The article provides a tentative reading of Hegel’s police as a concept that constitutes a crucial test for the rationality of Hegel’s state and that actually played a very important role in the formation of his model of rationality. It starts by considering some significant changes in Hegel’s approach to the subject in the Jena period, especially in reference to Fichte and Spinoza; then, it presents Hegel’s conception of the police as the interface of the universal in his mature political (...) philosophy, together with his treatment of the disturbing problem of poverty and the rabble; and to conclude, it adds some general remarks on Hegel’s police, then and now. (shrink)

Rabble, it is commonly argued, indicates one of the very few places in Hegel's system where he produced an inevitable contradiction that he was, however, unable to “sublate.” In this paper, I purport to prove this narrative wrong. Relying on a close reading of Hegel's reasoning in his book and his lectures on the philosophy of right, I first attempt to determine what the problem of rabble consists in: I demonstrate that Hegel was perfectly aware of the mechanism of necessary (...) impoverishment in (unrestricted) civil society, and that in his view the poor were actually justified in developing a rabble mentality. I then show, on the one hand, that civil society was from the very beginning conceived as self-sublating, and on the other, that Hegel was, at least in principle, able to find a solution for the rabble: the state. (shrink)

Nach einleitender Darstellung der Grundstruktur des Nihilismus-Vorwurfs, den Jacobi an die Philosophie als Unternehmen des reflexiven Erkennens machte, wird in dem Aufsatze die große Bedeutung dieser Diskussion für die Bildung der Hegelschen Philosophie, vor allem in Beziehung auf Schelling dargelegt. Sich an Schelling anlehnend versuchte Hegel in den ersten Jenaer Jahren das Nichts, in dem die Reflexionsphilosophie enden sollte, als notwendige Folge einer willkürlichen Absolutisierung der endlichen Reflexion zu lesen und es durch ihre immanente Selbstvernichtung zu überwinden. Doch fand er (...) dieses Modell schon bald unzureichend, weil das absolute Nichts darin objektiv unbestimmt und subjektiv bloß versichernd bleibt. So stellte er die Aufgabe der Philosophie als Gleichnis des spekulativen Karfreitags, wo der Begriff durch das absolute Leiden beide Forderungen entsprechend erfüllen soll. Anschließend werden einige Folgen angeführt, die die Nihilismus-Problematik in Hegels späteren Werken hinterließ, z. B. in dem Begriffe der absoluten Reflexion, und die auch für heutige philosophische Diskussionen von Belang sein können. (shrink)

The paper provides a modest reading of Hegel?s treatment of self-consciousness in his Phenomenology of Spirit and tries to present it as an integral part of the overall project of the experience of consciousness leading from understanding to reason. Its immediate objective is, it is argued, to think the independence and dependence, that is the pure and empirical I within the same unity of self-consciousness. This implies a double movement of finding a proper existence for the pure I and at (...) the same time a breaking down of the empirical I?s attachment to particularity. It is argued that the Hegelian struggle for recognition intends to show how the access to reason demands the subject?s renunciation of its attachment to particularity, that is to sacrifice not only its bare life but every thing indeed, including its particular identity, and yet, to go on living. nema. (shrink)