Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic

One of the topics of the pseudo-Freudian dismissal of Hegel is to regard his system as the highest and most overblown expression of oral economy: is the Hegelian Idea not a voracious eater that “swallows” every object upon which it stumbles? No wonder Hegel perceived himself as Christian: for him, the ritual eating of bread transubstantiated into Christ’s meat signals that the Christian subject can himself integrate and digest, without remainder, God himself. Is, consequently, the Hegelian conceiving/grasping not a sublimated version of digestion? So when Hegel writes:

If the individual human being does something, achieves something, attains a goal, this fact must be grounded in the way the thing itself, in its concept, acts and behaves. If I eat an apple, I destroy its organic self-identity and assimilate it to myself. That I can do this entails that the apple in itself, already, in advance, before I take hold of it, has in its nature the determination of being subject to destruction, having in itself a homogeneity with my digestive organs such that I can make it homogeneous with myself.¹

Is what he offers not a lower version of the cognition process itself in which, as Hegel likes to point out, we can only grasp the object if this object itself already “wants to be with/by us”? One should carry this metaphor to the end: the standard critical reading constructs the Hegelian Absolute Substance-Subject as thoroughly constipated—keeping in itself the swallowed content. Or, as Adorno put it in one of his biting remarks (which, as is all too often the case with him, misses the mark), Hegel’s system “is the belly turned mind,”² pretending that it swallowed the entire indigestible Otherness. But what about the countermovement, the Hegelian shitting excrementation? Is the subject of what Hegel calls “Absolute Knowing” not also a thoroughly emptied subject, a subject reduced to the role of pure observer (or, rather, registrator) of the self-movement of the content itself?

The richest is therefore the most concrete and most subjective, and that which withdraws itself into the simplest depth is the mightiest and most all-embracing. The highest, most concentrated point is the pure personality which, solely through the absolute dialectic which is its nature, no less embraces and holds everything within itself.³

In this strict sense, subject itself is the abrogated/cleansed substance, a substance reduced to the void of the empty form of self-relating negativity, emptied of all the wealth of “personality”—in Lacanese, the move from substance to subject is the one from S to $, that is, subject is the barred substance. (Adorno and Horkheimer, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, make the critical point of how the Self, bent on mere survival, has to scarify all content that would make survival worthy; this very move is what Hegel asserts.) Schelling referred to this same move as contraction (again, with the excremental connotation of squeezing the shit out of oneself, dropping it out): subject is the contracted substance.

Does, then, the final subjective position of the Hegelian system not compel us to turn around the digestive metaphor? The supreme (and, for many, the most problematic) case of this countermovement occurs at the very end of logic, when (after the notional deployment is completed, reaching the full circle of the Absolute Idea) the Idea, in its resolve/decision, “freely releases itself”⁴ into Nature: lets Nature go, leaves it off, discards it, pushes it away from itself, and thus liberates it. This is why, for Hegel, the philosophy of nature is not a violent reappropriation of this externality; it rather involves the passive attitude of an observer to watch nature sublate its own externality.

The same move is accomplished by God himself who, in the guise of Christ, this finite mortal, also “freely releases itself” into temporal existence. The same goes for the early modern art, which is how Hegel accounts for the rise of the “dead nature” paintings (not only landscapes, flowers, etc., but even pieces of food and dead animals). Because of the development of art, subjectivity no longer needs the visual medium as the principal medium of its expression. For example, because the accent shifted to poetry as a more direct presentation of a subject’s inner life, the natural environs is “released” of the burden to express subjectivity and thus gains freedom and can be asserted on its own. And, furthermore, as some perspicuous readers of Hegel have already pointed out, the very sublation of art in philosophical sciences (in conceptual thought), the fact that art is no longer obliged to serve as the principal medium of the expression of the Spirit frees it, thus allowing it to gain autonomy and stand on its own: is this not the very definition of the birth of modern art proper—that it is no longer subordinated to the task of representing spiritual reality?

