In How to Read Hegel Now, philosopher Shannon Hoff offers a powerful exploration of how Hegel’s ideas about freedom can speak to social injustice today. In the following excerpt from the introduction to her book, she discusses why she believes we should work to reread Hegel today, despite the challenges such a project entails.

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The content of the philosophical tradition can sometimes seem indifferent to or incompatible with liberatory concerns and projects. Those moved by issues of justice can find themselves recoiling both from the words of traditional philosophical texts as well as from those engaged with them, and go elsewhere for the pursuit of their commitments. Others remain, but suspiciously: Are the goods offered by philosophy fundamentally contaminated by the exclusion of those who have been perceived as idiosyncratic from the point of view of prevailing norms?1 Meanwhile, rifts emerge in philosophical communities, between those who cannot imagine ignoring such questions and those who cannot imagine being unswayed by traditional sources.

This is complicated and contentious terrain, made more challenging by the fact that we are always already inside the traditions we query, and so the resources by which we answer our concerns tend to draw on the philosophy in question. If we are trained in philosophy, we are trained in and through these traditions; they have shaped our sense of the nature of philosophy and what we think when we do it. Consideration of the possibly gendered nature of reason or the racist and colonial assumptions of social and political philosophy, for instance, seems to call for contemplation of the nature of reason and social life, in which case it often finds itself scurrying down the same rabbit holes traversed by, say, Locke, Plato, and Kant. Further, to decide whether any given philosophical account is thoroughly “contaminated,” we would have to be inducted into said philosophy; this takes time, the effort of digesting its implicit projection of indifference or hostility toward oneself if one is not counted by it, and also its meaningful incorporation into our perspective, which means that getting to the standpoint from which we could meaningfully assess whether philosophy is ultimately contaminated would seem to paradoxically require one to expose oneself to that contamination. Those who would invest such time and effort find their loyalties divided and their task doubled: It takes time to be inducted, and it takes time to elaborate one’s concerns about exclusion and about the complicity in exclusion of that into which one would be inducted.

How to Read Hegel Now is essentially a result of these divided loyalties and this doubled task, and hopes to work through some of these challenges. It is a small attempt to reconcile, through the figure of Hegel, an appreciation of the philosophical tradition with a commitment to emancipatory politics, and to center the purposes of emancipatory politics in interaction with the philosophical tradition. I began to study Hegel many years ago for probably two reasons: First, I thought that at least I would learn a lot just by doing the work it would take to understand it; but second, and more importantly, I was taken by the subtle ways in which he managed to juggle truths that seemed important and yet in tension with each other. At that time (and still now), I was interested in these two truths— that we are individuals, and that those who built the world we inherit and those with whom we now share it can “get inside of us” in debilitating ways. It was important to me, politically, that this vulnerability to others be recognized; my experience growing up in a religious community with some influential conservative adherents had made me allergic to the view that “hard knocks” were simply a matter of individual responsibility and not an effect of disempowering relations. For better or worse, this book exists because of that twenty-one-year-old’s dismay about the harsh attitudes circulating in her own social context, and her (uninformed) sense that Hegel provided the best philosophical building blocks by which to speak to the problems of exclusion and injustice relevant there. This sense opened the path of the dual task—to study and articulate, first, Hegel’s philosophy, and, second, contemporary diagnoses of the problems of social life.

In fact, one of the central points of Hegel’s philosophy is that thinking is inspired by its own concrete world; that it happens in situ, in history, never separate from the determinate “attentions and utensils” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 112) of its time and space, linked to the no-longer-present others who have thought through the issues of their own time and to the materiality that has carried their ideas into our present. This happens to thinking in ways it can never fully comprehend, since what seems to demand consideration resonates for the thinking being because of the specificity of its own irretrievable history. What is to be thought makes a claim upon us for reasons that are entangled with who we already are and with our history, and we attend to it not as generic thinkers but as these specific, historical beings who have cause to notice specific kinds of things in specific ways. While thinking works to consider reality beyond the confines of its own situation, it carries with it this “from”— its “body,” its “place,” and the meanings that moved it to consider the objects it considered. The appearance of what appears is shaped by where the thinker stands in the world and how the thinker’s attention has been cultivated, the specific character of which recedes into the darkness of non-awareness.

