Preface
序 言
Hegel is one of those thinkers just about all educated people think they know something about. His philosophy was the forerunner to Karl Marx’s theory of history, but unlike Marx, who was a materialist, Hegel was an idealist in the sense that he thought that reality was ultimately spiritual, and that it developed according to the process of thesis/ antithesis/synthesis. Hegel also glorified the Prussian state, claiming that it was God’s work, was perfect, and was the culmination of all human history. All citizens of Prussia owed unconditional allegiance to that state, and it could do with them as it pleased. Hegel played a large role in the growth of German nationalism, authoritarianism, and mili¬ tarism with his quasi-mystical celebrations of what he pretentiously called the Absolute.
黑格尔是几乎所有受过教育的人都认为对其略知一二的思想家之一。他的哲学是卡尔·马克思历史理论的先导，但是和身为唯物主义者的马克思不同，黑格尔是从下列的意义上说的一个唯心主义者：他认为现实最终是精神性的，它按照正题、反题、合题的过程发展。而且黑格尔也颂扬普鲁士国家，声称它是上帝的作品，是完美无缺的，是全部人类历史的顶峰。在他看来，普鲁士所有公民都应该无条件地效忠普鲁士国家，而普鲁士国家则可以随心所欲地处置他们。黑格尔由于对他所炫耀地称作的绝对加以类乎神秘的颂扬而在德国民族主义、极权主义和军国主义的发展中充当了主要角色。
Just about everything in the first paragraph is false except for the first sentence.
第一段中除了第一句话外差不多每句话都是错误的。
What is even more striking is that it is all clearly and demonstrably wrong, has been known to be wrong in scholarly circles for a long time now, and it still appears in almost all short histories of thought or brief encyclopedia entries about Hegel.
甚至更为引人注目的是就连这第一句话也极清楚地证明是错的，这句话长期以来在学术圈内成了众所周知的错话，而它却仍然出现在几乎一切思想简史或简明百科全书关于黑格尔词条里。
But if that isn’t Hegel, who then was Hegel. And how did he come to be so badly misunderstood?
但是假如那不是黑格尔，那么黑格尔是谁?而且他怎么落得被人这么严重误解的下场呢?
Hegel was born on the cusp of our modern era, and his life spanned the two great revolutions of the modern age. Born in 1770, Hegel grew up at a time when kings were secure on their thrones, and to the casual observer, society was in the shape it had assumed many years before. In his teenage years, the French and the American revolutions exploded that world forever, and by the time he died in 1831 the industrial revolution was gearing up; train travel and photography were on the scene, steam engines were driving industry, and the world was witness¬ ing the stirrings of the move toward economic globalization that we now find such a normal part of our world.
黑格尔出生于现时代的转折时期，而他一生经历了现代两次伟大革命。出生于1770年的黑格尔，成长于国王稳坐宝位时期，而在浅薄的观察家看来，社会处在多年前呈现出的状况中。在他青少年时期，美国独立战争和法国大革命就已相继爆发，而到1831年他辞世时德国工业革命即将来临；乘火车旅行和摄影已经变为现实，蒸汽机正在推动着工业的发展，并且世界正见证向经济全球化迈进时出现的一些激动人心的东西，而我们现在发现它们是我们世界的极为正常的部分。
Although we in our own day like to think of massive technological change as rapidly altering our lives, probably no generation lived through such a wrenching transformation of ways of life as did Hegel’s. The impact that industrialization and the upheavals of the political revolutions of the time had on people’s lives was exceptional; the world was suddenly drawing closer, the prospect of revolution hung perma¬ nently in the charged atmosphere of the times, wars of revolution spread both hope and destruction across the continent, and by the 1830s former backwaters were suddenly being linked by steamships and locomotives to each other and to the great metropolises of the world. Whole new professions were suddenly springing up to service the rapidly emerging economies of the modern world. Young men and women of the time, not without justification, felt quite strongly that they were leading unprecedented lives, that the past and even the world of their parents were no longer adequate guides to life in the new world emerging before them. Some reacted against that giddy feeling of being cut free and longed for a restoration of the world that had been; others entertained revolutionary hopes of a transformed humanity in the future.