The way abrogation relates to sublation is not that of a simple succession or external opposition; not “first you eat, then you shit.” Shitting is the immanent conclusion of the entire process: without it, we would be dealing with the “spurious infinity” of an endless process of sublation. The process of sublation itself can only reach its end by the countermove:

Contrary to what one would initially imagine, these two processes of sublation and abrogation are completely interdependent. Considering the last moment of absolute spirit (Philosophy), one readily notes the synonymy between the verbs aufheben and befreien (“to liberate”), as well as ablegen (“to discard,” “to remove,” “to take away”). Speculative abrogation, in no way alien to the process of Aufhebung, is indeed its fulfillment. Abrogation is a sublation of sublation, the result of the Aufhebung’s work on itself and, as such, its transformation. The movement of suppression and preservation produces this transformation at a certain moment in history, the moment of Absolute Knowledge. Speculative abrogation is the absolute sublation, if by “absolute” we mean a relief or sublation that frees from a certain type of attachment.⁵

A true cognition is thus not only the notional “appropriation” of its object: the process of appropriation goes on only as long as cognition remains incomplete. The sign of its completion is that it liberates its object, lets it be, drops it. This is why and how the movement of sublation has to culminate in the self-relating gesture of sublating itself. And is this shift from sublation to abrogation not structurally homologous to Alain Badiou’s shift from destruction to subtraction? After “destroying” the Substance in its immediacy—appropriating it through its mediation, applying on it the “work of the negative”—the subject has to subtract itself from it, set it free. So what about the obvious counterargument: is the part that is abrogated/released (not precisely the arbitrary, passing aspect of the object) that which the notional mediation/reduction can afford to drop as the part that is in itself worthless? This is precisely the illusion that is to be avoided on two points. First, the released part is, on the contrary, if one may be permitted to insist on the excremental metaphorics, precisely discarded as much as the manure of the spiritual development, the ground out of which further development will grow. The release of Nature into its own thus lays the foundation of Spirit proper, which can itself develop only out of Nature, as its inherent self-sublation. Second, and more fundamentally, what is released into its own being in speculative cognition is ultimately the object of cognition itself, which, when truly grasped (begriffen), no longer has to rely on the subject’s active intervention, but develops itself following its own conceptual automatism with the subject reduced to a passive observer who, without its contribution (Zutun), lets the thing deploy its potentials and merely registers the process. This is why the Hegelian cognition is simultaneously active and passive, in a sense that radically displaces the Kantian notion of cognition as the unity of activity and passivity. In Kant, the subject actively synthetizes (confers unity on) the content (the sensuous multiplicity), by which the subject is passively affected. For Hegel, on the contrary, at the level of Absolute Knowing, the cognizing subject is thoroughly passivized: he no longer intervenes into the object, but merely registers the immanent movement of the subject’s self-differentiation/self-determination (or, to use a more contemporary term, the object’s autopoietic self-organization). The subject is thus, at its most radical, not the agens of the process: the agens is the system (of knowledge) itself, which “automatically” deploys without any need for external pushes or impetuses. However, this utter passivity simultaneously involves the greatest activity: it takes the most strenuous effort for the subject to “erase himself” in its particular content (as the agent intervening into the object) and to expose oneself as a neutral medium, the site of the system’s self-deployment. Hegel thereby overcomes the standard dualism between system and freedom, between the Spinozist notion of a substantial deus sive natura of whom I am part, caught in its determinism, and the Fichtean notion of subject as the agent opposed to the inert stuff, trying to dominate and appropriate it: the supreme moment of subject’s freedom is to set free its object, to leave it to freely deploy itself: “The Idea’s absolute freedom consists in … that it resolves to freely let go out of itself the moment of its particularity.”⁶ “Absolute freedom” is here literally absolute in the etymological meaning of absolvere: releasing, letting go. Schelling was the first to criticize this move as illegitimate: after Hegel completed the circle of logical self-development of the Notion, being aware that all this development took place in the abstract medium of thought, outside real life, he had to somehow make the passage to real life. There were, however, no categories in his logic to accomplish this passage, which is why he had to resort to terms like “decision” (the Idea “decides” to release Nature from itself), which are not categories of logic but of will and practical, actual life. This critique clearly misses the way that this act of releasing the other is thoroughly immanent to the dialectical process and its conclusive moment: the sign of the conclusion of a dialectical circle. Is this not the Hegelian version of Gelassenheit?

