Background
Hyppolite, Jean was born in 1907.
Hyppolite, Jean was born in 1907.
Held various academic posts, including that of Maître de Conférences, Faculty of Letters, University of Strasbourg.
Main publications:(1939) Hegel: la Phénoménologie de l'Esprit, vol. I, Paris: Aubier.(1941) Hegel: ta Phénoménologie de l’Esprit, vol. II, Paris: Aubier.(1947) Genèse et structure à la Phénoménologie de l'Esprit de Hegel, Paris: Aubier.(1948) Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire de Hegel, Paris: Rivière.(1955) Etudes sur Marx et Hegel, Paris: Rivière (English translation. Studies on Marx and Hegel, New York: Basic Books, 1969).
Jean Hyppolite was one of a group of French scholars who contributed to, and worked within, the revival of Hegelian studies in France in the mid-twentieth century. This revival was due to three factors: the rediscovery of some of Hegel’s early works, which had been commented on by Wilhelm Dilthey and were published in 1907 by Dilthey’s former student Herman Nohl. The interest in Marx and his philosophical development.
And the courses of lectures given by Alexandre Kojève at the École Pratique des Hautes Études between 1933 and 1939. Prior to this renewal of interest, the predominant view of Hegel was, according to Hyppolite, that of a Romantic thinker who merely continued and developed a philosophical tradition begun by Kant and elaborated by Fichte and Schelling. This view was put forward as late as 1946 by R. G. Collingwood in The Idea of History.
Due partly to the work of Hyppolite and other French Hegelians the dominant interpretation of Hegel is now as the chief philosophical ancestor of Marx, and as one of the seminal influences on existentialism and phenomenology. According to Hyppolite’s comparison of Marx and Hegel, Marx’s views on labour and alienation are heavily dependent on Hegel’s theories.
Hyppolite himself regards Hegel’s philosophy of history in both his early and his later works as the key to understanding the whole of his philosophy, and as the reason for his rejection of the tradition of Fichte and Schelling. Hegel sees history as the arena for the progress of objective spirit and reason.
He rejected Fichte’s theories because of the latter’s view that reason was manifested most strongly through the moral life and Schelling’s because he held that the fullest revelation of the absolute was in art.