Stephen Houlgate: A Hegelian Life

In this wide-ranging dialogue Professor Stephen Houlgate and Johannes Niederhauser discuss what it means to lead a Hegelian life — a practice which Houlgate has been enacting for the past forty years of his life. Houlgate was initially drawn more towards Nietzsche but found that with Nietzsche’s philosophy there are severe shortcomings when it comes to precise and clear vision of what institutions and the state are supposed to look like.

With Hegel we find such a clear vision spelled out. Even and especially Hegel’s magnum opus the Science of Logic forms part of this vision insofar as here the modern demand of freedom is exercised on the highest level in thought and being. The inherent dialectic in “pure Being” as it unfolds and self-complexifies and depurifies, since it cannot hold on to itself, itself reveals precisely the dialectic of reason.

We consider throughout this dialogue what it means to lead a Hegelian ethical life, what proper institutions based on mutual recognition should look like, and how we have not yet truly arrived at Hegel’s philosophy and presuppositionless thought.

It is the achievement of Stephen Houlgate of having not only translated the letter but also and especially the spirit of Hegel’s thought into English and the English spirit. Houlgate has furthermore also as one of the first and few about taken seriously and shown why we must take seriously Hegel’s claim to presuppositionless thought after Kant.

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