Abstract

THE IMPORTANCE OF GREEK THOUGHT for the Hegelian science of wisdom has long been acknowledged. Nevertheless, if one considers the extraordinary increase in Hegel scholarship during the past two decades, it is somewhat surprising how few technical studies have been devoted to the connection between Hegel and the Greeks. The relative lack of attention to the details of this connection is in my opinion the most important reason for a certain imbalance in favor of Hegel’s religious thought which one may notice in the recent literature. This is especially true in the case of the crucial theme of self-consciousness. It is not so difficult to establish the classical antecedents of Hegel’s analyses in the domains of logic, ontology and epistemology. The case of self-consciousness is at first glance quite different. One might be tempted to say that the general problem of subjectivity is modern rather than ancient, Christian rather than pagan. Whereas Hegel’s teaching depends upon the assimilation of Aristotelian noetics, it could seem that Hegel reads Aristotle from the outset in the perspective of Christian Neo-Platonism. Does not Hegel violate the pagan teaching by importing the dimension of self-consciousness into the νόησις τῆς νοήσεως?