Abstract

In addressing the immensity of Hegel’s system, books of brief essays by different authors often seem at once helpful and hopeless. Helpful because that immensity is often daunting and we must find ourselves inclined to localize, to seek particular points of contact from which we might begin fruitfully to engage with the system and find our way into it. Hopeless because Hegel himself seems to warn us against such an endeavor; for there is, he tells us, no “royal road to science.” To grasp Spirit we must grasp its entire movement, and to know any part we must know the whole which is the immanent movement of those parts. The only place to begin is at the beginning and it is a long road.