296 } Notes to Chapter 2
which can be seen to be more or less true to life; its purpose is to provide insight. The only
way to appreciate it or understand what it is is to watch it at work” (introduction, xiii). Forbes
also observed: “Although Hegel insisted that ‘Science’ was wholly public and a discipline
of thinking... , nevertheless his philosophy is best approached in the spirit of Plato’s, as
something that is in danger of being destroyed or distorted if it is written down. Hegel in fact
was extremely reluctant to publish; he only published two books, because the Encyclopaedia
and the Philosophy of Right are compendia for courses of lectures” (ibid., xiv). Similarly,
Hodgson makes the point that oral exposition was perfectly suited to Hegel’s always evolv-
ing lectures on the philosophy of religion, which he reworked dramatically each time he
gave them (in 1821 , 1824 , 1827 , and 1831 ): “[Hegel] is not offering empirical descriptions but
imaginative constructions. For this purpose the medium of oral lectures was ideally suited,
and it is notable that Hegel was reluctant to constrain the fluidity of speech through publica-
tion” (“Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion,” 232 ).
86. Ernst Behler, “Note on the Texts,” xxv.
87. Hegel argues in the introduction to The Science of Logic ( 1831 ): “To establish or ex-
plain the Notion of science ratiocinatively can at most achieve this, that a general idea of the
Notion is presented to our thinking and a historical knowledge of it is produced; but a defi-
nition of science—or more precisely of logic—has its proof solely in the already mentioned
necessity of its emergence in consciousness” (Hegel’s Science of Logic, 48 – 49 ).
88. Frederick Beiser, introduction, xvii.
89. Ibid., xiii.
90. Ibid., xv.
91. Ibid., xvii. Hegel assumed that a historicist interpretation of reason at its various his-
torical stages would finally be (become) systematic: “Both ideals [systematic unity and inter-
nal understanding] are satisfied by simply describing the inner logic or self-organization of
its subject matter; what Hegel calls its ‘concept’ or ‘notion’ (der Begriff)” (ibid., xvi).
92. The first lectures on the philosophy of world history paradigmatically exemplify
Hegel’s tendency to perform the truth of his insight: “Aber die philosophische Weltge-
schichte ist mehr ein Aufweisen als ein Beweisen des Gesagten. Der eigentliche Beweis liegt
in der Erkenntnis der Vernunft selbst.... Die Weltgeschichte selbst ist nur eine Weise der
Erscheinung dieser einen Vernunft, eine der besonderen Gestalten, in denen die Vernunft
sich offenbart” (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, Berlin 1822 / 1823 , edited
by Ilting, Brehmer, and Seelmann, 21 ). The proof of reason (Vernunft) in history comes in
the form of reason’s discovery of itself in history—which happens in Hegel.
93. I quote the text of Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie in TWA,
the widely used Suhrkamp edition edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel,
which is based on the text assembled by Karl Ludwig Michelet for the first, Freundeskreis
edition of Hegel’s works (the history of philosophy lectures appeared in 1833 – 36 as vol-
umes 13 – 15 ). Because he worked from sources that have since been lost—including Hegel’s
manuscript of his Jena lectures on the history of philosophy in winter 1805 – 6 , which Hegel
continued to draw on in his Berlin lectures—Michelet’s text is irreplaceable. However, his
text is a composite of various sources by Hegel, as well as student transcripts and notes
from various years. As yet, no critical edition exists that reconstructs the particular versions
of the lectures on the history of philosophy as Hegel presented them. The only specific
course of these lectures to have been published is Pierre Garniron’s and Walter Jaeschke’s