Unity, experience, and the unconditioned: The writings of the young Hegel

Because of their "militant Kantianism" (Panajotis Kondylis), the documents Hegel wrote during his short stay in Bern (1793-96) often puzzle scholars. Before moving to Bern, Hegel shows no real sympathy for Kant's work, and shortly after leaving Bern, Hegel becomes explicitly critical of Kant. Furthermore, Hegel's pre-1793 texts from Tubingen (1788-93) and his post-1796 texts from Frankfurt (1797-1800) show other significant similarities. What can account for the Kantian "detour" in Hegel's development?;My thesis argues that this "detour" does not deviate from Hegel's own thought. Instead, I show that the Frankfurt period thinking is determined precisely by the attempt to come to terms with the aporias that result from Hegel's earlier, Kantian/Schellingian conception of absolute freedom. Thus the documents Hegel writes in Frankfurt are the result of the thinking he did in Bern. True, Hegel does resolve the aforementioned aporias by turning to a notion of unity that appears to be very much like the notion of unity that governs his writings in Tubingen. But the conception of freedom in unity in Tubingen differs greatly from its conception in Frankfurt. More specifically, the former allows a conditioned freedom, whereas the latter takes the conditioned as synonymous with the unfree.;Chapters one and two characterize the unity of experience in the Tubingen texts. The Kantian thought of the Bern period is the object of chapter three. Chapter four shows how the Frankfurt period thought resolves the aporias arising in the Bernese documents, and how the notion of freedom as united with being in the Frankfurt texts is conceived very differently from the related notion appearing in Hegel's Tubingen period. Finally, Hegel's early Jena thought embraces the notion of system in order to avoid the contingency and thus conditionedness of the unsystematic. Thus my final chapter, on an early Jena period document, demonstrates how the Bernese attempt to think absolute and unconditioned freedom guides Hegel to his mature attempts at systematic philosophy.