. \u2013 Groundlines, Preface; \u00a7 2<\/a> note, \u00a7 3<\/a> note, \u00a7 341<\/a>\u2013\u00a7 360<\/a>. \u2013 Literature.<\/strong> Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode<\/em>, T\u00fcbingen 1960 (there the concept of experience and effective history), and Hegels Dialektik. F\u00fcnf hermeneutische Studien<\/em>, T\u00fcbingen 1971; Michael Theunissen, Sein und Schein<\/em>, Frankfurt a. M. 1978. \u2013 In the glossary: Absolute Knowing<\/a>, The Owl of Minerva<\/a>, World History<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n