Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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Portrait by Jakob Schlesinger, 1831
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| Born | August 27, 1770 |
| Died | November 14, 1831 (aged 61) |
| Residence | Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Education | Gymnasium illustre zu Stuttgart Tübinger Stift, University of Tübingen (M.A., 1790) University of Jena (PhD, 1801) |
| Era | 19th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | |
| Institutions | University of Jena (1801–1806) University of Heidelberg (1816–1818) University of Berlin (1818–1831) |
| Thesis | Dissertatio Philosophica de Orbitis Planetarium (Philosophical Dissertation on the Orbits of the Planets) (1801) |
| Academic advisors | Johann Friedrich LeBret (M.A. advisor) |
| Notable students | Johann Eduard Erdmann |
Main interests
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Notable ideas
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| Signature | |
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (/ˈheɪɡəl/, August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher and an important figure of German idealism. He achieved wide recognition in his day and—while primarily influential within the continental tradition of philosophy—has become increasingly influential in the analytic tradition as well. Although Hegel remains a divisive figure, his canonical stature within Western philosophy is universally recognized.
Hegel's principal achievement was his development of a distinctive articulation of idealism, sometimes termed absolute idealism, in which the dualisms of, for instance, mind and nature and subject and object are overcome. His philosophy of spirit conceptually integrates psychology, the state, history, art, religion and philosophy. His account of the master–slave dialectic has been highly influential, especially in 20th-century France. Of special importance is his concept of spirit (Geist, sometimes also translated as "mind") as the historical manifestation of the logical concept and the "sublation" (Aufhebung, integration without elimination or reduction) of seemingly contradictory or opposing factors: examples include the apparent opposition between nature and freedom and between immanence and transcendence. Hegel has been seen in the 20th century as the originator of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad, but as an explicit phrase it originated with Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
Hegel has influenced many thinkers and writers whose own positions vary widely. Karl Barth described Hegel as a "Protestant Aquinas" while Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that "all the great philosophical ideas of the past century—the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis—had their beginnings in Hegel."
Life
Early years
Childhood
The birthplace of Hegel in Stuttgart, which now houses the Hegel Museum
He was born on August 27, 1770 in Stuttgart, capital of the Duchy of Württemberg
in southwestern Germany. Christened Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, he was
known as Wilhelm to his close family. His father, Georg Ludwig, was Rentkammersekretär (secretary to the revenue office) at the court of Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg.
Hegel's mother, Maria Magdalena Louisa (née Fromm), was the daughter of
a lawyer at the High Court of Justice at the Württemberg court. She
died of a "bilious fever" (Gallenfieber) when Hegel was thirteen. Hegel and his father also caught the disease, but they narrowly survived.
Hegel had a sister, Christiane Luise (1773–1832); and a brother, Georg
Ludwig (1776–1812), who was to perish as an officer in Napoleon's
Russian campaign of 1812.
At the age of three, he went to the German School. When he entered the Latin School two years later, he already knew the first declension, having been taught it by his mother. In 1776, he entered Stuttgart's gymnasium illustre and during his adolescence read voraciously, copying lengthy extracts in his diary. Authors he read include the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and writers associated with the Enlightenment, such as Christian Garve and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. His studies at the Gymnasium were concluded with his Abiturrede ("graduation speech") entitled "The abortive state of art and scholarship in Turkey."
Tübingen (1788–1793)
At the age of eighteen, Hegel entered the Tübinger Stift (a Protestant seminary attached to the University of Tübingen), where he had as roommates the poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin and the philosopher-to-be Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling.
Sharing a dislike for what they regarded as the restrictive environment
of the Seminary, the three became close friends and mutually influenced
each other's ideas. All greatly admired Hellenic civilization and Hegel
additionally steeped himself in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Lessing during this time. They watched the unfolding of the French Revolution with shared enthusiasm. Schelling and Hölderlin immersed themselves in theoretical debates on Kantian philosophy, from which Hegel remained aloof. Hegel at this time envisaged his future as that of a Popularphilosoph,
i.e. a "man of letters" who serves to make the abstruse ideas of
philosophers accessible to a wider public; his own felt need to engage
critically with the central ideas of Kantianism did not come until 1800.
Although the violence of the Reign of Terror in 1793 dampened Hegel's hopes, he continued to identify with the moderate Girondin faction and never lost his commitment to the principles of 1789, which he would express by drinking a toast to the storming of the Bastille every fourteenth of July.
