In the opinion of Gilles Deleuze, as we saw in the last chapter, Nietzsche is to be seen as a powerful critic of Hegelian dialectic. Deleuze not only claims that Nietzsche knew Hegel's texts well, he also maintains that Nietzsche exposes once and for all the life-denying ‘slave’ mentality underlying Hegel's philosophy. This is an opinion which I find hard to share. Nietzsche, as far as I can tell, did not study Hegel's texts in any depth and relied mainly on secondary sources for his interpretation and his evaluation of Hegel's thought. Furthermore, his understanding of Hegel's philosophy was in my view superficial and largely misconceived. The purpose of the present chapter, therefore, is to explain how Nietzsche understood Hegel and what the sources of that understanding might have been.

In general, Nietzsche seems to have relished criticising great philosophers rather than actually reading them. He studied at first hand almost none of the major philosophers in whose tradition he followed and whose thought he sought to surpass – with the exception, that is, of the ancient Greek philosophers and of Schopenhauer. The only explicit reference Nietzsche makes to having read any texts by Hegel comes in a letter to Hermann Mushacke of 20 September 1865.