Was Hegel a Neoplatonist?

Question

I have started reading a book by Philip Stanfield, Hegel the Consummate Neoplatonist where he claims (page 1):

From a materialist perspective (‘matter’ or objective reality is primary to consciousness) I will argue that Hegel’s philosophy is most obviously Neoplatonic, that it is the consummation of a philosophical current begun by Plotinus and that Hegel’s philosophy can neither be understood nor accorded the full appreciation it deserves without understanding that current.

I don't know anything about Hegel and little about Neoplatonism, but I find Plotinus very interesting which is why Stanfield's book interests me.

A partial answer might be given by Robert Jackson to a question linking Plato and Hegel, but the connection seems weak: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/54023/29944

In order to get a bearing, I wonder what an overview would be to the question: How much connection is there between Hegel and Neoplatonism?

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Reference

Stanfield, P, Hegel the consummate neoplatonist https://philipstanfielddotcom.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/hegel-the-consummate-neoplatonist-a2.pdf

Answer 1

The claim that Hegel stands in any line at the start of which is Plotinus looks highly suspect to me.

I make just two points. In the first place, Hegel's Absolute or God, or One if one chooses that terminology, has an inescapably historical dimension. The Absolute develops through time, seeking ever more adequate modes of expression and embodiment, ever more adequate concepts and modes of knowledge through which it can be understood in and by the expanding self-consciousness of human beings - which is also its own self-consciousness. Whatever one makes of this, nothing like it could be remotely true of the One of Plotinus. Plotinus' One has no such historical dimension. It is, and eternally is what it is. It cannot undergo the historical development by which Hegel's Absolute unfolds in time. The perspective is quite different.

Secondly, in the Absolute Hegel had to reconcile infinity and personality. The Absolute is not a person but it is present in and known to persons; and these persons, with their capacity for self-consciousness, are manifestations of the Absolute - and necessary, not merely contingent, manifestations.

Plotinus's view of the relation of persons, or souls (psuches), to the One is quite different. The One is that perfect excellence with which the soul, in some way alienated, must reintegrate itself. It must return to the One and do so by its own efforts. Rist refers to :

Plotinus' confidence, based on personal mystical experience, that a return to the sources of the soul, to Nous and to One, is possible for every soul. For such a return to excellence is possible in Plotinus, as in Plato, by the soul's own efforts. The soul needs no further help from the One, or from Gods or saviours (III, 2, 8-9) to enable it to return, for it has been generated from eternity with the necessary powers within itself. Yet although Plato, like Plotinus, thinks that man can be "saved" by his own efforts, he fails to make clear on what psychological theory such a doctrine is based. In Plotinus, however, the psychological theory is made explicit: it is the theory of the undescended part of the soul. (John M. Rist, 'Integration and the Undescended Soul in Plotinus', The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 88, No. 4 (Oct., 1967), pp. 410-422 : 417.)

Hegel can accommodate no such view. Persons are not 'declensions' from the Absolute to which by some means they must return. Rather, they are products or manifestations of the historically developing Absolute. The rough picture is that the Absolute must in the temporal process express itself in persons, in self-conscious minds. They are a phase of its development; this is radically different from Plotinus' idea of the One as an already existing perfection from which human souls, psuches, persons, have managed to alienate themselves and with which they must reintegrate.

Answer 2

Plato sets the question of the Good going. In Aristotle it is read as a plenum. By example: All normal (this concept was not a problem for Aristotle as it is toady) human beings have some mathematical sense. Some develop it, improve it, bring it to fullness. They become master geometricians. Winning the fullness of being with respect to geometry.

Plotinus interprets all matter as evil, or as sheer lack, and the "silence and abyss" of nous as the Good. Ergo, the more one can move beyond the "temple images" in the inmost penetralium, even in the very idea of the "Good," which is now thought as a work of the demi-urge, and a trick of the intelligence, one reaches what is genuinely good. The parallel is: all human beings can resist material life, some develop this tendency, some to perfection. In Hegel, the path that is followed regards (moral) freedom as "the spirit of lightness," and reality opposes it as the spirit of gravity.

Gravity: wicked matter. Freedom: unbearable lightness. In Plotinus, the silence of the abyss is itself the goal, it is the "place beyond the stars." In Hegel there is a return to the material with the gain. A perfection of the evil lack inherent in stupid matter. One might read the interpretation of Plato's Cave in Heidegger in this connection, the going up and coming back down.

Note: What is written in the "Geoffrey Thomas" answer is also correct, but I wanted to bring Hegel closer to Plotinus.

Answer 3

No, Hegel was not a neoplatonist.

Both Hegel and Plotinus were builders of very abstract metaphysical systems, and both admired Plato, but if we look deeper it will be quite clear that Hegel was not in this philosophical camp.

Interpreting Hegel is difficult business, which is why Derrida said that we will never be done with our reading of Hegel.

Hegel was an Aristotelian (and so was Heidegger who called Hegel the greatest follower of Aristotle). He starts with the empirical here-and-now in "Phenomenology of the mind", and he starts with being and nothingness in "The science of logic". For Hegel, the abstract and the metaphysical play central role, and he goes deeper into metaphysics than anyone (Schelling comes close), but he starts with the physically real and ends with the real enriched by the speculative, just like Aristotle.

For Plato and Plotinus, only metaphysical entities really exists. For Aristotle, the metaphysical world of platonic forms is a horizon we can never reach, what matters is the physical world. For Hegel, we start with concrete being, discover the abstract essence behind it, and resolve their contradictions in the notion (aka concept). The notion has a component (Hegel calls moment) of nature in it.

If you read Hegel himself, in volume 2 of his history of philosophy he calls Plotinus 'dull' and 'exhausting'. He says that 'the Enneads' should not be read in their entirety, just 2 chapters are enough to get the gist.

Answer 4

"So far as I understand it both tags subsume Plotinus in their own way. The more tendentious, more subtle, but I have slipped it in here, but correspondingly more enlightening juxtaposition, is with Mani and his teaching, the two were contemporaries. Of course, in Mani there can be no ultimate victory of peace or violence, gentle intelligence or rough stupidity. Gnosticism, I believe, is a Christian co-opting, as it were, more than the academic tag Neo-Platonism."

Simply no. Plotinus wrote a work called "Against the Gnostics."

Answer 5

Yes, Hegel is a neoplatonist. He merely made the dialectic dynamical. It's as simple as that. To make this distinction it might be better to call him a neo-neo-platonist.

Answer 6

To my understanding Hegel is closer to Heraclitus than Parmenides, in the sense that he rejects any possibility of wholeness, timelessness, oneness, singularity, completion, resolution...the hallmarks of Platonism.

For Hegel, the Absolute is not some final synthesis or resolution of antithetical positions. Rather, it is the guiding assumption of an unlimited desire for completion that reveals more and more contradictions and, indeed, the inescapability of contradiction. Nonetheless, this is not mere skepticism, for the carefully tracked movement of these contrary assertions does reveal a pattern, teleology, or "narrative," if you will, the historical struggle towards "freedom."

This is very different from a Platonic or Neoplatonic dissolution of temporal events into a timeless absolute or singularity. I believe Hegel might well say of such Platonism what he famously said of Schelling's Absolute, that it is merely "the night in which all cows are black."