Hegel's Hermeneutics

An advance on recent revisionist thinking about Hegelian philosophy, this book interprets Hegel's achievement as part of a revolutionary modernization of ancient philosophical thought initiated by Kant. In particular, Paul Redding argues that Hegel's use of hermeneutics, an emerging way of thinking objectively about intentional human subjects, overcame the major obstacle encountered by Kant in his attempt to modernize philosophy. The result was the first genuinely modern, hermeneutic, and "nonmetaphysical" philosophy. Redding describes Hegel's accomplishment in terms of a development of Kant's revolution in philosophy, a "Copernican" revolution analogous to that which initiated modern science. He shows how the heterodox pantheistic views and hermeneutic social thought that merged at the end of the eighteenth century provided a fruitful environment for the transformation that Kantian idealism underwent within the work of Schelling and the early Hegel. He argues that Hegel overcame Schelling's pantheistic metaphysics with the Phenomenology of Spirit and developed a postmetaphysical hermeneutic mode of philosophy. Redding goes on to show how the social theory of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and the conceptual structures of his allegedly most metaphysical work, the Science of Logic, are systematically linked to the hermeneutic insights of the Phenomenology. Against this background, Hegel's works are freed from traditional misunderstandings. Redding demonstrates that Hegel's analyses of modernity and the modern state surpass the one-sided views of Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, providing a coherent framework for modern social and political thought.