Klaus Hartmann – The Categorial Approach (1925-1991)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Alongside the philological school, Klaus Hartmann developed a different approach in the 1970s: “categorial reconstruction,” or the “non-metaphysical” interpretation of Hegel.[1]
Hartmann’s basic thesis was simple: Hegel is not a metaphysician in the traditional sense. The Logic is not a description of suprasensible entities, but a systematic analysis of categories — of determinations of thought that are at the same time structures of reality. Hartmann called this the “ontological option”: ontology without substrates, categories without metaphysics.
This approach made Hegel accessible to analytic philosophy. Hartmann’s essay “Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View” (1976) became internationally influential and paved the way for later interpreters such as Robert Pippin and the Pittsburgh School.
Hartmann’s method was the “test of stringency”: examining every transition for its logical validity, not venerating Hegel, but asking: does the derivation hold up? This distinguished him from mere philology — he wanted not only to understand what Hegel meant, but whether Hegel was right.
The full unfolding of this approach — including its strengths in the subjective concept and its difficulties in the logic of objectivity — is documented in Hartmann’s posthumously published magnum opus Hegels Logik (1999). Since this work appeared only after the period covered by this volume, and substantially shaped the systematic turn of the 1990s, it is treated in detail in Geschichte der Hegel-Rezeption, Band III, Kapitel 18 (geplant).
Klaus Hartmann: “Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View,” in: Alasdair MacIntyre (ed.): Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1976, pp. 101-124. The posthumous magnum opus: Hegels Logik, ed. Olaf Müller, Berlin: de Gruyter 1999. ↩︎