Work · German Idealism & Its Heirs
What Is Living and What Is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel
Keeps Hegel’s dialectic of opposites but criticises his confusion of opposites with distinct forms of spirit and his philosophy of nature and of history.
Introduction
The study appeared in 1907; Douglas Ainslie’s English translation followed in 1915. Croce sets out to separate what remains valid in Hegel from what does not. Alive, for him, is the dialectic of opposites: the insight that reality is the synthesis of opposites such as being and nothing, or good and evil, and that the concept is at once concrete and universal. Dead is Hegel’s confusion of this dialectic with the relation between distinct concepts – art and philosophy, the useful and the good – which are not opposites to be overcome but degrees of spirit. From this confusion, Croce argues, follow the arbitrary constructions of Hegel’s philosophy of nature and philosophy of history and the attempt to deduce empirical facts. The essay became a key text of the Italian revision of Hegel; Gentile answered it with his own reform of the dialectic (1913).
Connections
Criticizes
- Science of Logic1812 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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