Modern Freedom Book

This book makes Hegel's philosophy readable and understandable, which is a quite an accomplishment. Adriaan Peperzak is a master of rendering difficult thoughts clear and understandable, as he does with Levinas and other major philosophers in the history of western philosophy. This book is not only a must-read for anyone who want to read Hegel's difficult texts as students but also for any Hegelian scholars. Heavily relying on Hegel's Encyclopedia--probably one of the most difficult philosophic texts of all times (in the section on Logic)--Peperzak provides a detailed commentary on Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right, the textbook Hegel wrote in 1820 for his course on practical philosophy, where he describes the unfolding of the spirit in its concrete and objective (self) realization in property, family, civil society, and state. A rare feat of accomplishment that explains Hegel's political philosophy in terms of the spirit's self unfolding and self identity. Peperzak remains faithful to Hegel's overall intention and philosophy. Accordingly, he does not rely on Hegel's earlier and more popular work, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), as many commentators do, to interpret Hegel's political philosophy. Peperzak writes: "Hegel's entire philosophy is one long unfolding of the all-encompassing One, whose most adequate name is 'spirit.' Every thing and every dimension of the universe is therefore a realization and revelation of spirit" (137).

This is probably not the most popular interpretation of Hegel but is most accurate and succinct summary of his thought. Peperzak only hints here and there that Hegel's "faith in Reason" blinded him from a more adequate understanding of God (who reveals himself beyond reason or understanding) and faith. But this book does not aim at critiquing Hegel's philosophy. For that we must turn to, among others, Peperzak's essay entitled: "Faith in Philosophy Or Philosophy Within Faith?" (Budhi, 18.2 (2014), pp. 1-38). In that essay, Peperzak summarizes Hegel's "philosophy" rather succinctly in the following way:Hegel's philosophy is indeed the unfolding of a conceptual (i.e., at once logical and onto-logical) science or Wissenschaft about all the essential phenomena that are relevant for a human life in the world of absolute Spirit, which Hegel calls "God," because it is the all-encompassing self-knowledge of the Whole (das Ganze) of the total Truth (die Wahrheit) of Hegel's universe. [...] As Logos (or onto-logical Idea), the Spirit unfolds its basic categoriality into the universal pattern of all essentiality, thanks to whose "dialectical identity" (or hybrid synthesis) of being and non-being, all beings find their orderly connections and mutual inclusions with one another and the whole of their universe (Id., 30).In his Elements of Ethics (2004), the title that recalls Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Peperzak writes of the unfolding of the spirit as follows: The history of spirit is understood as a dialectical unfolding (in which the negatives of all positions play a necessary and productive role), unfolding is understood as progress, and progress is interpreted as the victorious self determination of the spirit, that is, as the center and completion of the mind itself (Elements of Ethics, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2004), 242-43).
Steering away from Kojèves' and Lucàcs's interpretations, Peperzak successfully argues for the arena of history as a double stage in which the spirit expresses itself in art, religion, and philosophy in the subjective side as well as it actualizes itself in property, family, society, and in the state in the objective side. Peperzak writes:Only by blending the dimension of this self-knowledge with the most perfect form of ethical life, can Hegel sketch a picture of world history in which the history of Sittlichkeit [ethicality] (as the history of states) is combined with the historical unfolding of art, religion, and philosophy. […] History is the temporal, successive, and therefore finite, manifestation of the infinite self-knowledge through which the spirit's absoluteness 'liberates itself from the form of natural immediacy.' Only by sublating the naturalness of geographically and anthropologically determined peoples ([Elements of the Philosophy of Right] § 346), i.e., only by transforming the spirit's objectivity into the embodiment of the spirit's religious and philosophical self-consciousness, can history transcend the mixture of justice and violence characteristic of its natural imperfection (§ 352)" (Modern Freedom, 614-15).Or, 'God' is used by Hegel as a more popular name for the universal and absolute spirit. […] Because the spirit, as the origin of its all-encompassing unfolding, is both the unmoved beginning and the 'actuosity' of the universal moment, the universe can be characterized as the 'course of the spirit' or the 'course of God.' Every moment and stage of this universal course is created, necessitated, willed, and actualized by God (or the spirit). 'God's course' is the 'cause' and the life of all the actualities in which the spirit manifests or reveals (offenbart) its creative fullness. Nature, right, state, art, religion, and so on exist because of the spirit's realization, unfolding, and revelation of itself (Modern Freedom, 482). Thus, history unfolds as His-story. But in maintaining this thesis, what has Hegel done to the notion of God, if 'God' can be understood even as a notion? It goes without saying that Hegel's optimism in history is soundly defeated by the brutal empirical facts of WW I, WW II, and by many other atrocities and barbarism that occur even now, even in the most civilized states. If this is His story, God must be either a monster or dead. But such a conclusion is not as serious as these: that God is immanent and constitutes the totality of all there is, that philosophy (as the articulation of the spirit's inner logic or logos) contains all there is to know and to desire, and that there is therefore nothing beyond philosophy to think. Such is the pretension of Hegelian philosophy that is ignorant of God's transcendence, which is attested to consistently by 1500 years of wisdom sustained in the medieval period, which incidentally Hegel calls the "dark middle ages" (Modern Freedom, 322, n.).

Are we more "ethical" in modern times than we were before--in the strict Hegelian sense? The obvious answer is negative. But what do we mean by "ethical"? A different sense of the term must be articulated, coming from the hither side of the shore, that could breach Hegel's totality and infinity.