Reading :: Hegel: A Very Short Introduction

Hegel: A Very Short Introduction

By Peter Singer

I don't enjoy reading philosophy, yet I've been told that to really understand activity theory, I have to understand Hegel—a notoriously unclear writer. So I've been reading summaries and commentaries on Hegel before tackling his original work. And what better place to start than a book that in its very title promises to be Very Short?

Thanks to COVID-19, I chose to buy the Kindle version. The book is indeed Very Short, with just six chapters covering Hegel's life and major aspects of his thought. My review will be Even Shorter, focusing on those aspects that resonate with activity theory.

One of those aspects was, obviously, Hegel's attention to change and development through history, something that he accepted from Schiller and that went on to influence Marx and Engels (p.13). 

A bit later, Singer describes the master-slave dynamic in Hegel, in which, through his [sic] labors, the slave "makes his own ideas into something permanent, an external object" (p.80). In doing so, the slave becomes aware of his own consciousness. This insight, Singer says, inspired Marx 40 years later to develop the concept of alienated labour, in which the worker objectifies or externalizes himself by putting the best of himself into his labour (pp.80-81). When the object is someone else's property, the objectified essence of the worker is lost to him and actually oppresses him. This concept of alienated labour becomes the basis for Marx's concept of surplus value (p.81).

Singer also describes Hegel's understanding of dialectics and the dialectical method, which Hegel uses "to uncover the form of pure thought" (p.99). Singer draws from Hegel's Philosophy of History to provide an example of the dialectical method, in which Greece's customary society (thesis) was revealed as inadequate via Socrates' questioning and independent thought (antithesis), leading to the "acceptance of the supreme right of individual conscience" (synthesis) (p.100). The synthesis then becomes the thesis for the next movement of history. I am not sure how adequate this explanation is, since (according to other sources, including Wikipedia) the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad first appeared in Fichte's summarization of Hegel's work. But perhaps it is enough: Singer goes on to explain that dialectic involves detecting how development involves opposing elements, leading to the disintegration of the current state and the creation of a relatively stable new state, which then develops its own tensions (p.102).

And I think that's enough for now. Singer has indeed produced a Very Short book, one that is highly readable. It did not sell me on the prospect of reading Hegel in the original, but it did give me an idea of the sweep of his thought and how it connects to themes about which I am concerned. If you're interested in taking the first step toward understanding Hegel, check it out.