This is how one should read Hegel’s “third syllogism of Philosophy,” Spirit-Logic-Nature: the starting point of the speculative movement rendered by this syllogism is spiritual substance into which subjects are immersed. Then, through strenuous conceptual work, the wealth of this substance is reduced to its underlying elementary logical/notional structure. Once this task is accomplished, the fully developed logical Idea can release Nature out of itself. Here is the key passage:

The Idea, namely, in positing itself as absolute unity of the pure Notion and its reality and thus contracting itself into the immediacy of being, is the totality in this form—nature.

But this determination has not issued from a process of becoming, nor is it a transition, as when above, the subjective Notion in its totality becomes objectivity, and the subjective end becomes life. On the contrary, the pure Idea in which the determinateness or reality of the Notion is itself raised into Notion, is an absolute liberation for which there is no longer any immediate determination that is not equally posited and itself Notion; in this freedom, therefore, no transition takes place; the simple being to which the Idea determines itself remains perfectly transparent to it and is the Notion that, in its determination, abides with itself. The passage is therefore to be understood here rather in this manner, that the Idea freely releases itself in its absolute self-assurance and inner poise. By reason of this freedom, the form of its determinateness is also utterly free—the externality of space and time existing absolutely on its own account without the moment of subjectivity.⁷

Here Hegel repeatedly insists on how this “absolute liberation” is thoroughly different from the standard dialectical “transition.” But how? The suspicion lurks that Hegel’s “absolute liberation” relies on the absolute mediation of all otherness: I set the Other free after I completely internalized it. However, is this so?

One should reread here Lacan’s critique of Hegel: what if, far from denying what Lacan calls the “subjective disjunction,” Hegel asserts an unheard-of division that runs through the (particular) subject as well as through the (universal) substantial order of “collectivity,” uniting the two? That is to say, what if the “reconciliation” between the particular and the universal occurs precisely through the division that cuts across the two? The basic “postmodern” reproach to Hegel—that his dialectics admits antagonisms and splits only to resolve them magically in a higher synthesis-mediation—strangely contrasts the good old Marxist reproach to Hegel (already formulated before Marx by Schelling), according to which Hegel resolves antagonisms only in “thought,” through conceptual mediation, while in reality they remain unresolved. One is tempted to accept this second reproach at its face value and use it against the first one: what if this is the proper answer to the accusation that Hegelian dialectics magically resolves antagonisms? What if, for Hegel, the point, precisely, is not to “resolve” antagonisms “in reality,” but just to enact a parallax shift by which antagonisms are recognized “as such” and thereby perceived in their “positive” role?

The passage from Kant to Hegel is thus much more convoluted than it may appear. Let us approach it again through the opposition of Kant and Hegel with regard to the ontological proof of God’s existence. Kant’s rejection of this proof takes as the starting point his thesis that being is not a predicate: if one knows all predicates of an entity, its being (existence) doesn’t follow; for example, one cannot conclude being from a notion. (The anti-Leibniz is clear here, according to whom two objects are indiscernible if all of their predicates are the same.) The implication for the ontological proof of God is clear: in the same way that I can have a perfect notion of one hundred thalers and still not have them in my pocket, I can have a perfect notion of God without God existing. Hegel’s first remark on this line of reasoning is that “being” is the poorest, most imperfect notional determination (everything “is” in some way, even my craziest phantasmagorias); it is only through further notional determinations that we get to existence, to reality, to actuality, which are all much more than mere being. His second remark is that the gap between notion and existence is precisely the mark of finitude; it holds for finite objects like one hundred thalers but not for God: God is not something I can have (or not have) in my pocket.

In a first approach, it may seem here that the opposition of Kant and Hegel is ultimately the one between materialism and idealism: Kant insists on a minimum of materialism (the independence of reality with regard to notional determinations), while Hegel totally dissolves reality in its notional determinations. However, Hegel’s true point lies elsewhere: it involves the much more radical “materialist” claim that a complete notional determination of an entity, to which one would only have to add “being” in order to arrive at its existence, is in itself an abstract notion, an empty abstract possibility. The lack of (a certain mode of) being is always also an inherent lack of some notional determination—say, for a thing to exist as part of opaque material reality, a whole set of notional conditions-determinations have to be met (and other determinations to lack). With regard to one hundred thalers (or any other empirical object), this means that their notional determination is abstract, which is why they posses an opaque empirical being and not full actuality. So when Kant draws a parallel between God and one hundred thalers, one should ask a simple and naive question: but does he really possess a (fully developed) concept of God?

