Staging a Comeback

Philip Grier helps philosopher Hegel gain renewed respect

April 17, 2007

Philip Grier, Thomas Bowman Professor of Religion and Philosophy, is the new president of the Hegel Society of America.

For many years, dismissal, if not outright hostility, was the mood among many professional philosophers toward the once influential German idealist Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831).

Philip Grier, Thomas Bowman Professor of Religion and Philosophy, has been a major player in the revival of interest in Hegelianism and was recently elected president of the Hegel Society of America, a body of more than 350 professional philosophers who meet every other year to discuss the latest in Hegel scholarship.

Grier has been studying and publishing for decades on Hegel's work—which is difficult to understand, even by the usual standards of philosophical writing. To him, revival of interest in the philosopher was inevitable.

"Hegel provides a coherent set of philosophic possibilities and addresses all of the issues of the last 2,000 years of philosophy," Grier makes clear. "Hegel also helps us get past many dilemmas posed by the Enlightenment, such as the [alleged] 'hard divide' between reason and faith."

Hegel's steep fall from grace resulted not only from the many intellectual challenges to his body of thought—a natural development in the evolution of any discipline—but also from being identified as an enabler and apologist for many unsavory political movements and world events, from totalitarianism and nationalism to aggressive war-making.

"In the early 20th century, many well-intentioned intellectuals such as Karl Popper [in The Open Society and Its Enemies] popularized the notion that Hegelian thought was responsible for many of the evils and atrocities of the World Wars," Grier explains. In recent decades, however, Hegelianism has staged a dramatic comeback, even becoming "hot" again in philosophic circles—a tough-to-please audience, to be sure—that now seem eager to give it fresh consideration.

For Grier, the renewed popularity of Hegel's thought is satisfying on more than intellectual grounds: Philosopher Hegel, who belongs beside Aristotle and other giants of the field, will finally get back the respect he so richly deserves.