ABSTRACT
In Anglo-Saxon countries a Hegel-renaissance has been made more difficult by the comparative recency of a period in which Hegel's prestige was immense, though his doctrine and method were very imperfectly understood. A Hegel-renaissance has also been made difficult in the Anglo-Saxon world by the immense prestige of mathematical logic: since 1911 one may say that we have all lived in the noble shadow of Principia Mathematica. Hegel's dialectic corresponds to the sort of informal, non-formalizable passages of comment and discussion in a book like Principia Mathematica, rather than its systematic text, and it has the immense importance of that interstitial comment. What Hegel does is in fact extraordinarily like what is done in modern syntactics or semantics or similar formal studies, when we pass from discourse in a language to discourse about that language, when we make a language an object-language for a meta-language.