This brings us to the true finesse of Hegel’s argumentation, which is directed both against Kant and against Anselm’s classic version of the ontological proof of God. Hegel’s argument against Anselm’s proof is not that it is too conceptual, but that it is not conceptual enough: Anselm does not develop the concept of God, he just refers to it as the sum of all perfections, which, as such, is precisely beyond the comprehension of our finite human mind. Anselm merely presupposes “God” as an impenetrable reality beyond our comprehension (i.e., outside the notional domain). For example, his God is precisely not a concept (something posited by our conceptual work), but a purely presupposed pre- or nonconceptual reality. Along the same lines, albeit in the opposite sense, one should mention the irony that Kant talks about thalers, that is, money, whose existence as money is not objective, but depends on notional determinations. True, as Kant says, it is not the same to have a concept of one hundred thalers and to have them in your pocket; but let us imagine a process of rapid inflation that totally devalues the one hundred thalers is my pocket. Yes, the same object is there in reality, but it is no longer money, just a meaningless and worthless coin. In other words, money is precisely an object whose status depends on how we think about it: if people no longer treat this piece of metal as money, if they no longer believe in it as money, it no longer is money.

With regard to material reality, the ontological proof of God’s existence should thus be turned around: the existence of material reality bears witness to the fact that the Notion is not fully actualized. Things “materially exist” not when they meet certain notional requirements, but when they fail to meet them. Material reality is, as such, a sign of imperfection. With regard to truth, this means that, for Hegel, the truth of a proposition is inherently notional, determined by the immanent notional content, not a matter of comparison between Notion and reality—in Lacanian terms, there is a non-All pas-tout of truth. It may sound strange to evoke Hegel apropos non-All: is Hegel not the philosopher of All par excellence? However, the Hegelian truth is precisely without the external limitation/exception that would serve as its measure-standard, which is why its criterion is absolutely immanent: one compares a statement with itself, with its own process of enunciation.

When Alain Badiou emphasizes the undecidability of a Truth-Event,⁸ his position is radically different from the standard deconstructionist notion of undecidability. For Badiou, undecidability means that there are no neutral “objective” criteria for an Event: an Event appears as such only to those who recognize themselves in its call; or, as Badiou puts it, an Event is self-relating: it includes itself—its own nomination—into its components. While this does mean that one has to decide about an Event, such an ultimately groundless decision is not “undecidable” in the standard sense; it is rather uncannily similar to the Hegelian dialectical process in which, as Hegel already made clear in the introduction to his Phenomenology, a “figure of consciousness” is not measured by any external standard of truth but in an absolutely immanent way, through the gap between itself and its own exemplification/staging. An Event is thus “non-All” in the precise Lacanian sense of the term: it is never fully verified precisely because it is, for example, infinite/illimitedunlimited because there is no external limit to it. And the conclusion to be drawn here is that, for the very same reason, the Hegelian “totality” is also “non-All.”

So, back to our main line, this means that the externality of Nature with regard to the Idea is not that of the Idea’s constitutive exception: it is not that Nature is set free as the exception that guarantees the wholeneness of the Idea’s self-mediation. It is not that, after this mediation is completed (i.e., after the Idea’s dialectical progress can no longer be propelled by the Idea’s own incompleteness, its failure to correspond to its own notion), the completed Idea needs an external Other (Nature) to sustain the complete and closed circle of its self-mediation. Nature is, rather, the mark of the non-All of Idea’s totality. Here is how the early Hegel, still struggling to differentiate himself from the legacy of other German Idealists, formulated this self-relating non-All totality, starting from Kant’s great philosophical breakthrough: in the Kantian transcendental synthesis, “the determinateness of form is nothing but the identity of opposites. As a result, the a priori intellect becomes, at least in principle, a posteriori as well; for a posteriori is nothing but the positing of the opposite.”⁹

