It was only to be expected that the radicality of Hegel’s philosophy would be missed. Not missed entirely, for the Phenomenology’s central concern with temporality cannot be denied. But it was relegated to the first seven chapters of that work, with the final chapter viewed as climbing up and out of time itself, from history into traditional philosophy, with its claims to truth above time. I have argued elsewhere (Time and Philosophy pp. 39-42) that this is an utter misunderstanding of that chapter: when Hegel moves on to his System, he does not write a statement of anything permanent, let alone eternal, but constructs a wildly revisable fugue of definitions (see Understanding Hegel’s Mature Critique of Kant, Chapter One).
But this went unrecognized at the time, and Hegel was divided into a youthful, radical Hegel, who wrote the Phenomenology (except the embarrassing Chapter Eight), and a traditional late Hegel (that chapter and the later “systematic” writings). Each Hegel attracted its own group of Hegelians. The older of these took the late Hegel as their master and expounded his philosophy as a giant proof that everything that existed was somehow a part of God, which made them very conservative. The Young Hegelians took the Phenomenology as their incitement, and operated as if everything they could talk about had beginnings and endings in time. Since the Old Hegelians had made Hegel’s supposedly divine Absolute the lynchpin of their conservatism, the Young Hegelians waged their war against them as a critique of religion.
The Young Hegelians won that war, but lost it as well. They won it by becoming much more influential than their older counterparts. Many people know of Ludwig Feuerbach, the early Zionist Moses Hess, Karl Marx, and Max Stirner (the more brilliant avatar of Ayn Rand); who today but a specialist has heard of Leopold von Henning, Philip Marheineke or J. K. W. Vatke? But what they won philosophically, the Young Hegelians lost personally: their political and religious radicalism denied them university careers. Some of them lived off small inheritances (Hess, Stirner); others became journalists (Arnold Ruge, Marx) or were supported by wealthy friends (Marx again). Feuerbach apparently became a grifter, moving to a town, running up debts, and then moving again. It is one of the saddest stories in the history of philosophy. (For more on the Young Hegelians, see the “Introduction” to Lawrence S. Stepelevich (ed.), The Young Hegelians Cambridge, 1983).
Their sad fates turned out to constitute an early phase of an enduring problem: philosophy, it seems, fits ill within the modern university. For the university is an institution, and institutions need financial support. This can only come from the upper reaches of society, from political and economic leaders, and upper reaches are never happy with radical critique—or even with radical questioning; Socrates was hardly the last to find this out (even teachings of Aquinas, later a saint, were condemned by the Catholic church in 1277). We will hear more of this; for the moment, it meant the exclusion of the best and brightest of a generation from German universities altogether.
But universities still had philosophy departments—needed to have them, for excluding such an ancient and prestigious domain would impugn their very reason for being, which was the impartial search for truth. And those departments needed, as the 19th Century wore on, to make hires. Whom did they hire? Those who were not the best and brightest: those who were not quite as sharp, those who were a little bit lazier, those who from an abundance of personal caution abjured the dangerous work of thinking for themselves. In short, German philosophy abandoned Hegel altogether, returned to a (bowdlerized) Kant,[1] and sank into an intellectual morass. Lewis White Beck describes it as follows:
….men entered and left the [Neo-Kantian] movement as if it were a church or political party; members of one school blocked the appointments and promotions of members of the others; eminent Kant scholars and philosophers who did not found their own schools or accommodate themselves to one of the established schools tended to be neglected as outsiders and contemned as amateurs.
White Beck, “Neo-Kantianism” in Edwards, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy V. 428.
This situation continued for almost the entire 19th Century; it is no accident that Frege was in a mathematics department, or that Nietzsche was a classicist; neither could stand the theistic prattle of the philosophers. Not until the 1890’s did respectable philosophy re-emerge in German philosophy departments, and then it was in politically safe forms of Kantianism—the phenomenologists at Göttingen and later Freiburg, the Logical Positivists in Vienna and Berlin, and the neo-Kantians at Marburg—all avoiding the new, temporalized approach pioneered by Hegel, who, as today, was never read and little remembered.
[1] The bowdlerizing consisted mainly in systematic underplaying of the Third Critique, for which see ## 24 and25