The Problem of Nature in Hegel’s Final System

Wes Furlotte critically evaluates Hegel’s philosophy of human freedom in terms of his often-disregarded conception of nature. In doing so, he gives us a new portrait of Hegel’s final system that is surprisingly relevant for our contemporary world, connecting it with recent work in speculative realism and new materialism. Furlotte offers a sophisticated sense of the fundamental materialism permeating Hegel’s concept of freedom and how the former serves as the inescapable precondition of subjectivity and social history. He also reveals how material nature and culture’s reactions to it problematize human freedom – even threaten it with utter annihilation. This book forces us to reconsider accepted accounts of Hegel’s system and to re-evaluate what Hegel, and German Idealism, might still offer us today.