How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy

A Kantian dared the idealists to deduce the pen on his desk; Hegel answered with a review that made fun of him down to his surname.

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel37 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Wie der gemeine Menschenverstand die Philosophie nehme
First published: 1802(aged 32)
Original language: German

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Overview

The objection still goes by its author's name: Krug's pen. Wilhelm Traugott Krug, a young Kantian lecturer at Wittenberg, published two books of letters against Fichte and Schelling in 1800 and 1801, and in them he made what looked like a modest request. If idealism really derives the world from the self, let it derive one ordinary thing — the moon, a rose, a dog, or simply the pen he was writing with — and he would sign the whole system with that very pen. Hegel's review, printed unsigned in the Critical Journal in 1802 and covering those letters together with Krug's outline of a new method for philosophy, argues that the request misunderstands what philosophy is for. Nothing can be understood alone: the moon makes no sense without the solar system, and a pen is the kind of passing, accidental object that philosophy has no business deducing at all. The things that do concern it, Hegel wrote, are living forms and historical figures — an oak or a horse, Moses or Alexander — and all of them lie nearer to philosophy than Krug's pen. Krug is German for a jug, and the review turns cruel when Hegel pictures Krug's attempt to reconcile the schools as a jug of Reinhold's water, stale Kantian beer and an Enlightenment syrup he called Berlinism. Krug's career did not suffer: within a few years he held Kant's old chair at Königsberg, and from 1809 he taught at Leipzig for more than thirty years. Hegel came back to the pen years later, in a note to the philosophy of nature in his Encyclopaedia, where he conceded that the accidents of nature set real limits to what philosophy can derive.

Key concepts

What exactly did Krug's pen challenge ask for?

Krug asked idealism to deduce, that is, to derive by necessary steps from its first principle, one particular thing with all its features: the moon, a rose, a horse, a dog, iron, an oak, or simply his own pen. If an idealist managed it, he wrote, he would sign the whole system with that very pen. He was sure no idealist would even try.

What does it mean for philosophy to deduce something?

To deduce something is to show that it follows necessarily from a principle, so that it could not be otherwise. Hegel's point against Krug is that necessity belongs to wholes and to living forms, not to accidents. The moon's place follows from the order of the solar system; that a particular pen exists, with its nib and its owner, follows from nothing philosophy could know.

What is Krug's 'transcendental synthetism'?

It is Krug's name for his own position: realism and idealism joined inseparably, so that both the self and outside things count as real. Hegel treats it as a stir-together rather than a thought. He pictures it as a jug holding stale Kantian beer, an Enlightenment syrup called Berlinism and other ingredients, all there by chance, while someone tastes them one by one and calls the list a system.

Who is 'the ordinary human understanding' in the title?

It is common sense taking philosophy at its word as if it spoke about everyday objects. Krug stands for it: he reads the idealists' promise to deduce 'the whole system of our representations' as a promise to produce every dog, cat and pen. For Hegel this is understanding philosophy the way the crowd would, and missing that philosophy's object is the whole, beginning with God.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

What philosophy owes an explanation of

Must a philosophy of the world be able to derive every object on a desk? Krug assumed so and dared the idealists to try; Hegel answers that it owes an account of the whole, and of what lives.

Krug, a Kantian lecturer at Wittenberg, asked the idealists to derive one ordinary thing, the moon, a rose, a dog, or simply the pen he wrote with, and promised to sign their system with that pen. Hegel replies that nothing is understood in isolation. The moon cannot be grasped without the whole solar system, whose knowledge is reason's highest task, while a pen is a passing accident that philosophy has no business deducing. Oaks, horses and great individuals lie nearer to it. Krug's own cure, a blend of every school, gets a jug of ridicule.

transcendental idealism
critique
idealism
philosophical method
common sense
irony
knowledge
self-consciousness
empirical consciousness
philosophical criticism
reason
polemics
synthesis
first principles
deduction
necessity
realism
the absolute
external world
philosophical systems
transcendental philosophy

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 37
distinct concepts: 89
by passages held, corpus-wide: #692

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “critique” and “idealism”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 18 pairings. 37 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
critique	idealism	4
idealism	philosophical method	4
critique	empirical consciousness	3
critique	knowledge	3
critique	philosophical method	3
common sense	transcendental idealism	2
empirical consciousness	idealism	2
irony	philosophical method	2
common sense	philosophical method	1
critique	irony	1
critique	transcendental idealism	1
empirical consciousness	knowledge	1
empirical consciousness	philosophical method	1
empirical consciousness	transcendental idealism	1
idealism	irony	1
idealism	transcendental idealism	1
irony	transcendental idealism	1
knowledge	philosophical method	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1801 The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy (Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie)
The book that opened Hegel's Jena years and first put his name before the public — as Schelling's ally, a role his essays for their Critical Journal continued.
DE
1802 Faith and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen)
Written at the height of the alliance with Schelling: the longest of Hegel's pieces for their journal, and his fullest early reckoning with Kant.
DE
1802 How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy (Wie der gemeine Menschenverstand die Philosophie nehme) you are here DE
1802 On the Essence of Philosophical Criticism (Über das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik überhaupt)
Unsigned, and claimed for both editors ever since: the programme at the head of the journal Hegel and Schelling ran in 1802–03, which Hegel's reviews in its later issues put into practice.
DE
1802 On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law (Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts)
Spread across the Critical Journal's last two issues: Hegel's longest published early writing on law and the state, composed while he was still an unsalaried lecturer at Jena.
DE
1802 Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy (Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie)
Between the Krug review and Faith and Knowledge in the Critical Journal's run, the essay in which Hegel first says what doubt does for philosophy.
DE
1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (Die Phänomenologie des Geistes)
Written as Napoleon's army entered Jena and published in 1807, the book Hegel meant as the doorway into his system — and the one many readers still enter him through.
DE
1812 Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik)
The larger of Hegel's two versions of the Logic, written away from any university while he ran a Nuremberg school; the metaphysical core the rest of the system rests on.
DE
1817 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline (Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse)
The frame for Hegel's other books: its first part condenses the Science of Logic, and the Philosophy of Right expands one section of its third part. Hegel taught from it and rewrote it twice.
DEEN
1821 Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts)
The last book Hegel published in his lifetime apart from new editions of the Encyclopaedia: the textbook of his Berlin law lectures, and the one of his books most argued over by political readers.
DE
1831 On the English Reform Bill (Über die englische Reformbill)
Some three decades after his first, unpublished pamphlets on Württemberg and on the German constitution, Hegel's last venture into the politics of the day.
DE
1833 Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie)
Among the posthumous lecture books, the course Hegel carried through nearly his whole teaching life, and the one that closes on his thanks to the students who had followed it.
DE
1835 The Philosophy of Fine Art (Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik)
Not a book Hegel wrote but Berlin lectures assembled by a student after his death — the most influential philosophy of art of the nineteenth century, and a contested reconstruction of it.
EN
1835 Who Thinks Abstractly? (Wer denkt abstrakt?)
Hegel in the manner of a magazine essayist: short, comic and aimed at the general reader, though he never published it himself.
DE
1837 Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte)
For decades the most widely read of Hegel's works, and now the most contested — lectures on world history, published after his death, reading it as the growth of human freedom.
DE

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