Jean Hyppolite (1907–1968)

French philosopher, the dominant Hegel-translator-and-commentator of the post-war French philosophical scene; MP's ENS condisciple, longtime friend, and intellectual interlocutor. Author of the historic French translation of Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes (Aubier, 2 vols, 1939–41) — the translation MP uses throughout the 1947–48 PPH course — and of the parallel commentary Genèse et structure de la Phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel (1946). Director of the École Normale Supérieure 1954–63; later Collège de France professor (1963–68). Recipient of MP's only documentary trace of the PPH course (the "24 rue de la Tour" letter to Hyppolite about the projected "groupe d'études sociales et culturelles" with Sartre, Alquié, and himself).

Key Points

Born Jonzac (Charente) — same regional origin as MP. ENS 1925, agrégé 1929, docteur 1947.
Genèse et structure de la Phénoménologie de l'esprit (1946) is the foundational French Hegel-commentary of its generation; MP's annotated copy at the ENS is heavily marked but never cited in PPH — a striking "dissimulation" that Dalissier highlights. MP cites Hyppolite only as translator.
Author of "Marxisme et philosophie" (Revue socialiste, November 1946) — published a few months after MP's essay of the same title (June–July 1946, Revue internationale). The two share resonant themes (early Marx, Aufhebung, alienation) but with different methodological emphases — Hyppolite philological, MP phenomenological.
Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire de Hegel (Aubier, 1948) is the first French monograph on Hegel's philosophy of history — but MP's PPH course (1947–48, dated by Dalissier) does not cite it, confirming the dating: PPH precedes its publication.
The 24 rue de la Tour letter from MP to Hyppolite (otherwise undated; Dalissier dates it 1947–48) is the only documentary evidence of the PPH course's institutional context: a "groupe d'études sociales et culturelles" with Alquié on psychoanalysis, MP on "De Hegel à Marx," and a request to Hyppolite for a Phénoménologie de l'esprit course "with the distant aim of clarifying the origins of existentialism." Sartre was to give an inaugural conference. None of these projects appear to have materialized except MP's own course.
Conferencier at the Société française de philosophie, 10 April 1948: "De la structure du Capital et de quelques présuppositions philosophiques de l'œuvre de Marx" — Hyppolite finds in Marx's Capital a volonté de puissance (Nietzschean) economic structure derived from Hegel; debates Aron at length in the discussion.
His "Situation de l'homme dans la Phénoménologie hégélienne" (April 1947, Temps Modernes) is the basis of MP's "L'existentialisme chez Hegel" (April 1946 review-essay) which provides the only MP-essay-anchor on the Hegel-Existentialism relation.

Role in This Wiki

The reception-of-Hegel context for MP's PPH

Hyppolite is structurally the natural interlocutor for MP's 1947–48 PPH course but is quietly displaced in MP's actual textual references. Three reasons (per Dalissier):

Chronological: Hyppolite's Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire de Hegel (1948) postdates the PPH course (1947–48); the genealogical commentator-source MP uses for the PPH State material is Bernard Groethuysen's 1924 NRF article "La conception de l'État de Hegel et la philosophie politique en Allemagne" — a non-obvious choice but the only one available pre-1948.
Methodological: Hyppolite's Genèse et structure takes the route of a philological-genetic reconstruction of Hegel from the Theologische Jugendschriften through the Phenomenology. MP's PPH approach is non-philological — a course-on-a-course, paraphrasing the Vorlesungen directly. The two methods do not converge.
Conceptual: Hyppolite reads Hegel through unhappy consciousness (continuing Wahl's framing); Kojève reads Hegel through master/slave. MP, characteristically, refuses both anchorings — declares no central Hegelian concept except the structural-phenomenological Phenomenology read against the Encyclopedia. The result: Hyppolite is intellectually proximate to MP but textually invisible in the course.

The Marxisme et philosophie parallel

The same-title essays of 1946 are the most direct MP-Hyppolite philosophical engagement. Hyppolite's emphasis on the early Marx's aliénation-theme converges with MP's existential reading; differences include MP's stronger phenomenological framework, Hyppolite's stronger philological focus, MP's polemic with Pierre Hervé (PCF), Hyppolite's emphasis on Kierkegaard. The two essays in dialogue establish the philosophical possibility of an early-Marx reading that pre-dates the orthodox communist line.

The Sorbonne / Collège de France succession

In 1948–49, Hyppolite becomes Sorbonne maître de conférences (October 1949 — same date as MP, who also goes to the Sorbonne); they later become Collège de France colleagues. The personal-institutional intimacy outlasts and survives the "intellectual distance" MP deliberately maintains in PPH.

Hyppolite in Sense and Non-Sense: "we are all Jews" and the existentialize-Hegel programme

*Sense and Non-Sense*'s "Hegel's Existentialism" (Chapter 5; Les Temps modernes No. 7, April 1946) is MP's first published acknowledgment of Hyppolite as the philosophical interlocutor for the two-Hegels / existentialize-Hegel programme. The essay is structured as a free commentary on Hyppolite's lecture of the same title (the editor's footnote dates the lecture to "Feb. 16, 1947" — but the essay was published April 1946; chronologically anomalous, likely a typo for 1946 or a 1948 Sens et non-sens edition addition; flag).

MP credits Hyppolite for the structural distinction (Phänomenologie 1807 vs. Encyclopädie 1827) and follows Hyppolite "freely rather than textually." The most striking acknowledgment is MP's recording of Hyppolite's wartime line: "Judaism's historical mission has been to spread this sense of separation throughout the entire world, and, as Hyppolite said to his students during the war, we are all Jews to the extent that we care about the universal" (p. 67). This is MP's clearest published acknowledgment of Hyppolite's wartime intellectual courage — saying during the war what could not be said openly: that the Jewish refusal "to resign ourselves to merely being, and want to exist" is the figure of consciousness's own structure.

MP's principal disagreement with Hyppolite: Hyppolite holds that Hegel "stops being an existentialist" with the move from individual to history. MP demurs: "Hegel's thought is existentialist in that it views man not as being from the start a consciousness in full possession of its own clear thoughts but as a life which is its own responsibility and which tries to understand itself" (p. 64) — and the move to history is the affirmation of the individual properly understood (because the for-others is internal to consciousness). MP's 1946 reading therefore preserves more of Hegel's project than Hyppolite's, though MP credits Hyppolite explicitly with the structural-genealogical work.

Connections

interlocutor of MP from ENS (1925) onward — MP's caïman at ENS in 1936–40 (per henri-maldiney's 1948 letter).
parallel commentator of Hegel with Kojève — but with different anchors (Phenomenology vs master/slave) and different audiences (academic vs the EPHE seminar).
contemporary of jean-wahl — both anchor French Hegel-reception in the Phenomenology (Wahl on unhappy consciousness, Hyppolite on phenomenology-genesis).
attempted publication site for MP's PPH course — the never-realized 1947–48 "groupe d'études sociales et culturelles."
ENS director who succeeds Lefort's milieu of Socialisme ou barbarie by a different path.

Sources

merleau-ponty-2022-inedits-ii-1947-1949 — extensive editorial treatment in the PPH introduction (pp. 73–80) of Hyppolite's structural role; the 24-rue-de-la-Tour letter from MP to Hyppolite (pp. 35–37); the 1947 Temps Modernes situation-de-l'homme article (cited p. 78); the 1948 SFP Capital conference (cited p. 77).
merleau-ponty-2022-inedits-i-1946-1947 — Hyppolite as MP's translator-source for the Phenomenology.