Projects / Programmes
Hegel's Political Metaphysics
| Code |
Science |
Field |
Subfield |
| 6.10.00 |
Humanities |
Philosophy |
|
| Code |
Science |
Field |
| 6.03 |
Humanities |
Philosophy, Ethics and Religion |
Hegel, Classical German Philosophy, Metaphysics, Political Philosophy, Concept, Mechanism, Organism, Agency, Practice, Reason, State
Data for the last 5 years (citations for the last 10 years) on
April 22, 2024;
A3 for period
2018-2022
Data for ARIS tenders (
04.04.2019 – Programme tender,
archive
)
| Database |
Linked records |
Citations |
Pure citations |
Average pure citations |
| WoS |
20 |
5 |
5 |
0.25 |
| Scopus |
28 |
16 |
15 |
0.54 |
Researchers (6)
Organisations (1)
Abstract
The proposed project Hegel's political metaphysics constitutes an ambitious and novel endeavor, striving to contend with a major philosophical issue, which is even more significant because of its political implications. While Hegel himself defined German Classical Philosophy as the theoretical apprehension and thus the completion of the upheaval that occurred in political practice with the French Revolution, our contention is, quite the opposite, that we may be able to understand the world, but are still incapable to think political practice. The premise of the project proposal is that a decisive characterization of our predicament is also present in Hegel’s core conceptual operation embedded in his notion of the Concept. From the very onset, Hegelianism has been caught in a constant flux of affirmative and dissenting opinions and reactions, while Hegel's political philosophy has been almost universally evaluated as reactionary and misguided. Some commentators even likened his philosophy as the scientific dwelling of the spirit of Prussian restoration. Our contention is, however, that the original, productive and even revolutionary character of his speculative thought is to be found precisely in the dialectical relationship between the Concept and political form. Proceeding from the diagnosis that Hegel produced a conceptual turn the scope of which has yet to be fully apprehended, the project’s main objective is to define the logical structure of Hegel’s Concept so that philosophy may finally return to its basic task – to develop the conceptual tools for thinking its own time. In this view, the project redresses the depolitization of the postmodern shift. Hegel’s philosophical program can be regarded as an answer to the crisis of the traditional regime of thought, which in many respects reflected the political situation of that time. With Kant’s philosophy and the “Spinozismusstreit,” the crisis in thought became virulent, and produced a radical answer in the form of Romanticists, which advocated the shunning of rational thought altogether. It is against this background that Hegel, a consistent partisan of reason, tried to develop concepts with a different inner structure in order to think what understanding found to be unthinkable. In his attempt to provide a new metaphysics framework, Hegel profoundly reworked our usual conception of the logical form of the Concept: in particular, he formed the Concept according to the political model of agency and life. Against this backdrop, the research project intends, first, to take Hegel’s reanimation of the Concept seriously and to provide a detailed analysis of its novelty. By a careful reading of Hegel and his contemporaries, the project plans to outline the organological form of the Concept, its relation to sphere of the political, and the process of the formation of reason. Following from this, secondly, the project intends to delineate the novel metaphysical character of the Concept, which is embedded in the political form. Third, the reworking of Hegel’s Concept will enable us to rearticulate and conceptualize the traditional appraisal of Hegel, but also vitalize the field of political philosophy. The project will thereupon strive to intervene in contemporary philosophical debate, especially regarding the attempts to formulate a modern politics of knowledge in contemporary society. And most importantly, using Hegel’ speculative logic, the project will try to show how the moment of subjective decision is immanently ingrained in the form of the Concept. An important added value of the project will be the institution of research infrastructure for the study of Classical German Philosophy in Ljubljana, which will in turn promote the establishment of closer collaboration with leading European centers in the field of political philosophy and German Idealism.