In principle, the meaning of this dense passage seems clear: the “determinateness of form” is another name for concrete universality, for the fact that the universal form of a concept generates out of itself its particular content, that it is not merely a form imposed on an independent empirical content. And since the notional universality and the particularity of its content—in short, the a priori of the universal form and the a posteriori of its content—are opposites (precisely the opposites that Kant keeps apart and that are ultimately external to each other, since the immanent transcendental form is imposed onto a content that affects the subject from the outside), the determinateness of form equals the unity of opposites and the fact that content is generated by its form. The trick is how are we to concretely read this identity of the opposites? The standard critical reading satisfies itself by seeing in it the very model of how the Idea mediates/posits all of its particular content, for example, as the extreme “idealist” affirmation of the primacy of a priori over a posteriori. What such a reading clearly misses is the opposite movement: the irreducible “umbilical cord” on account of which every a priori universality remains attached to (colored, “overdetermined” by) the a posteriori, a particular content. To put it somewhat bluntly: yes, the universal notional form imposes necessity upon the multitude of its contingent content, but it does so in a way that remains marked by an irreducible stain of contingency. Or, as Derrida would have put it, the frame itself is always also a part of the enframed content. The logic here is that of the Hegelian gegensaetzliche Bestimmung, the “oppositional determination” in which the universal genus encounters itself among its particular-contingent species. (Marx’s classic example: Among the species of production, there is always one that gives the specific color on the universality of production within a given mode of production. In feudal societies, artisanal production itself is structured like another domain of agriculture, while in capitalism, agriculture itself is “industrialized,” that is, it becomes one of the domains of industrial production.) Hegel introduces this notion of “oppositional determination” in his logic of essence, when he discusses the relationship between identity and difference. His point there is not only that identity is always the identity of identity and difference, but that difference itself is also always the difference between itself and identity. In the same way, it is not only necessity that encompasses itself and contingency, but—also and more fundamentally—it is contingency itself that encompasses itself and necessity. Or, with regard to the tension between essence and appearance, the fact that essence has to appear means not only that essence generates/mediates its appearances, but also that the difference between essence and appearance is internal to appearance: essence has to appear within the domain of appearances, as a hint that “appearances are not all” but “merely appearances.”

Insofar as (in a language) this opposition appears as the opposition between the universal content of meaning and its expression in a contingent particular form (of the signifier), it is no wonder that language provides the ultimate example of this dialectical unity of the opposites:

There is no such thing as a superior language or benchmark idiom. Every language is an instance of the speculative. Philosophy’s role is to show how, in each language, the essential is said and exhibited through the idiom’s accidents.¹⁰

The starting point of a thought has to be all the contingency of one’s own language as the “substance” of one’s thinking: there is no direct path to universal truth through abstracting from the contingencies of one’s “natural” tongue and constructing a new artificial or technical language whose terms would display a precise meaning. This, however, does not mean that a thinker should naively rely on the resources of his language: the starting point of his reflection should rather be the idiosyncrasies of this language, in a way, the redoubled contingencies, contingencies within a contingent (historically relative) order itself. Paradoxically, the path from the contingency (of one’s natural language) to the necessity (of speculative thought) leads through the redoubled contingency: one cannot escape thinking in one’s language, this language is one’s unsurpassable substance; however, thinking means thinking against the language in which one thinks. Language inevitably ossifies our thoughts; it is the medium of the fixed distinction of understanding par excellence. But, while one has to think against the language in which one thinks, one has to do this within language; there is no other option. This is why Hegel precludes the possibility (developed later, especially by Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy) of purifying our natural language of its “irrational” contingencies or of constructing a new artificial language that would faithfully reflect conceptual determinations. In what, then, in language itself are we to find a support for thinking against it? Hegel’s answer is: in what, in language, is not language proper as a formal system—in that which, in a language, is most inconsistent, contingent, idiosyncratic. The paradox is that one can combat the “irrationality” of language on behalf of the immanent notional necessity only if this necessity relies on what is the most “irrational” in language, on redoubled irrationality/contingency, which is similar to the Freudian logic of the dream in which the Real announces itself in the guise of a dream within a dream. What Hegel has in mind here is often uncannily close to Lacan’s notion of lalangue: wordplays, double meanings, and so on. His great example in German is words with opposite or multiple meanings, such as zu Grunde gehen, “disintegrate/fall apart” and, literally, “to go to, to reach, one’s ground,” not even to mention the notorious Aufhebung with its three meanings: to cancel/annihilate, to preserve, to elevate at a higher level. Aufhebung is often put forward as the very example of what is “idealist-metaphysical” about Hegel: does it not signal the very operation by which all external contingency is overcome and integrated into the necessary self-deployment of the universal notion? Against this operation, it is hence fashionable to insist how there is always a remainder of contingency, of particularity, which cannot be aufgehoben, which insists and resists its conceptual (dis)integration. The irony here is that the very term Hegel uses to designate this operation is marked by the irreducible contingency of an idiosyncrasy of the German.

