Hegel’s philosophy is shaped by his extreme systematic ambition: He argues that everything is interconnected, in one system, with one source of intelligibility for everything; and he commits to building his system not on a merely assumed foundation, but on arguments that engage philosophers who disagree, or those who are not already within his system. On Hegel’s 250^th birthday, it seems that the intervening years of philosophy have rarely smiled on Hegel’s idea of a philosophical system. But the extreme systematic ambition has animated much work on Hegel, including my own—and I hope that it might be of continuing philosophical interest in the future.

Compare what I would call half-baked systematicity. Imagine a group of philosophers rigorously apply some precisely stated rules; but it might turn out that the rules express only a misguided assumption about what is and is not philosophical, and the assumption is shielded from criticism by gatekeepers at journals and conferences widely regarded as most prestigious. This program advertises as systematic, in its rigor and precision; but the shielded assumption renders the advertising deceptive. The internal tension is a ripe target for Hegel’s dialectical arguments. And Hegel’s extreme systematic ambition is essentially the aim—attractive, in my view—of doing better in this respect.

Would the kind of system Hegel desires be a mere idealized abstraction from, and of dubious relevance to, the actual world? No. For Hegel such abstraction is merely half-baked systematicity: it cannot justify its making one assumption, rather than others, about what is so unimportant that it should be abstracted away. Philosophy is really

…the comprehension of the present and the actual, not the setting up of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where—or rather a beyond, of which we can indeed say where it exists, namely in the error of a one-sided, empty ratiocination.  (Philosophy of Right, Preface)

In seeking to understand Hegel in terms of the opposition to his views, we should not just compare philosophical programs he would regard as half-baked systematicity, but also those more resolutely anti-system. These seek to convince us that constructive arguments that work toward systems tend to evade something that we can and should face more directly. Levinas, for example, sees privileging systematicity as threatening to obscure the experience of the other, and one’s own ethical responsibility in the face of the other.

For those of us attempting charitable, philosophical work on Hegel, the extreme systematic ambition can certainly make for difficulties. We easily assume that defending requires assimilating Hegel to some now-popular and less systematically ambitious project. But if we turn Hegel’s philosophy into half-baked systematicity, or lose sight of his extreme systematic ambition, then we lose too much of value in Hegel—we lose, for example, potential assistance in asking critical questions about whether some now-popular philosophical programs might really be unattractively half-baked forms of systematicity. My own approach is to charitably read arguments in Hegel supporting a metaphilosophical priority of metaphysics, and then to proceed to understand his defense of his absolute in light of his interest in Aristotle and Spinoza’s metaphysical accounts of God. But my aim here is not partisan defense of my approach; it is to welcome all ways of taking Hegel’s extreme systematic ambition seriously, and giving it continued philosophical relevance.