Hegel’s sensitivity to the historical determinacy of thinking supports a critical orientation to traditional sources such as his own work: These sources will be, predictably and inevitably, both complicit and transformative, part and parcel of systems of domination in the process of congealing, with or without their knowledge, while bringing powerful and potentially world- transforming insight to expression. Thinkers can disavow their own position, the work of their own attention, and the strings that keep them attached to their own embodied, determinate, worldly situations; they can fail to notice the way that their attention centers the preoccupations of their own world and the way the world brings certain realities to their attention while concealing others. But this is the context from which thinking unfolds, and, as Hegel does, we must think through the historical determinacies by which our thinking is led and think through their hold upon us. Further, if we know that this is where thinking begins, then we can be careful about the possibility that it sees only the familiar when it is trying to look for the true.

We should notice here that a similar rootedness, a similar embeddedness in a time, or a similarly unthought inhabitation supports contemporary thinkers in seeing contemporary social problems as problems. This is what our reality gives us to think; in other words, our thinking is hardly the unprecedented capacity to think beyond the habits of our time. It may not be our “superior intelligence” that leads us to perceive the world’s problems, but rather our enactment of the largely unreflective habits of our own time, such that moral outrage at the apparent ignorance of those who come before us can be in disavowal of the relevance of others and of history to what appear to it to be its own moral insight.

Nevertheless, thinking is both rooted and aspiring, determinate and transcending. Particularly because of Hegel’s sense of the importance of the “where and when” of thinking, he does not simply pursue the preoccupations of his own time but excavates the thought of other determinate worlds. In his work we see a more or less unprecedented historical and intercultural sensitivity coming to life in so-called Western philosophy and demanding the name “philosophy.” The aspiring and transcending capacity of his own thought, its capacity to illuminate the one-sidedness of his own time, is aided by this historical mindset, by the experience of bringing to life the thought of other times and peoples alongside his own. Further, his work goes beyond its own embeddedness in feeding future thought: When a text opens us up to the experience of the ongoing unfolding of meaning and is fed by our own investment, our own cultivation as readers, and our own situations as much as by its own content, then it continues to be alive and fertile, to foster thought. The thinking of the text is thus never “over”—and so we use the present tense when citing the words of dead authors. Thinking is expansive; it proliferates; it becomes something new in relation to new forms of determinacy.

My sense—having experienced the expansiveness of Hegel’s philosophy and the urgent demands presented by pervasive practices of injustice—is that this philosophy has tremendous resources for addressing political problems to which it may not have been particularly alive, and that its power in this regard should not be jettisoned. Stephen Houlgate captures it well when he says, in an interview, that we might not in fact have “got to Hegel yet”: “there is such a lot of Hegel and of our world that hasn’t been explored yet in the way that Hegel would do or we as Hegelians would do” (2024). Houlgate identifies particularly Hegel’s critique of the liberalism that makes the individual into the primary unit and ontological foundation for social organization, and the import, grounded in mutual recognition, of forming associations with each other. I too find profound fertility in Hegel’s work in relation to contemporary social issues, and I want to illuminate the answers that keep pulling me back, as they help me make sense of issues with which they may not have explicitly conversed. This engagement is possible most basically because Hegel is a thinker of relations, cultures, contexts, structures, and history, and these are relational, contextual, structural, cultural, and historical problems. If these ideas admit of becoming powerful means for confronting forms of domination to which they were not particularly alive, I believe it is important to mobilize them for that purpose and to undermine their possible use in opposed or indifferent projects.

This work is mobilized, then, by the conviction that it can be of significant value to feminist, anticolonial, antiracist, anti-ableist, and anti-capitalist projects to read and deploy Hegel and to channel the trajectory of Hegel scholarship and philosophy as such in those directions. It is mobilized also by the conviction that the value of this scholarship depends on our use, on people bringing it to life inside of their determinate situations, and that it is of significant value to Hegel’s philosophy as such to approach it through the lens of such concerns, since they in turn expand or reveal the sense it has; their concreteness lends itself to its expansion and clarification. Other ways of thinking, that is, can enliven Hegel’s text in new ways, as he would be the first to affirm, given the concrete and historical thinker he is. Thus I intend this project both to give readers better insight into Hegel’s philosophy, as well as to show what it means in interaction with contemporary political thinkers who are preoccupied with issues beyond those that seemed to have concerned him. To invoke Gayle Rubin’s similar orientation to Freud, this “is not for the sake of [Hegel’s] good name” (1975, 184). Rather, this project is intended to mobilize several of his most profound ideas because resistance to oppression is a cause that calls for the best resources we can muster.

