"It was also Hegel who established the view that the different philosophic systems that we find in history are to be comprehended in terms of development and that they are generally one-sided because they owe their origins to a reaction against what has gone before"
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Kaufmann is praising Hegel while quietly warning you not to treat philosophy like a cabinet of curiosities. The hook is “development”: Hegel’s big move was to make intellectual history intelligible as a sequence with pressure, direction, and stakes, not a pile of disconnected “isms.” That frame flatters philosophy with narrative coherence, but it also disciplines the reader. If systems are moments in a development, then cherry-picking your favorite doctrine starts to look like bad historiography, maybe even bad faith.
The sharper subtext sits in “generally one-sided.” Kaufmann isn’t just summarizing Hegel; he’s endorsing a diagnostic method. Philosophical systems become reactive, born from resistance to what came before, so their strengths are also their distortions. Rationalism overcorrects for superstition; empiricism overcorrects for metaphysical excess; existentialism overcorrects for bloodless abstraction. “One-sided” isn’t an insult so much as a structural claim: any system gains clarity by narrowing its target, and pays for that clarity by omitting something real.
Context matters: Kaufmann spent his career translating, curating, and rescuing 19th-century thinkers (especially Nietzsche) from simplifications. His Hegel here is a tool for intellectual empathy. Read a philosophy as an answer to a prior problem, and you stop asking whether it’s “right” in the abstract and start asking what it was trying to fix, what it had to ignore to do so, and what new blind spots it created. That’s also a subtle rebuke to academic taxonomy: if ideas are reactive developments, then intellectual life is conflict-driven, not syllabus-driven.
The sharper subtext sits in “generally one-sided.” Kaufmann isn’t just summarizing Hegel; he’s endorsing a diagnostic method. Philosophical systems become reactive, born from resistance to what came before, so their strengths are also their distortions. Rationalism overcorrects for superstition; empiricism overcorrects for metaphysical excess; existentialism overcorrects for bloodless abstraction. “One-sided” isn’t an insult so much as a structural claim: any system gains clarity by narrowing its target, and pays for that clarity by omitting something real.
Context matters: Kaufmann spent his career translating, curating, and rescuing 19th-century thinkers (especially Nietzsche) from simplifications. His Hegel here is a tool for intellectual empathy. Read a philosophy as an answer to a prior problem, and you stop asking whether it’s “right” in the abstract and start asking what it was trying to fix, what it had to ignore to do so, and what new blind spots it created. That’s also a subtle rebuke to academic taxonomy: if ideas are reactive developments, then intellectual life is conflict-driven, not syllabus-driven.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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