Benedetto Croce • What is Living and what is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel

Benedetto Croce • What is Living and what is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel

translated by Douglas Ainslie from the italian
Croce's appreciation of Hegel was always as ambivalent as the title of his famous study suggests. Indeed, although related to two of the major 19th century exponents of Italian Hegelianism – Bertrando and Silvio Spaventa his first encounter with Hegel had been one of almost total rejection. As he wrote to the philosopher Donato Jaja in 1892, ‘I believe that the fundamental principles, and especially the method, of that system are entirely erroneous; and the damaging consequences of this error will become plain when applied to particular disciplines’. The study of Marx and the influence of Gentile and Labriola, however, led him to review his earlier position and in 1906 to translate the Encyclopedia and to write the accompanying book What is living and what is dead in the Philosophy of Hegel. Thereafter Croce, who had already completed his Aesthetic (1902) and the first edition of the Logic (1905), was increasingly to present his own philosophy as a sustained commentary on, and development of, Hegel's philosophy. An examination of his classic study of Hegel thus provides an important insight into salient features of Croce's own philosophical system as it later developed.

"This little volume appears together with my translation of Hegel’s Ency-clopedia of Philosophical Sciences made for the series Classics of Modern Phi-losophy, published by the same press and edited by me and my friend, Professor Giovanni Gentile. According to the plan of that series, the introductions to each text are of a purely philological nature, excluding any discussion of a critical-philosophical kind. But I have been unable to resist my desire to put into writing the critical-philosophical introduction to Hegel’s work that has taken shape in my mind – my views on the merits and demerits of Hegel’s philosophy. Naturally, since I had not the least intention of breaking my own rule, I am now publishing this text of mine not as an introduction but as a book standing on its own.This suffices to clarify the purpose, character, and limits of this work.In hopes that the translation of the Encyclopedia, along with these criti-cal inquiries of mine, might help reawaken in Italy the study of a phil-osophical giant like Hegel, I have added to my text a bibliography of Hegel’s works and studies dealing with them. This grew out of a series of notes made originally for my own use, and it is certainly less than a com-plete bibliography of Hegel would require, though it is still something more than the bibliographical lists available up to now."

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. .

Nabu Press, Paperback, english, 246 pages