What is Living and What is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel

Readers of the following pages, accustomed to Hegel s Himalayan severity and ruggedness of style and to the arid and difficult treatment of the Hegelian philosophy, so long in vogue, will probably be surprised at the profound yet pellucid clarity of Croce s thought. Hegel has at last found a critic and interpreter equal to the task, in the thinker who has already given us the Philosophy of the Spirit. Croce has passed beyond and therefore been able to look back upon Hegel, to unravel the gorgeous yet tangled skein of his system, and supply to all future students the clue of Ariadne. Who but Croce would have thought of recommending that Hegel should be read like a poet? Were it not for his own work upon aesthetic, such a statement would seem absurd; but in the light of the two degrees of theoretic knowledge and of the formation of logic from aesthetic intuitions, such a remark assumes its full significance. Rather than dwell for ever upon some technical difficulty, such as that presented by the first triad of the Logic, he recommends us to read Hegel like a poet, that is without paying undue attention to the verbal form, the historical accident of what he says, but full attention to its poetic truth. In reading a philosopher, we should seek his inspiration in the mazes of his text, without paying undue attention to the pedantries and formulae with which such a writer as Hegel is (historically) overlaid; and when with Croce s help we have scraped the lichen of his formulae from the thought of Hegel, we find beneath it the true philosopher, the hater of all that is abstract and motionless, of the should-be that never is, of the ideal that is not real. The magnificent critique and explanation of the dialectic is followed by the exposition of one of Hegel s two great errors, the confusion of distincts and opposites, and of its far-reaching evil consequences for a great part of the Hegelian system.