Aphorisms from Hegel’s Wastebook

Abstract

The paper surveys Hegel’s early aphorisms from his Wastebook first published by K. Rosenkranz. In his Hegel biography, Rosenkranz admires these critical xenias for their beauty and their poignance. They are chance but concise little products that are to reappear in Hegel’s introduction to The Phenomenology of the Spirit. They show the process through which Hegel sheds the mythical perspective he inherited from Schelling’s philosophy. György Lukács also considers these notes important as traces of Hegel’s maturing thought and methodological development in Jena during his early years. There are approximately one hundred notes which can be arranged into five topics: religion, philosophy as science, methodological problems of the principle of dialectics, the intellectual and political status of Germany. These ideas will be expanded on in Hegel’s early volumes, primarily in The Phenomenology of the Spirit.