Hegel’s short essay “Who Thinks Abstractly?” (1808) argues that “abstract thinking” is something the ‘uneducated’ partake in, not the educated. Through a string of vivid scenes – a crowd sneering at a condemned murderer, an old market woman reducing a rival to a single insult, a servant reduced to nothing but his function – Hegel shows how flattening a person into one label (“just a murderer,” “just a servant”) is itself the crude, abstract move, while genuine thought holds a person’s full, contradictory concreteness together.
In this episode of Theoryish, we work through Hegel’s essay, unpacking why he insists thinking concretely is harder than it sounds; what his examples reveal about class, judgment, and moral condemnation, and why this brief, almost comic, piece has become one of the most quoted entry points into Hegelian thought. Along the way, we ask what “abstraction” means for Hegel versus how we use the word today, and why an essay about a hanged man and some rotten eggs still has something to say about how we categorize each other now.
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