There is no conceptual clarity without lalangue as a starting point, or, to put it in more conceptual terms, not only does necessity express itself in the appearance of contingency, but this necessity itself does not preexist the contingent multitude of appearances as their ground. It itself emerges out of contingency, as a contingency (say, the contingent multiple meaning of Aufhebung) elevated to the necessity of a universal concept.¹¹ Does Freud not intend something strictly homologous with his notions of symptoms, jokes, and slips of the tongue? An inner necessity can only articulate itself through the contingency of a symptom, and, vice versa, this necessity (say, the constant urge of a repressed desire) comes to be through this articulation. Here, also, necessity does not only preexist contingency: when Lacan says that repression and the return of the repressed (in symptomal formations) are the front and the obverse of one and the same process, the implication of this is precisely that the necessity (of the repressed content) hinges on the contingency (of its articulation in symptoms). Critics of Hegel emphasize only the first aspect (necessity as the inner principle dominating its contingent expressions), neglecting the second one, for example, how this necessity itself hinges on contingency, how it is nothing but contingency elevated into the form of necessity.

So, to pursue our rather tasteless metaphor, Hegel was not a sublimated coprophague, as the usual notion of the dialectical process would lead us to believe. The matrix of the dialectical process is not that of excrementation-externalization followed up by swallowing up (reappropriation) of the externalized content, but, on the contrary, of appropriation followed up by the excremental move of dropping it, releasing it, letting it go. What this means is that one should not equate externalization with alienation: the externalization, which concludes a cycle of dialectical process, is not alienation; it is the highest point of disalienation: one really reconciles oneself with some objective content not when one still has to strive to master and control it, but when one can afford the supreme sovereign gesture of releasing this content from oneself, of setting it free. This is why, incidentally, as some perspicuous interpreters pointed out, far from subduing Nature totally to man, Hegel opens up an unexpected space for ecological awareness: for Hegel, the drive to technologically exploit nature is still a mark of man’s finitude; in such an attitude, nature is perceived as an external object, an opposing force to be dominated, while a philosopher, from his standpoint of Absolute Knowing, does not experience nature as a threatening foreign field to be controlled and dominated, but as something to be left to follow its inherent path.

What this means is that the Hegelian Subject-Substance has nothing to do with some kind of mega-Subject who controls the dialectical process, pulling its strings: there is no one pulling the strings and controlling the process—the Hegelian system is a plane without a pilot. Here Louis Althusser was wrong when he opposed the Hegelian Subject-Substance, the “teleological” process-with-a-subject, to the materialist-dialectical “process without a subject.” The Hegelian dialectical process is the most radical version of a “process without a subject” in the sense of an agent controlling and directing it, be it God or humanity or class as a collective subject—in his late writings, Althusser starts to become aware of this. What Althusser is thoroughly unaware of is how the fact that the Hegelian dialectical process is a “process without a subject” (in the sense of a controlling agent) means exactly the same as Hegel’s fundamental thesis that “it is crucial to grasp the Absolute not only as Substance, but also as Subject”: the emergence of a pure subject qua void is strictly correlative to the notion of “system” as the self-deployment of the object itself with no need for any subjective agent to push it forward or to direct it.

What critics of Hegel’s voracity need is, perhaps, a dosage of a good laxative.

1. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), vol. 3, p. 127.

5. Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 156.

6. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), para. 244.

8. Alain Badiou, L’etre et l’evenement (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1989).

9. G. W. F. Hegel, “Glauben und Wissen,” in Jenaer Kritische Schriften (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1968), vol. 3, p. 26.

11. And Hegel was far from conceding any priority to German language—an interesting biographical detail: when, in the 1810s, he was considering the invitation of a Dutch friend to accept a university post in Amsterdam, he not only started to learn Dutch but immediately bombarded his friend with requests to inform him on Dutch-language idiosyncrasies such as wordplays, so that he would be able to develop his thoughts in Dutch.