I take this to be one strategy among many, part of a family of different kinds of efforts, not as the only mode of rapprochement with the history of philosophy. My project here is to help make it philosophically mainstream to draw on figures from the Western philosophical tradition (which is the tradition in which I have found myself) for critique of what is also their heritage: racist, capitalist, sexist, ableist, and colonial domination. This particular strategy is not without risks, particularly that of the ongoing privileging of “Western” interests and traditions and the neglect of that of others, and thus it is enacted in the belief that there are other vital strategies as well. The project also brings in other thinkers and traditions to do the work of diagnosing and addressing the social problems that Hegel is used to address. It aims at what Linda Martín Alcoff has called “internal Western critique”: first, I would say, by exposing a tradition’s own critical orientation to the temptations and short-comings of its world, many of which continue to operate today; second, by wresting elements of that tradition from their original contexts and appropriating them for the needs of our time; and third, by showing through dialogue with those who are othered by that tradition its “simplification and repudiation of non- Western thought” (Alcoff 2007, 91).

In the rest of this post, I want to address the more basic question of why we would use Hegel to address problems such as racism, sexism, colonialism, ableism, and capitalism when he does not seem significantly alive to these problems and when we might think that there are better options. Readers might have in mind the following: (a) He characterizes the women of ancient Greek ethical life as “the eternal irony of the community” in the Phenomenology of Spirit (PS §474/PG 259) and sequesters them in the  domestic arena in the Philosophy of Right (PR/GPR §166); (b) his writing on race and colonialism seems at times to be racist and colonialist, and student notes register that in lectures Hegel spoke of American Indigenous people, Indians, Asians, and Africans in ways that could be interpreted to recommend or justify colonialism (see “The New World” and “The Old World” in LPWH 162– 94/VPW 198– 241); (c) with the exception of a discussion of mental illness or “derangement” (die Verrücktheit) in the Encyclopaedia’s “Anthropology” (PM/E §408), he does not speak of issues of ableism and disability; and (d) he does not seem to directly target capitalism, and the equation of the actual with the rational in his political- economic writing, as well as his presentation of a civil society that prioritizes freedom in individual enterprise and engenders poverty, seems possibly consistent with capitalist exploitation. The answer to why we would go to such a source cannot come in one sentence, however, because it depends on the work of presenting these ideas and showing how they interact with existing arguments and modes of opposition against domination, which is the overall project of the book. Here, however, I will briefly outline a proposal for a dual strategy that I believe is called for by our very existence in a scholarly tradition: first, scholarly engagement; and second, a critical pairing that would carry the powerful ideas of the past into the present and future.

Philosophy is done by a community of philosophers, however at odds or disjointed it might be, and how we do philosophy and what we choose to talk about has an effect on those who also inhabit the world of philosophy. Philosophy is not just a move we make in the domain of truth, but a move we make in this interpersonal domain, in ways that support or undermine its health and ongoing activity. This domain is characterized by concrete people: singular beings with singular lives, but also people whose particularities are taken by their social worlds to be defining in specific ways. Namely, they are swept up in racial, eco-nomic, sexual, gendered, material, religious, and cultural systems of meaning; or, they are people of color and they are white; they are working class, poor, middle class, and wealthy; they are oriented to specific kinds of sexual intimacy with others; they appear in gendered terms to gendered perception; they are disabled and nondisabled; they have relations to religious traditions; they inhabit different cultural worlds and historical trajectories. Many of these concrete readers, scholars, and students of philosophy find that philosophy excludes or degrades them, and it can be hard to encounter and work through these texts without first doing some kind of personal reckoning: namely, grappling with the effect of being excluded, by virtue of one’s particularities, from the very thing one is learning to care about. Results of that reckoning are various and can have significant impact on the discipline of philosophy:  We turn away from the offending texts; we critique them; we work to digest the harm; we build ourselves up in communities of like- minded people and engage with philosophy motivated by the concerns of that community; we work through or suppress the challenges of that initial encounter; we project what the philosophy would be like had it had the good sense to actually “count” us. When readers of philosophy do not do this reckoning, or do not feel or acknowledge the need for it, this has an effect on the way the philosophical community feels to those who do. In this vein, Robert Bernasconi argues that “subtle strategies to play down the racism of Locke, Kant and Hegel, among others” has “the inevitable consequence that, for example, in the United States philosophers are disproportionately white” (2003, 35; see also Zambrana [2016]). In other words, work to downplay the racism of philosophical texts can be the final straw cementing the exclusion of those who already have to work too hard to locate themselves in the universal human “we.” It might seem all very well and good to defend Hegel’s or Kant’s ideas in the name of their power, for instance, but one is never simply doing that; one is also making an intersubjective gesture, and we should all keep in mind the philosophical community we touch with our words, not simply the issue of the “truth of the matter,” as if they could even be separated. This book operates with the sense that it is incumbent upon us to do both, at least in some small way— to engage with powerful traditional ideas and to honor the work of reckoning. This book works to set the stage for a possible future mutuality that has been painfully absent historically, with the hope that it will not rub salt into wounds.

