• Justin Burke
    0
    Most Hegel scholars are familiar with the lithograph of Hegel in his study by Julius Ludwig Sebbers:
    zv3py2mhqiav6jis.jpg
    The print shows Hegel seated at his desk wearing a dressing gown and beret in 1828, when Hegel would have been 57 or 58.
    Hegel is surrounded by books and papers, but the only legible inscriptions appear to be:
    PLATO:
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    and
    ARISTOTELES:
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    The Plato looks convincing, but Aristotle looks more like an afterthought ... and, further, Plato occupies a prominent position on Hegel's desk, while Aristotle is propped up by a table leg on the floor.
    How should we interpret this?
    In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel says:
    69hmvqfcyswaligf.jpg
    Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 2nd edition, vol. 2, edited by C.L. Michelet, 1842, p. 147
    TRANSLATION:
    The development of philosophic science as science, and, further, the progress from the Socratic point of view to the scientific, begins with Plato and is completed by Aristotle. They of all others deserve to be called teachers of the human race. (Haldane/Simson translation, 1894, vol. 2, p. 1)
    So Hegel obviously has a high opinion of both ancient Greek philosophers, but if we take into account that in part one of the Encyclopedia (Logic), Hegel says:
    Plato is called the inventor of the dialectic, and rightfully so, insofar as in the Platonic philosophy the dialectic occurs for the first time in its free, scientific and thus at the same time objective form.
    (Encyclopedia Logic, Brinkmann/Dahlstrom translation, 2010, §81 Z1)
    Combine that with his refutation of what he calls in §115 "the so-called laws of thinking", and it is possible that we could be seeing a visual representation of the superiority of dialectic over Aristotelian logic.

    On a final note, Hegel's mahogany desk in the picture still exists and may be found at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin:
    w68piuhuopmay564.jpg
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