Hegel’s Organic Systematicity

Kant, Reinhold, and Hegel on the Debate on Philosophy as a Systematic Science

Abstract

When discussing Hegel’s philosophy, it is common to refer to it as Hegel’s system of philosophy. Hegel himself emphasizes that philosophy to be a science must be systematic. A significant scholarly debate focuses on the nature of Hegel’s system. Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, in his article ‘The Question of System: How to Read the Development from Kant to Hegel’ (2006), challenges the conventional view that Hegel constructs a system. Instead, Stekeler-Weithofer argues that Hegel builds an encyclopedia, which is an ordered disposition of different realms of knowledge rather than an axiomatic-deductive system. This paper aims to shed light on this issue by arguing that Stekeler-Weithofer’s position is in part accurate and in part inaccurate. Stekeler-Weithofer correctly asserts that Hegel does not align with a deductive notion of system the contents of which are derived from a set of axioms. However, the claim that Hegel does not construct a system is not entirely persuasive. By building on the contributions of Salvi Turró and Karin de Boer, I propose that the foundationalist understanding of a system is an oversimplification of Kant’s philosophy made by Reinhold. In opposition to Stekeler-Weithofer’s claim, I argue that Hegel does strive for constructing a system of philosophy, envisioning it as an organic system.