Hegel and Kierkegaard on system and subjectivity

The relation between Hegel and Søren Kierkegaard is not simply a contest between a closed philosophical system and an open, choosing individual. Kierkegaard casts Hegel as the systematizer who subordinates living subjectivity to the universal, but the essay finds an unexpected proximity between them: Hegel’s dialectic, properly understood, need not erase contingency. Their dispute instead becomes a test of whether becoming belongs only to the individual subject or also to reality and history themselves.

Shared Ground: Choice Before Theory

The essay locates an important continuity between German Idealism and Kierkegaard in the priority of practical commitment. The deepest human reality is described as an ethical engagement or choice that precedes, and grounds, any theoretical account of itself. Kant’s primacy of practical over theoretical reason prepares this position; Fichte makes its existential consequence explicit in the claim that the philosophy a person chooses depends on what kind of person that individual is. In this account, Kierkegaard’s insistence on a decision about how to live does not stand wholly outside German Idealism. It develops a problem already present within it: theory cannot finally account for the commitment on which theorizing rests.

This shared ground makes Kierkegaard’s anti-Hegelianism more ambiguous than a simple opposition suggests. The essay argues that making Hegel the absolute enemy can conceal a disavowed closeness. Kierkegaard objects to the system’s power to absorb the singular subject into the self-development of the universal concept, yet his concern with the irreducible individual also presses on a difficulty internal to Hegelian philosophy: how can a universal system be the work of one contingent person, Hegel? The relation is already knotted together in that question. The supposedly all-encompassing system bears the mark of the singular life that produced it.

The System and the Individual

Kierkegaard’s sharpest criticism is that Hegel’s speculative philosophy forgets what it means for particular people to exist, not merely what it means to be human in general. He associates the system’s mortification of thought with the university discourse and imagines the professor as the figure who inherits and institutionalizes what was most alive in a thinker’s work. The critique is directed not only at abstraction but at its afterlife: singular thought risks becoming an academic result, detached from the existence and commitment that gave it force.

The essay turns this charge back toward Hegel. The connection between an impersonal universal system and its accidental author resembles what Hegel calls an “infinite judgment”: the conjunction of the universal with the lowest singularity. The individual philosopher is not an external detail that can simply be removed from the system’s story. The fact that an existing, contingent person wrote the account of Absolute Knowing exposes a tension between the system’s universal reach and the singular act that gives it expression. Kierkegaard’s objection therefore comes close to the dialectical problem it is meant to reject.

Objective Thought and Subjective Becoming

Kierkegaard distinguishes objective thought, which turns everything into results, from subjective thought, which remains in process and omits results because the existing individual is continually coming to be. From this perspective, Hegel stands for a retrospective view of history: he understands it as if its outcome were final and its becoming already complete. Kierkegaard’s subject, by contrast, cannot step outside existence to survey life as a finished whole. What has passed may be apprehended as complete, but the person still existing cannot occupy the standpoint from which that finality would be absolute.

The essay complicates the contrast by challenging the assumption that an open-ended objective process is enough to capture Kierkegaardian becoming. Any objective reality, however processual, remains a positively existing domain of objects and interactions, and is therefore treated as ontologically constituted. Subjectivity alone names a domain that remains open through an inherent failure to become a completed whole. The disagreement is not simply about whether change occurs. It concerns where openness resides: in a subject who cannot be reduced to an object among objects, or in reality itself.

Rereading Hegelian Necessity

Against the conventional opposition, the essay argues that Hegel does not merely close history into a circle in which everything realizes what it always was. The point is not to view the present from a final standpoint, as though its result had been settled from the beginning. It is to restore the future’s openness to the past: to grasp what existed through the contingent process by which it became necessary. Hegel’s claim that the Absolute must be conceived not only as Substance but also as Subject matters here because necessity is not detached from the activity and development that produced it.

This reversal also changes how the past appears. Participants in an unfolding situation may experience themselves as trapped in destiny, merely reacting to what seems inevitable. Retrospective attention, by contrast, can disclose alternatives and unrealized paths. The essay uses this difference to distinguish idealist and materialist accounts of openness: idealism reserves a closed totality for an eternal, all-knowing standpoint, whereas materialism treats openness as extending all the way down. Necessity then does not conceal a complete order beneath appearances; the whole is itself non-whole, marked by irreducible contingency.

Historical Closure and Intervention

The contrast between Hegel and Kierkegaard also concerns historical time. Both are placed against a model in which a dangerous present is expected to give way to a redemptive future. The essay associates this expectation with the Hölderlin paradigm, in which the danger of an age also opens the possibility of what may save it. Hegel’s image of the Owl of Minerva flying at dusk can sound like an endorsement of retrospective closure, as if thought only arrives after the process has ended. Yet the essay insists that recognizing an event as already having happened need not entail passivity. The radical Christian version of this stance says that the decisive Event has already taken place and that there is nothing to wait for; the task is intervention in its aftermath.

The resulting relation is neither a reconciliation that dissolves Kierkegaard’s objection nor a victory for the picture of Hegel as a thinker of completed destiny. Kierkegaard keeps the pressure on the singular individual whose existence cannot be converted into a finished result. Hegel, in the essay’s reading, offers a way to think necessity without erasing the contingent becoming from which it arose. Their opposition thus remains productive: it makes the question of whether reality is open, and how a subject can act within history, a problem internal to the system rather than a choice between system and life.