THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

interpret these issues as an expression of cultural and existential concerns.” 1 This
interpretation has a degree of plausibility in light of Hegel’s intellectual development.
During the 1790s, for instance, Hegel showed far more interest in Rousseau, the French
Revolution, and the social aspects of religion than he did in the more theoretical debates
about the completion of transcendental idealism. It was not until 1801, with the
publication of the Differenzschrift, that Hegel showed a marked interest in the more
abstruse problems of theoretical philosophy. Thus while Hegel sees the Science of Logic
and the Encyclopedia as the ground of his social and political philosophy, one might
argue that his intellectual development and the genesis of his thought suggest the
conceptual priority of the social and the political aspects of his thought over those that are
metaphysical.
Wood also justifies his non-systematic and non-metaphysical interpretation of the
Philosophy of Right in terms of the Wirkungsgeschichte of Hegel’s corpus. Wood notes:
“If Hegel understood his philosophy as the activity of pure thought-thinking itself, its
legacy has rather been that of enabling us to understand how all human thought expresses
its concrete social and cultural context.” 2 If Hegel conceived his philosophy as a grand
metaphysical system in the tradition of continental rationalism, as the apotheosis of pure
thought, then the legacy of his philosophy proved highly ironic, at least according to
Wood. With the exception of the British Hegelians, who receive significant attention in
Chapters Two and Three of this dissertation, most philosophers who have drawn
inspiration from Hegel’s work have developed his thought in explicitly non-metaphysical
1 Hegel’s Ethical Thought, p. 6.
2 Hegel’s Ethical Thought, p. 6.
2