我们在我们自己时代喜欢将大量技术变化看作快速地改变了我们的生活，但是大概没有哪代人像黑格尔那代人一样经历过这种改变生活方式的痛苦。那时工业化和政治革命动乱对人民生活所产生的影响是异常罕见的；世界眨眼间变小了，革命的可能性始终悬于那时一触即发的气氛中，革命战争既给整个欧洲大陆带来了希望也带来了毁灭，到19世纪30年代，以往的偏僻地方陡然通过汽船和机车而相互连接起来并与世界大都市连接起来。全新的职业如雨后春笋，服务于现代世界快速兴起的经济行业。那时的青年男女完全有理由极强烈地感受到：他们过着史无前例的生活，过去的世界甚至就连他们父母的世界也不复能对出现在他们面前的新的世界生活提供适当引领。一些人的反应是，抵制那种令人晕眩的割裂游离感，希望回复到原来存在的那个世界中去；另一些人则对将来改变人性抱有革命的希望。
Hegel himself was not indifferent to those revolutionary events and to those deeply felt experiences of his own generation. He was drawn to them, he embraced them, and he made it his life’s vocation to try to comprehend those circumstances and that experience, to make sense of the vast changes he and others personally encountered as young Ger¬ mans and Europeans growing up at the end of the eighteenth century and living through the disruptions of that period and the dawn of the nineteenth century. Much of his philosophy was an attempt to come to terms with what those events might and must mean to us, “we mod¬ erns,” who are still trying to grapple with the meaning for our own lives of market societies and the celebration of freedom. Hegel has been called, not without reason, the first great philosopher to make modernity itself the object of his thought.
黑格尔本人对那些革命事件和对他自己那代人的那些深切体验并非是漠不关心的。他被它们所吸引，他拥抱它们，他引以为终身使命的就是试图去领会那些环境和那样的体验，就是努力去理解他和其他人，作为在18世纪末成长起来的、经历了那个时期混乱与19世纪黎明的德国青年和欧洲青年，亲身遭遇的巨变的意义。他哲学中许多内容所试图与之达成妥协的是，那些事件在我们即“我们现代人”看来可能且必然意味着的东西（这里的我们作为“我们现代人”仍然在企图绞尽脑汁地去理解我们自己的市场社会生活的意义和对自由的颂扬）。现时黑格尔已被称作使现代性自身成为人们思考的对象的第一位大哲学家，这种说法是很有道理的。
Despite his influence on so much subsequent thought, Hegel remains a figure of great mystery within a great deal of contemporary philoso¬ phy, and the mystery deepens and varies depending on whether one looks at the reception of his thought in the context of Anglophone philosophy or of continental European philosophy. In continental Eu¬ ropean thought, almost everybody has reacted to him, and he remains a force in that tradition of philosophy, a thinker whose influence can be picked up almost everywhere. Behind so many worries about, for ex¬ ample, the status of modern culture, the relation of science to the humanities, the role of the state, how we are to understand history itself, what are the possibilities for modern art - there stands Hegel, looming as one of the central figures in the debate.
尽管黑格尔对后世这么多的思想产生影响，他在当代哲学领域很大程度上依旧是位极为神秘的人物，而且这种神秘性的加深和变化取决于一个人是基于英美哲学语境还是基于欧陆哲学语境来考察他的思想被接受情况。在欧陆思想界，几乎当代每个哲学家都已对他的哲学作出反应，他依然代表着这一哲学传统的一股势力，依然代表着一位其影响几乎俯拾即是的思想家。举例来说，在现代文化的地位、自然科学和人文科学的关系、国家的作用、我们得怎样理解历史自身、现代艺术的发展前途如何这么多令人担心的问题背后，——站着的那个人，还是黑格尔，他赫然而立，成为关于上述诸问题争论中的主将之一。
Curiously enough, though, his thought has also repeatedly been de¬ clared to be definitively, once and for all, dead and gone, something that has long since been overcome - yet, equally curiously, the alleged corpse keeps reviving and reappearing. A contemporary French philos¬ opher once remarked that the great anxiety for all modern philosophers is that no matter how many new paths they take, they will find all of them to be dead ends, with Hegel waiting at the end of each of them, smiling.
不过，足以令人好奇的是，现时他的思想却已经被人再三宣布死定了且永远地-去不复返了，是某种早就已经被克服了的东西。——然而，同样使人感到奇怪的是，他的思想这具所谓死尸却逐渐苏醒和重新露面。记得一位当代法国哲学家曾经评论道，所有现代哲学家们的极大焦虑是，他们不管开出多少条新路，总是发现它们全都是死胡同，因为黑格尔正等候在每条路的尽头且面带微笑。
For many, of course, Hegel’s own reputation has been inextricably entwined with the reputation of the most famous person to claim to adapt his thought to new circumstances, Karl Marx. Marx and his followers claimed to have transformed Hegel’s supposedly “idealist” dialectic into a “materialist” theory of history, society, and revolution. Not unsurprisingly, the reaction to Hegel after Marx became intermin¬ gled with the reaction to Marxism itself, and depending on what one thought about that, one took a different stance toward Hegel. For much of the twentieth century, “Hegel” seemed only to be the nonindependent part of a phrase, “from Hegel to Marx.”
