Jon Stewart is studying Hegel at the Kierkegaard Institute. He finished his dissertation at the University of California at San Diego in 1992. He then studied in Germany and received his post-doctoral grants in Germany and Belgium; in 1996, he received an appointment at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center, working on different topics in 19th century German and Danish philosophy, primarily concerning Kierkegaard’s relationship to German and Papal idealism.
: Why study Hegel in particular?
Stewart: My actual point of departure was Hegel. I wrote my dissertation on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I was attracted to a number of things in Hegel’s philosophy. It was primarily because he is so important to the development of European philosophy. I also had interest in Existentialism and Phenomenology but when I had to make decision on what to write my dissertation on, I was thinking tactically more than anything else. I thought if I could start with a good knowledge of Hegel, it would be much easier in terms of providing me with an understanding of the later movements as opposed to the other way around. For instance, if I were to write on the late movements it would be much be harder to go back.
: So, Hegel is a bit more fundamental?
Stewart: I think so. I think there’s a consensus that that’s the case. If you can understand Hegel, you can understand the subsequent developments of Phenomenology, Existentialism, Marxism, Modernism, Critical Theory; they all have their roots in Hegel’s philosophy.
: How would you characterize Hegel’s key points and what he contributed to philosophy?
Stewart: I guess his original contribution is, in my mind, that he is really the philosopher who introduced history as a philosophical topic. There are some philosophers who, going back to antiquity, had a certain view of the philosophy of history, like Augustine, for example. But Hegel was really the one to bring the philosophy of history into a really legitimate and independent philosophical field; his understanding of the development of cultural history and the history of the arts and philosophy. He has this picture of the grand sweep of things which I think is fascinating. Nobody anymore even dares to do such a thing. So, there is a certain pretension in his approach, but there’s a certain fascination with it as well. So, I guess that would be the thing I would try to get across to students; in contrast to other philosophers, who might have detailed philosophical systems that are concentrated on development of concepts, he is concluding history as a concept and thereby enriching philosophy in a way that hadn’t been done up until that point.
: Can you give an example?
Stewart: Sure. It was his understanding of history as basically a concept of freedom that the human spirit is trying to achieve at some conscious or unconscious level. It breaks forth at certain historical epochs and periods and is only achieved through some conflicts of historical peoples or within certain societies. So he gives an interpretation of certain concepts that are still with us today, where we have traditional societies in conflict with modern societies. Do we want to live in a society where there’s a rigid class system and prearranged marriages or do we buy into the autonomy of the individual and his interpretation that this “spirit of freedom for autonomy,” which is becoming ever-more present in history, is breaking forth and is breaking off the shackles of the repressive institutions of the past?
: Your previous work was on the historical implications of Hegel and you’re currently looking into things that you see as being more applicable.
Stewart: It is more a methodology shift than anything else, and it’s not even a shift since I continue to do the historical stuff, but the background of this is, as we do more with my research on Kierkegaard and less with Hegel, that when I first came to Copenhagen, I didn’t know Danish, I didn’t know much about the cultural background in which Kierkegaard was writing, but the more I found about it, the more it became a revelation to me. There were texts that I thought I knew and understood, and it turned out [that] when I read certain other writers that he was in dialogue with and wanted to criticize, it cast them in a totally new light; that led me to the conclusion that for me to really understand his texts in a more adequate fashion, I was going to have to familiarize myself with the background of debate in Golden Age Denmark. That’s what I’ve spent the last 5 or 10 years doing. That’s led me to adopt a rather historical method. Of course, these questions of methodology are always a bit ideological; when one has a certain historical method, in some circles that one is quickly dismissed as a historian and not a philosopher. And that’s the type of prejudice I’d like to counter by developing some other sorts of papers or books which approach Kierkegaard or Hegel with more of a standard kind of methodology, and not the strictly historical one.
: Would you embrace the existence of Hegelian philosophy and, if so, would you find how to make it applicable nowadays?
Stewart: Hegel’s philosophy is a huge family. After his death, there were a number of different Hegel schools that developed a number of competing interpretations, but I think if one wants to talk about the enduring importance of Hegel’s philosophy, one can talk about his dialectical methodology. His critical view of culture has given us certain tools by which I think we can evaluate our own cultural institutions or evaluate the development of art, or literature. Yeah, I think they’re enduring. I think that those are not purely time-bound things that are no longer relevant now. Even though it’s 150 years after his death, I think they can still be used and applied.
: Could you give an example of Hegelian philosophy in action? How you might apply it to a problem?
Stewart: There is a tendency in political debate today to immediately take one predetermined side or the other, and it’s just a yes-or-no, right-or-wrong kind of thing for most people. But, Hegel offers this word of caution right away: he says, “Look. Let’s look at the political institutions or let’s look at the law that’s in question and try to find the rationality that’s there, and then let’s debate that, and then it’s a little harder than the question of right-or-wrong, yes-or-no, when you’re debating the intrinsic rationality of a certain law or institution or policy; and to me that’s the source of a much more interesting political debate than just a “knee jerk reaction.”
: To develop our own ideas through discourse rather assume a dogmatic mind set….
Stewart: Yeah, that’s right. Through philosophical discourse, if we are all in this philosophical game, then we can all agree on reason and we can convince each other on the basis of the best evidence and arguments and we can come to an agreement, if it is a just law, if it is a rational institution or [if] it’s not, and that’s something that can be determined in the philosophical form.
: You attribute this rationality, this evolution of ideology, I suppose, to Hegel then?
Stewart: I think he is one of the strongest advocates of it and people in the Frankfurt school have developed it further but they themselves have openly acknowledged their debt to Hegel in that point.
: How would you characterize the purpose of philosophy?
Stewart: My approach has always been involved in a tension. You have the Aristotelian view that philosophy begins with wonder. So, it’s simply a question of explanation trying to gain a deeper insight into the workings of the universe. But then there’s another aspect of me, maybe the more Existential, Kierkegaarden dimension, where I say it must also have something to do with practice. You don’t want to be just some philosopher in the ivory tower. You have profound understanding about certain things, but so what, right? So for a long time, I’ve had interest in Existentialism and the philosophical schools that try to tease out the dialectic of this knowledge for its own sake or knowledge for some applied point. And I can’t say that I’ve resolved this dichotomy in my own mind. I think that philosophy’s mission has got to be some combination of the two.
: Some combination of achieving higher understanding and actually applying it?
Stewart: Yeah, that’s right. That it’s got to have some insight of its own, but that insight has to have some sort of relevance; it has to be able to be used to help improve our lives.
: What would you say to someone who questions the value of studying a philosopher who’s been dead for 150 years?
Stewart [laughing]: I’m used to this sort of criticism! Particularly when one does historical research in the way I do, you often meet someone who says, “Who cares? This is a book published 200 years ago? What’s its relevance today?” The test of a true or profound philosophy is that it raises certain issues that are recurrent, that are relevant, in many different time periods. We were talking earlier here about discussion of the universe in particular. That is really a defining problem for the entire history of philosophy that goes back 2000 years. It can take many different forms and many different historical periods but it still seems to be a basic issue there that the human mind has continually wrestled with.
Stacey Ake teaches Philosophy in Drexel's Department of English and Philosophy. While much of her primary writing is on semiotics and existentialism, she has also written about the role magic realism plays in women's literature.