Hegel And The Romantic Legacy, & The Question Of Polemics

Frederick Beiser, Hegel, (Routledge, 2005), ch. II., Early Ideals, The Romantic Legacy, pp. 35-36:

Although the importance of the romantic legacy seems obvious, it has lately become unpopular even to associate Hegel with romanticism. Walter Kaufmann, Shlomo Avineri and Georg Lukács, to name a few, have argued strenuously against any conflation of Hegel with the romantics, even in his early years. There is an important element of truth to this. Hegel came into his own only in his later Jena years (1804–7) when he reacted against some of the central ideas of the romantic circle. The preface to the Phenomenology is his Abschiedsbrief, his settling of accounts with the romantics. We can see some of these critical tendencies even in the early fragments, so it would be a mistake to see Hegel as a romantic pure and simple even in his Frankfurt years. 

Nevertheless, it is also a mistake to treat Hegel as a figure apart, as if we can understand him without the romantics, or as if he were fundamentally opposed to them. This would be anachronistic for the early Hegel; but it would also be inaccurate about the later Hegel, who never entirely freed himself from romantic influence. His distinguishing features are still within a common genus. What seems to be a difference in quality is very often only one of quantity or emphasis. It is indeed a very common mistake of Hegel scholarship to regard ideas as distinctly Hegelian that are in fact common to the whole romantic generation. Hegel’s absolute idealism, his organic conception of nature, his critique of liberalism, his communitarian ideals, his vitalized Spinozism, his concept of dialectic, his attempt to synthesize communitarianism and liberalism–all these ideas are sometimes seen as uniquely Hegelian; but they were part of the common romantic legacy. 

Hegel scholars have often been led astray by Hegel’s own polemics. They accept these polemics as infallible, as if what Hegel says about his differences with the romantics had to be true simply because Hegel knew himself best. But sometimes the polemics distance Hegel from the romantics only at the cost of obscuring or disguising his own affinity with them. When, for example, in the preface to the Phenomenology Hegel states that his own view is that the absolute is not only substance but also subject, Hegel scholars take this as a distinguishing feature of Hegel’s philosophy over Schelling’s and the romantics. But what Hegel claimed as his own project–the attempt to combine substance and subject, Spinoza and Fichte–was a common enterprise of the romantic generation.

The reason many scholars have separated Hegel from the romantic generation is that they have a very anachronistic conception of Frühromantik that virtually equates it with the later more reactionary tendencies of Spätromantik. Their conception of Hegel’s intellectual context rests upon a neglect of the early philosophical works of the romantics, the unpublished fragments of Schleiermacher, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel and Hölderlin, most of which have been accessible in critical editions only in the last fifty years. A careful study of these fragments is a fundamental desideratum of Hegel studies; it alone will allow us to locate him historically and to determine his individuality.