诚然，对于许多人来说，黑格尔个人的名望已经是与声称使他的思想适应新环境的泰斗式人物卡尔·马克思的名声紧密联系在一起的。马克思及其追随者断言已将黑格尔的据称“唯心主义”辩证法变成关于历史、社会和革命的“唯物主义”学说。不能不使人觉得很惊奇的是，马克思之后的学者对黑格尔所作出的反应是与对马克思主义本身的反应交织在一起的，而且这后一种反应又取决于人们对前一种反应做了何种思考，又取决于人们对黑格尔采取的不同态度。20世纪很多时候，“黑格尔”好像只不过成了“从黑格尔到马克思”这个短语中的非独立的一部分。
Likewise, because of a bowdlerized presentation of his philosophy by the deservedly obscure Heinrich Moritz Chalybaus, which was im¬ mensely popular in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century (and read by Marx), Hegel’s thought quickly became synonymous with the rather arid formula of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, a formula that Hegel himself never used and which in any event misrepresents the structure of his thought. But the characterization stuck, and to many, Hegel remained simply the idealist progenitor of the materialist Marx, which (depending on one’s attitude toward Marxism) made him a hero or a villain, but in both cases, somebody whose own thought was not important and whose only real importance lay in the people he influ¬ enced.
同样，由于被思想极为晦涩的海因里希·莫里茨·夏理鲍斯对黑格尔哲学做了在19世纪中期德国极为流行的阉割式介绍（和黑格尔哲学被马克思所解读），黑格尔思想旋即成了正题、反题、合题这个颇为枯燥无味的公式的代名词，这个公式从未被黑格尔本人用过且无论如何歪曲了他的思想结构。可是黑格尔哲学所具有的特性是谁也改变不了的，而在许多人眼中，黑格尔依然只是唯物主义者马克思的唯心主义思想先驱，这种看法（取决于一个人对待马克思主义的态度）使黑格尔成了一个英雄抑或一只狗熊，不过在这两种情况下，名人自xii 己的思想无关紧要，他唯一的真正重要性在于他所影响的人。
Hegel’s reception in Anglo-American philosophy has always been much different from his reception on the European continent. Although Hegel has always had his devoted readers in Anglophone intellectual circles, he has also been firmly, sometimes even vociferously, rejected by a large and important segment of Anglophone philosophy as having nothing of any importance to say.
黑格尔在英美哲学中受欢迎情况始终与他在欧陆受欢迎情况有着天壤之别。黑格尔虽在英语知识圈中一直不乏忠实的读者，还是遭到英语哲学圈很重要的一大部分人的强硬拒绝，有时甚至是极张狂地拒绝，被视为无任何重要性可言。
In many places in Anglophone philosophy, it is probably safe to say that he has not been so much rejected as simply ignored. It is not out of the ordinary to find major departments of philosophy where he is not taught at all, especially at the graduate level. It is hardly a secret that there are large numbers of Anglo-American philosophers who refuse to read Hegel, who seem to have completely absorbed Bertrand Russell’s criticisms of Hegel without ever having paused at Hegel himself. Among them, the suspicion remains, first fostered by Russell and the other great analytic critics of German Idealism at the beginning of the cen¬ tury, that the clarity and argumentative rigor that count as one of the great achievements of modern analytic philosophy can only be attained and sustained by a thorough refusal and avoidance of the dark prose and dense continental thought of Hegel. For these people in contem¬ porary philosophy, Hegel stands not as one of the great thinkers of the modern era, someone with whom one simply must come to terms, but as somebody to be avoided virtually at all cost, who has nothing of importance to say, and whose thought is at best only a wicked tempta¬ tion from which pliable young minds especially must be protected.
