Who Thinks Abstractly?

Five light pages of murderers, market women and rotten eggs, arguing that the abstract thinker is not the philosopher but the man in the street.

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel11 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Wer denkt abstrakt?
First published: 1835(published posthumously)
Original language: German

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Overview

A reader who meets the words thinking and abstract in a title, this essay begins, will run from it as from someone carrying the plague. Hegel answers his own question at once: the uneducated person thinks abstractly, not the educated one. To think abstractly, in his sense, is to seize on one feature of a person and let it blot out everything else. The crowd watching a murderer led to execution sees nothing but a murderer. A market woman told that her eggs are rotten turns on the customer's whole family — a father eaten by lice, a mother who ran off with French soldiers — and on the holes in her stockings. In the Prussian army an officer treats a private as a man who may be beaten and as nothing more. Whoever asks how the murderer came to be what he became thinks concretely, and so, Hegel adds, does an old woman from the poorhouse who saw the sun shining on the severed head and took it for a sign of God's grace. It was first printed in 1835, four years after Hegel's death, in his collected works, and Walter Kaufmann's English translation appeared in 1966 beside the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit in his Hegel: Texts and Commentary. When it was written is unknown. It mentions readers of the Morgenblatt, a magazine for the educated public, and is usually placed around 1807, in Hegel's years at Bamberg, though nothing settles the date.

Key concepts

What does 'thinking abstractly' mean in this essay?

To think abstractly is to seize on one feature of a person and let it wipe out everything else about them. Hegel's first case is a murderer led to execution. To the common crowd he is nothing but a murderer, and when some ladies remark that he is a strong, handsome man, the crowd is shocked. They have reduced a whole human being to a single quality.

Can kindness be abstract too?

Yes. In Leipzig, Hegel reports, sensitive people decked the wheel and the criminal bound to it with garlands of flowers. That, he says, is the opposite abstraction: instead of seeing only the crime, it sees only a victim to be pitied, and patches over the evil with sentiment. He calls it a reconciliation in the manner of Kotzebue, the popular playwright, a loose tolerance between feeling and wrong.

How is the cross different from the Leipzig garlands?

The cross, Hegel notes, was once a gallows, an instrument of shameful punishment. Christianity did not decorate it; it transformed its meaning, so that it now holds together the deepest pain and rejection with the highest joy and divine honour. The Leipzig garlands, by contrast, leave the wheel what it was and only hide it under violets and poppies, which is why one is reconciliation and the other sentimentality.

Why does the essay refuse to explain what 'thinking' and 'abstract' mean?

Because, Hegel jokes, good society already knows, and that is exactly why it runs away. Nobody can hate what they do not know. So he does not try to smuggle philosophy into light conversation or shame his readers into it. He simply asks who does the abstract thinking, and answers with examples from the street that every reader will recognise.

Themes of the book

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

One trait for the whole person

Is abstract thinking the vice of philosophers or of the street? Hegel turns the insult around: whoever reduces a person to a single label is the abstract thinker.

Readers flee the words thinking and abstract as if from the plague; Hegel answers his title at once: the uneducated person thinks abstractly, not the educated. To think abstractly is to seize one feature of a person and let it blot out everything else, as a crowd sees only a murderer in a condemned man, or a market woman accused of selling rotten eggs damns the buyer's family. Whoever asks how the murderer became one thinks concretely, and so does an old woman who sees God's grace in the sun on his head.

abstraction
moral judgment
irony
rhetoric
education
personhood
social prejudice
punishment
human dignity
social status
dehumanization
reconciliation
sentimentality
religious grace
social critique
criminal justice
social hierarchy
master-servant relations
military hierarchy
philosophical language

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Within this work

passages held: 11
distinct concepts: 29
by passages held, corpus-wide: #813

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)
Of Hegel's reviews for the Critical Journal, the most openly mocking: the journal's programme of severity turned on a single named Kantian.
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?) you are here 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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