The Tremendous Power of the Negative

All the great philosophical ideas of the past century—the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis —had their beginnings in Hegel; it was he who started the attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reasonwhich remains the task of our century. He is the inventor of that Reason, broader than the understanding, which can respect the variety and singularity of individual consciousnesses, civilizations, ways of thinking, and historical contingency but which nevertheless does not give up the attempt to master them in order to guide them to their own truth. But, as it turns out, Hegel’s successors have placed more emphasis on what they reject of his heritage than on what they owe to him.