在英语哲学世界的许多地方，可以稳妥地说，黑格尔未遭彻底拒绝，只是受到冷落而已。如果我们发觉某些大学重要的哲学系，那里根本就不讲授他的哲学，特别是在研究生层面上，这种情况是很正常的。几乎尽人皆知的是，有大量英美哲学家拒绝解读黑格尔，他们似乎完全认同贝特兰·罗素对黑格尔的批判，而从没有研究过黑格尔本人。英美哲学家中，最初由罗素和20世纪初针对德国唯心主义的伟大批评家所培养出的怀疑论者仍旧坚持认为，那被算作现代分析哲学伟大成就之一的明晰和严格论证，只能凭借彻底拒绝并避开黑格尔晦涩的散文体和难懂的欧陆思想而达到且保持。对于当代哲学中这些人来说，黑格尔已不属现时代大思想家之列，不复是人们必须面对的人物，而成了人们实际上不惜任何代价躲之不及的名人，黑格尔已经无重要性可言，而且他的思想至多只不过是易受影响的青年人心灵必须特别加以防范的一种邪恶的诱惑。
Almost as if he were an unwanted guest, though, Hegel has refusedto go away even in analytic philosophy itself; instead, he keeps poppingup on many of the byways of contemporary intellectual life. Why,though, was he shunted off to the side. What happened to Hegel tomake him such a pariah?
好像黑格尔几乎成了一位不速之客，虽然如此，他仍拒绝离开，即使是在分析哲学本身中；相反，他继续冷不防地出现在当代知识生活的许多偏僻小径上。然而他为什么被人们撇在一边了呢?黑格尔怎么成了这样一个受蔑视的人了呢?
Part of the explanation is straightforwardly historical. Hegel was blamed in Anglophone countries for the German authoritarianism that led to the First World War and for the kind of nationalist worship of the state embodied by the Nazis that led to the Second World War. Not only was he suspected of teutonic obfuscationism and of being an imposter within the halls of the academy, his name became associated with the moral disasters of the twentieth century. When after the Sec¬ ond World War Karl Popper published his immensely influential book The Open Society and Its Enemies, laying blame for much of the German catastrophe on the baleful influence of Hegel’s thought, the final nail in the coffin for Hegelianism seemed to have been put in place. That Popper’s treatment of Hegel was a scandal in itself did nothing to assuage the fears of many that the study of Hegel’s works as if they might have something to say was itself a dangerous enterprise.
部分的解释，说白了是由于历史造成的。黑格尔在英语世界中遭到责备，说他应对导致第一次世界大战的德国极权主义承担责任，应对那发动第二次世界大战的纳粹分子所体现的民族主义国家崇拜承担责任。他不但有日耳曼人搅乱人心和学术殿堂中江湖骗子嫌疑，而且他的名字还和20世纪的道德灾难联系在一起。当在第二次世界大战后卡尔·波普发表他的力作《开放社会及其敌人》，把德国很多灾难归咎于黑格尔思想的邪恶影响的时候，对黑格尔哲学似乎已盖棺定论。波普对黑格尔所作的那番论述本质上实属恶意诽谤，丝毫没有打消许多学者心目中的恐惧，即对黑格尔的好像可能有些说道的著作的研究本身是一项危险的工作。
Hegel survived the attacks and still remains around, although not entirely so. It is still not unusual at any number of major universities to find famous professors in one department celebrating Hegel as one of the intellectual giants of the modern world while equally famous profes¬ sors in another department at the same university deride him as hum¬ bug, poppycock, maybe even a fraud. Hegel, the mystery figure, still remains as controversial as if he had been lecturing on the campuses only yesterday.
黑格尔历经种种劫难，还是活了下来，仍然一直在我们中间，尽管他的遭际颇为殊异。我们会发觉，某所大学一个系里的名教授们颂扬黑格尔是现代世界知识巨人之一，而同所大学另一个系里同样知名的教授们则嘲弄他胡说八道，取笑他空话连篇，甚或讥讽他欺世盗名，这种情况现今在任何名牌大学中照旧是极其寻常的。黑格尔，这位神秘人物，当下依旧是颇有争议的，似乎他就在昨天还一直在某些名牌大学校园里作讲演。
Why, though, if he is long since dead and gone, if his thought has clearly long since been superseded and shown to be false and maybe even dangerous - why has he remained around? The passions he provokes within the academy seem oddly out of place for a figure in the history of philosophy whose influence has supposedly already come and gone.
可是，为什么，如果他很久以前就死了且一去不复返了，如果他的思想显然很久以前就被其他思想取代并被证明是错误的甚或是危险的，——他依然没有离开我们呢?他在学界所激起的热情看来好像与他在哲学史上的形象极不相称，因为他的影响据称已经消失殆尽。
Who then was Hegel?
那么黑格尔是谁?
