Hegel and Us

Which factors condition a cultural grand narrative and let it become efficacious? Especially Hegel’s sublime accomplishment of a narrative synthesis that he achieves with his philosophy of history still provokes this question. And so it is the grand epicist Hegel, who dons the garb of philosophical classification, that Albrecht Koschorke focuses on in his Adorno Lectures in Frankfurt.

With regards to Prussia – after 1806 a financially ruined, territorially, politically and culturally fragmented agrarian state, and around which Hegel’s system revolves later – his philosophical narrative has a more counterfactual than describing character. In any case, producing creative constructs that then gain independence as political entities is a general characteristic of the era of national mythologies – whereas symbolic integration by narration is far less successful under contemporary post-national portents.

With that in mind, Koschorke is concerned not least with the narrative conditions of the European present. He shows why an all-encompassing, inwardly heavily integrating narrative of Europe, which politicians demand especially in times of a Euro crisis, doesn’t – and shouldn’t – exist.