How common sense takes on philosophy - presented in Mr. Krug's works.

Abstract

We present the first English version of the text Wie der gemeine Menschenverstand die Philosophie nehme, - dargestellt an den Werken des Herrn Krug's, written by G. W. F. Hegel and published in the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie which circulated in Jena between 1801 and 1803. In the introduction to the journal in question the then friends Hegel and Schelling had pointed out that they intended to outline speculative philosophy as opposed to non-speculative philosophy. The essay we translate here was published by Hegel in January 1802 and deals with W. T. Krug (1770-1842), a contemporary and colleague of his at the time. This text is one of the first testimonies of Hegel's thought, one that will allow him to continue to outline his philosophy in relation to contemporary perspectives on it. What is meant by the expression "Mr. Krug's pen"? According to Krug, idealism failed in its demand to deduce "the whole system of our representations." For him, this project would be achieved and would convince him if "something little", e.g., "the moon with all its features" or also "his pen" were deduced. The position is of interest because it highlights a misunderstanding that not infrequently arises in connection with idealism, and to which Fichte and Schelling (not Hegel) sometimes contributed to consolidate.

The misunderstanding consists in the assumption that speculative philosophy, in claiming to have found something like the formula of the world in its totality from which everything singular, down to the most immediate thing like a quill pen that allows writing and that someone right now can hold in his hand, could be realized or deduced. What is demanded of speculative philosophy is then that everything finite be reclaimed from a transcendent infinite. Hegel points out that speculative philosophy brings out how thinking engenders the rational structure of the world, but not of the empirical, casual, accidental world, for that would be a misrepresentation that could prove fatal insofar as it would assume that thinking is a sort of demiurge that generates material things. Already in this writing Hegel shows that speculative philosophy works on a logical level; it is not that it creates objective and empirical reality as if thinking were a craftsman who configures a world, like a demiurge. What it is about is that thinking unfolds the conceptual structure of reality. Speculative thinking manifests and unfolds to the point where it brings to light a conceptual structure that is present in all objective reality. Concepts describe the totality of reality, so that they can be shown in the empirical reality of something, but they are not primarily empirical.
Idealist philosophy does not deny that there are perspectives on things and on states of affairs in which purely empirical contingencies manifest themselves; what it holds is that thinking recognizes that, for example, one cannot understand the determinate sense of a casual empirical fact without first being clear about the sense of what it is to know or about the necessity of the concept that is presented there. In the same direction, Hegel shows against Mr. Krug that the empirical is not the foundation of the conceptual, but that speculative thinking goes by its own unfolding and that the empirical only shows itself from there. The starting point of speculation is not the detached and abstract, but the logos, the real and concrete, from where the casual is shown as necessary, the part as the whole. - At bottom, Mr. Krug's problem is that he treats the absolute as having the same rank as the contingent. For the same reason speculative philosophy cannot "deduce" his pen, not because its usefulness is not real, but because of its irreducible casualness.

The versions used for the present translation are volume two dedicated to the Jena writings of the complete works of Hegel edited by Suhrkamp (Frankfurt am Main, 2016), and volume IV, published under the title Jenaer kritische Schriften, of Hegel's Gesammelte Werke edited by the Academy (Hamburg, Felix Meiner, 1968).
I am also grateful to the Faculty of Humanities of the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional for supporting this translation through the faculty project "Let's talk about education. Perspectives from Goethe and Hegel". I also thank Professor Jorge Aurelio Díaz for carefully reading the first version of the text, for his very wise recommendations to the translation and for sharing with me his remarkable philosophical and intellectual background that was decisive in recognizing certain issues that the text brought into play. I am indebted to Professor Díaz throughout my education and especially now that he has accompanied me in the interesting profession of translating. I thank him for his delicate and lively support.

Fernando Forero
National Pedagogical University (Colombia)