The question of why we would go to this source in particular also raises the issue of the supply of sources. Philosophy is difficult, and it is typically learned by reading key sources in the history of philosophy, though the relative inaccessibility of “other people’s canons” means that much is yet to be thought. Nonetheless, it is difficult to imagine philosophical powers growing in someone independently of engagement with at least some of the material of one’s philosophical tradition, and there is not an unlimited supply of profound sources, of which none will be free of the one- sided exclusions associated with their historical moment, free of their communal and cultural ties, their determinate technologies, the religious and economic practices and customs of their time. I believe that, while one could potentially get to this end through other avenues, Hegel has helped me learn how to think and pursue a basic concern for issues of justice, and pairing Hegel with those who treat these political concerns explicitly is my best way forward for mobilizing some of the tradition’s powers for the present and future.

Further, one of the genuine virtues of systematic philosophy is that its ambition to be in some sense comprehensive does not permit fragmentary analyses of various pieces of experience and reality, the treatment of specific issues in abstraction from others. Systematic philosophy offers scholars of separate analyses a sense of how they relate to other pieces and how their scope is limited by another dimension of reality. It has the capacity to give pathways to thought, to guide it from one thing to a related other, to see the larger context, the conflicts and tensions, the resonances. It is not that systematic philosophy somehow projects the possibility that all of reality could be analyzed and nothing would be left for freedom and thought. Rather, it insists that, if we undertake practice and theory in abstraction from other relevant and interrelated facets of the situation, then in theory we will fail to do justice to the expansiveness of the human condition, and in practice we will mobilize forces against us of which we are ignorant, producing what Jean- Paul Sartre calls “counterfinalities” that undermine the possibility of free action (2004, 162). To handle a piece of human experience well, one must have a sense of how it contacts and affects other pieces, and how its character depends on its relations to or tensions with them.

Finally, a note about style. Hegel does not write for casual readers, or communicate very effectively with people who are not already experienced readers of his philosophy. Because he does not, I do (or try to).  I want to communicate these ideas in a way that allows their potential to come alive and come across. Just as Hegel uses experiences, particularly in the Phenomenology, to express, check, and revise hypotheses, so also this book is filled with examples from everyday human experience, examples designed to help reveal both the rich logic at play in our experience and to make it easier to see what Hegel means, since he (and much of the scholarship on him) otherwise makes it so hard. Further, if the political problems addressed in this book are matters of concern for all of us (since, as Hegel himself would argue, our freedom depends on that of others), then it is incumbent upon us to speak clearly and not only to other scholars of Hegel. Thus this book aims to speak to an audience not already inclined toward him; to give that audience a foothold in his philosophy by elaborating his most fundamental ideas; to enliven these ideas by showing how they resonate in everyday experience; and to address issues of contemporary concern for audiences wrapped up with those concerns. Further, in seeking to cultivate a kind of wisdom and orientation that would develop in readers the capacity for mobilizing Hegel’s ideas, it forgoes precise, rigorous moves at the level of scholarly detail. Yet insofar as it offers footholds in relation to scholarly conflicts and quagmires, establishes a stable point of orientation to the bewildering array of complexity in Hegel’s texts, and orients attention toward issues of contemporary concern, it nevertheless aims also to be a book for Hegel scholars.

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Shannon Hoff is professor of philosophy at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She is author of The Laws of the Spirit: A Hegelian Theory of Justice.

How to Read Hegel Now is available now. Use the code UCPNEW to take 30% off when you order from us directly.