Manfred Riedel — The Rehabilitation of Practical Philosophy
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Placing It: The Movement of the Whole
Postwar philosophy had a problem with practical philosophy. The analytic tradition treated ethics as metaethics — not the question “What should I do?” but “What do moral statements mean?” The continental tradition had lost itself in existentialism and fundamental ontology — the concrete questions of living together remained marginal.
Manfred Riedel belonged to those who wanted to change this. His edited volume Rehabilitierung der praktischen Philosophie (1972-1974) became the manifesto of a movement that set Aristotle and Hegel against the scientistic narrowing of philosophy.
Who Was Riedel?
Manfred Riedel (1936-2009) studied in Heidelberg under Gadamer and Löwith. He taught in Saarbrücken, Erlangen, and Halle. His position lay between hermeneutics and Hegelianism, between historical reconstruction and systematic ambition.
Riedel was not a pure Hegel scholar — he also worked on Aristotle, on Kant, on the Enlightenment. But Hegel was the systematic point of reference: the thinker who had practiced practical philosophy as concrete analysis of ethical life, not as abstract deduction of principles.
The Thesis: Practical Philosophy Is Not Applied Theory
Riedel’s basic thesis: practical philosophy has its own dignity. It is not merely “application” of theoretical principles to practical questions. It has its own object (human action), its own method (phronesis, prudence, judgment), its own form of knowledge (practical knowledge).
This is Aristotelian — and at the same time anti-Kantian. Kant had conceived morality as the application of the categorical imperative: a general principle from which concrete duties are derived. But this, Riedel argues, misses the structure of practical knowledge. The agent does not stand before an algorithm to be applied. He stands before a concrete situation that he must judge — with all its richness, its ambiguity, its unrepeatability.
The Hegel Connection: Ethical Life against Morality
Hegel’s distinction between morality and ethical life becomes central for Riedel. Morality is abstract obligation — duty as Kant conceived it. Ethical life is concrete action within institutions — family, society, state.
Riedel’s interpretation: Hegel rehabilitates practical philosophy against Kant’s moralism. He shows that ethical action is not the application of abstract rules, but participation in concrete forms of life. Institutions are not constraints on freedom, but its realization.
This connected Riedel with the Ritter school — he too read Hegel as a defender of institutions against abstract critique. But Riedel was less political than Ritter, more interested in method. His concern was the structure of practical knowledge, not the defense of the Federal Republic.
The Impact
The edited volume Rehabilitierung der praktischen Philosophie brought together contributions from Gadamer, Ritter, Apel, Habermas, and others. It marked a turning point: practical philosophy returned, not as mere application of theory, but as an independent discipline.
Its impact reached beyond Germany. The communitarianism of the 1980s — MacIntyre, Sandel, Walzer — drew on similar motifs: critique of abstract liberalism, emphasis on embeddedness in traditions and communities, rehabilitation of Aristotelian virtue ethics.
For Hegel reception, Riedel’s contribution was: the actualization of the philosophy of right. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is not merely of antiquarian interest, but speaks to present-day problems. What does it mean to live within institutions? How does individual freedom relate to social embeddedness? How is ethical life possible in a pluralistic society?