Robert Bernasconi, “Krimskrams: Hegel and the
Current Controversy about the Beginnings of
Philosophy”
A Presentation for PHIL 317 by John
Doe
The Thesis
 In his article, Bernasconi sets out to examine the
status of the belief that philosophy begins with the
Greeks.
 As such, he proposes to focus on Hegel, one of the
first to argue for the Greek origin of philosophy, and
show how partial and dubious Hegel’s case is.
 A key part of his examination is the insistence that
this is not a historical question, but a philosophical
one.
 It’s also significant that Hegel insisted that every
major philosopher who takes up the tradition does so
with assumptions about the nature of philosophy.
Lectures on the History of
Philosophy
 Bernasconi spends most of his time
focusing on Hegel’s Lectures on the History
of Philosophy.
 This book is a compilation of 6 different
lecture courses that Hegel gave at the
University of Berlin.
 The most recent edition allows scholars to
examine the differences from each of the
years, and the issues and concerns that
Hegel kept coming back to.
What counts as historical?
 One of the questions which Hegel was
preoccupied by was, “What should be
included in the history of philosophy?”
 Hegel was concerned to exclude the nonphilosophical and to make what is essential
about philosophy appear as essential.
 To accomplish this, he presents the history in an
explicitly narrative form.
 Bernasconi points out that this decision has
important implications for Hegel’s question.
 Decisions are made based on the demands of
the narrative structure as defined by Hegel’s
understanding of the nature of philosophy.
A Vicious Circle?
 As Bernasconi observes, the dependence of
the narrative about the emergence of
philosophy on a conception of philosophy
seems to involve a circularity in thinking.
 This isn’t a problem says Hegel, because
the movement of thought in the history of
philosophy follows the internal necessity of
the concept of philosophy and thus we can
recognize that the circle is not a vicious
one, but is rather necessary.
One Necessity: Emancipation
 One thing that the structure of the concept
requires/produces according to Hegel is
that philosophy is constituted in part as an
emancipation from religion.
 This insistence, a reflection of Hegel’s
participation in the Enlightenment, is part
of Hegel’s rejection of claims that
movements like Pythagoreanism had its
roots in African and Asian religions.
Another Necessity: One Root
 Hegel also insisted that the nature of philosophical
conceptuality requires that philosophy have one and
only one origin.
 The question remains, “Why is that one origin
Greece?”
 As Bernasconi details it, the answer lies in a wideranging debate going on at the time about the nature
and character of Greek religious belief which provided
Hegel with the resources he needed to argue for a
decisively Greek origin.
 To the extent that Hegel’s position depends on the
axes he’s grinding in the debate, we should wonder if
they really exhibit the necessity he insists on.
A Wrinkle: Indian Philosophy?
 The picture is even more complicated when
Hegel is confronted by the first detailed
studies of the products of Indian texts like
the Bhagavad Gita.
 Acknowledging ultimately that there is
much of philosophical significance in this
and related texts, Hegel includes discussion
of them in the later courses on the history
of philosophy but still insists that
philosophy begins in Greece.
 He does so, however, without much in the way
of argumentation.
The Takeaway
 In the end, Bernasconi insists that there is little
justification beyond Hegel’s assumptions about the
nature of philosophy to justify his insistence on its
Greek origins.
 It is, he suggests, a myth, having the status of that
which philosophy is supposed to overcome. Which
suggests that this claim to overcoming is a myth as
well.
 Where are we?: if the question of the status of the
beginning of philosophy is not just about philosophy’s
past, but also about its future, than the increasing
criticisms about the Greek origins of philosophy tell us
something important about that future.