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As dictums go, Hegel’s Doppelsatz—“what is rational is actual [wirklich]; and what is actual is rational”—has a nice ring to it, right up there with “existence precedes essence” and “revenge is a dish best served cold.” Still, it has long befuddled readers: what does it mean, and what does it suggest about Hegel’s worldview?
Anyone looking for answers to these questions would do well to consult the essays in Wirklichkeit. Beiträge zu einem Schlüsselbegriff der Hegelschen Philosophie. The essays are grouped into two sets of six, with the first tending toward theoretical, the second toward practical issues in Hegel. Their gravitational center is the Logic’s technical concept of Wirklichkeit—“the unity of essence and existence” (Hegel, GW 11:369, 3)—which is normally translated as “actuality” to distinguish it from “reality” (Realität), which signifies existence in its immediate, factical contingency (Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer and Jean-François Kervégan are excellent on this distinction).
But this distinction is no sooner made in individual essays than abandoned as a guiding thread in the collection, whose focus broadens to realism, antirealism, and idealism in Hegel’s system in historical and contemporary philosophical contexts. The latter sense of ‘real’ pertains to mind-independent objectivity,...