The First Generation — Philological Groundwork
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Within this institutional framework, a new generation of Hegel scholars emerged who chose a radically different approach than their predecessors. Ritter had rehabilitated Hegel by showing that civil society had an independent standing in Hegel’s thought. Gadamer had integrated Hegel into the hermeneutic tradition. Both had made Hegel productive for the present by interpreting him.
The new generation wanted something different: they wanted, first of all, to understand Hegel — not to use him, not to update him, not to instrumentalize him for their own purposes, but to grasp him in his own logic. That sounds self-evident, but it was a methodological revolution. Almost the entire reception of Hegel since 1831 had been driven by the desire to mobilize Hegel for one’s own position — the Right Hegelians for restoration, the Left Hegelians for revolution, the Marxists for historical materialism, the existentialists for human freedom, the critics of totalitarianism for their warning against the state.
Dieter Henrich, who taught in Munich and founded the so-called “Munich School,” became the most important representative of this philological turn. His focus lay on the Logic — that part of Hegel’s system that was most difficult, most abstract, least immediately usable for political purposes. This was progress: finally someone who took Hegel’s systematic core seriously, instead of merely quoting the Philosophy of Right or the master–slave chapter.
Henrich’s method was meticulous: trace every transition, understand every category in its development, name every inconsistency. Not “What can we do with Hegel?” but “What did Hegel himself want?” This was not historicism in the sense of antiquarian interest, but the conviction that one can only criticize a philosopher productively once one has first understood him from within — the steelman method avant la lettre.
Admittedly, this philological rigor also had limits, which we discussed in detail in Chapter 3a. Henrich’s judgment that the transition from the Logic of Being to the Logic of Essence was “not tenable” rested on a misunderstanding: he read the Logic as deduction rather than as explication, as a linear sequence rather than as a spiral movement from implicit to explicit reflection. His philological precision led to precise observations, but his systematic conclusions were questionable. The intensity of his seminar readings — sentence by sentence, word by word — tied attention to details and could make it harder to raise systematic objections.
Nevertheless, Henrich’s institutional achievement remains significant. The transatlantic bridge he built still holds today. That American philosophers like Pippin, Pinkard, and Brandom take Hegel seriously is owed substantially to his mediation — even though all three, in their systematic work, went beyond Henrich’s limits and rehabilitated precisely the reflexivity that Henrich had declared problematic.
Rolf-Peter Horstmann worked in parallel on the substance–subject problem. Hegel’s famous thesis that “the True is to be grasped not [merely] as Substance, but just as much as Subject” was systematically thought through by Horstmann. What does it mean: substance as subject? Is this idealism? Or the overcoming of idealism? Horstmann showed: it is the overcoming of the alternative itself. Substance is not dead (as in Descartes), and subject is not bodiless (as in Kant) — rather, both are moments of a single movement.
Hans Friedrich Fulda concentrated on dialectic as method. What exactly constitutes Hegel’s method? Is it arbitrary? Is it dogmatic? Or is there an inner logic to the transitions? Fulda showed: the transitions are not arbitrary, but neither are they compelling in the sense of formal logic. They are “logical in respect of the subject matter” [sachlogisch] — they follow from the nature of the matter itself, if one thinks it through consistently. This is not mysticism, but methodological rigor at the highest level of reflection.
These three — Henrich, Horstmann, Fulda — shared a common conviction: Hegel must not be appropriated. Not by Marxists, not by existentialists, not by hermeneuticists, not by anyone at all. Hegel must first be understood from himself. Only then can one productively criticize him, develop him further, or move beyond him. Everything else is projection.
The question of whether the philological method alone suffices to understand Hegel “from himself” is, admittedly, more complicated. Philology explains what an author wrote and how he meant it — but not necessarily whether it is true. The constellation research that Henrich founded reconstructs the conditions of a text’s genesis, not the grounds of its validity. Anyone proceeding purely philologically can precisely observe that a transition is “not direct” — but they need systematic understanding to judge whether this is a flaw in construction or an insight into the structure of thought itself.
The philological school raised Hegel scholarship to a new level. It set methodological standards that still apply today. But it also showed that philological precision and systematic understanding are two different things — and that the former, without the latter, can lead astray.