Translator’s Introduction

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s 1796 account of a seven-day voyage by foot in the Bernese Oberland gives us a snapshot of the philosopher as a twenty-five-year-old traveler, guidebook in hand, weighing his and previous visitors’ reactions to iconic attractions such as the Reichenbach Falls, the Aare Gorge, the Jungfrau and its glaciers, and the Rütli Mountain in the Canton of Uri, which Schiller would highlight in his dramatization of the story of Wilhelm Tell eight years later. This was Hegel’s first and last visit to the high mountains. The narrative mixes philosophical observations and matter-of-fact description of the route and travel conditions. This piece is a curious artifact of the period, in part because Hegel does not embrace proto-Romantic accounts of the mountain sublime as effusively as so many of his contemporaries and successors.

The piece was first printed in 1844, thirteen years after Hegel’s death, as a supplemental document to his student Karl Rosenkranz’s biography of the philosopher. Rosenkranz initiated the practice continued by subsequent publications of this text to situate it within the broader development of Hegel’s thought, including his aesthetics, philosophy of nature, and philosophy of religion. Rosenkranz praises Hegel’s “objective description” of the Bernese Oberland, claiming that it lacks “any illusionary romanticism” (Illusionsromantik) or “individual poetry of sentiment” and that Hegel brings an “economically mercantile and industrial gaze” to the area and its population. In his 1965 Hegel: A Reinterpretation, Walter Kaufmann included excerpts from the philosophical sections of the diary, excluding most of Hegel’s ethnographical and geographical commentary. Kaufmann notes Hegel’s attention to concepts of “life” and “motion” (Bewegung) and his aversion to rigidity—all prominent ideas in Hegel’s critique of positive religion. Though Hegel is not effusive about his natural surroundings, Kaufmann does venture a muted defense of Hegel’s account of nature, arguing that even though rain and fog prevented Hegel from glimpsing many of the most spectacular sights on his route, he did pen “some of the most sensitive impressions ever recorded about waterfalls.” Hegel’s diary was also published in French translation in 1988 with an introductory essay that situates Hegel’s reflections on the Alpine landscape against the backdrop of eighteenth-century aesthetics.