Abstract

Every thinker is related to the history of thought, but investigating this relationship is not always interesting or even profitable. In the case of Hegel, however, the philosopher’s relationship to the history of thought is one of the chief things that recommends his philosophy as a subject of study. But what makes Hegel interesting also makes him difficult, for Hegel was acutely conscious of his relation to the tradition. Perhaps Hegel had a broader and deeper awareness of this relationship than any thinker before him. But this is not the important thing. What matters is that Hegel seized upon his relationship to the tradition as a problem, translating it from the language of dim, circumstantial connections into the language of philosophy’s essential vocation. For Hegel, philosophy’s relationship to the tradition is not in the first place a fact about the system of thought. It is rather the logical destiny that rules its genesis, development and perfection. The determination to put the problem of this relationship on philosophy’s agenda and so make it scientifically profitable for raising thought to maturity is the heart and soul of Hegel’s preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. This text celebrates phenomenological science as the “ladder” for leading consciousness upward into its true element, science, just at the moment when consciousness has been prepared by its historical experience to take this step.