Bern (1793–1796) and Frankfurt (1797–1801)
Having received his theological certificate (Konsistorialexamen) from the Tübingen Seminary, Hegel became Hofmeister (house tutor) to an aristocratic family in Bern (1793–1796). During this period, he composed the text which has become known as the Life of Jesus
and a book-length manuscript titled "The Positivity of the Christian
Religion". His relations with his employers becoming strained, Hegel
accepted an offer mediated by Hölderlin to take up a similar position
with a wine merchant's family in Frankfurt, to which he relocated in 1797. Here, Hölderlin exerted an important influence on Hegel's thought. While in Frankfurt, Hegel composed the essay "Fragments on Religion and Love". In 1799, he wrote another essay entitled "The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate", unpublished during his lifetime.
Also in 1797, the unpublished and unsigned manuscript of "The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism"
was written. It was written in Hegel's hand, but thought to have been
authored by either Hegel, Schelling, Hölderlin, or an unknown fourth
person.
Career years
Jena, Bamberg and Nuremberg (1801–1816)
In 1801, Hegel came to Jena with the encouragement of his old friend Schelling, who held the position of Extraordinary Professor at the University there. Hegel secured a position at the University as a Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer) after submitting the inaugural dissertation De Orbitis Planetarum, in which he theorized that there could be no other planet between Mars and Jupiter, while Giuseppe Piazzi had just discovered one on January 1, 1801, planet that later turned out to be the asteroid Ceres. Later in the year, Hegel's first book The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy
was completed. He lectured on "Logic and Metaphysics" and gave joint
lectures with Schelling on an "Introduction to the Idea and Limits of
True Philosophy" and held a "Philosophical Disputorium". In 1802,
Schelling and Hegel founded a journal, the Kritische Journal der Philosophie (Critical Journal of Philosophy), to which they each contributed pieces until the collaboration was ended when Schelling left for Würzburg in 1803.
In 1805, the University promoted Hegel to the position of
Extraordinary Professor (unsalaried) after he wrote a letter to the poet
and minister of culture Johann Wolfgang Goethe protesting at the promotion of his philosophical adversary Jakob Friedrich Fries ahead of him. Hegel attempted to enlist the help of the poet and translator Johann Heinrich Voß to obtain a post at the newly renascent University of Heidelberg, but he failed; to his chagrin, Fries was later in the same year made Ordinary Professor (salaried) there.
"Hegel and Napoleon in Jena" (illustration from Harper's Magazine, 1895), whose meeting became proverbial due to Hegel's notable use of Weltseele ("world-soul") in reference to Napoleon ("the world-soul on horseback", die Weltseele zu Pferde)
With his finances drying up quickly, Hegel was now under great pressure
to deliver his book, the long-promised introduction to his System. Hegel
was putting the finishing touches to this book, The Phenomenology of Spirit, as Napoleon engaged Prussian troops on 14 October 1806 in the Battle of Jena
on a plateau outside the city. On the day before the battle, Napoleon
entered the city of Jena. Hegel recounted his impressions in a letter to
his friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer:
I saw the Emperor – this world-soul [Weltseele] – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.
Pinkard (2000) notes that Hegel's comment to Niethammer "is all the
more striking since at that point he had already composed the crucial
section of the Phenomenology in which he remarked that the Revolution
had now officially passed to another land (Germany) that would complete
'in thought' what the Revolution had only partially accomplished in
practice".
Although Napoleon chose not to close down Jena as he had other
universities, the city was devastated and students deserted the
university in droves, making Hegel's financial prospects even worse. The
following February, Hegel's landlady Christiana Burkhardt (who had been
abandoned by her husband) gave birth to their son Georg Ludwig
Friedrich Fischer (1807–1831).
In March 1807, Hegel moved to Bamberg, where Niethammer had declined and passed on to Hegel an offer to become editor of a newspaper, the Bamberger Zeitung.
Unable to find more suitable employment, Hegel reluctantly accepted.
Ludwig Fischer and his mother (whom Hegel may have offered to marry
following the death of her husband) stayed behind in Jena.
In November 1808, Hegel was again through Niethammer, appointed headmaster of a Gymnasium in Nuremberg, a post he held until 1816. While in Nuremberg, Hegel adapted his recently published Phenomenology of Spirit
for use in the classroom. Part of his remit being to teach a class
called "Introduction to Knowledge of the Universal Coherence of the
Sciences", Hegel developed the idea of an encyclopedia of the
philosophical sciences, falling into three parts (logic, philosophy of
nature and philosophy of spirit).
In 1811, Hegel married Marie Helena Susanna von Tucher
(1791–1855), the eldest daughter of a Senator. This period saw the
publication of his second major work, the Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik; 3 vols., 1812, 1813 and 1816), and the birth of his two legitimate sons, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm (1813–1901) and Immanuel Thomas Christian (1814–1891).
Heidelberg and Berlin (1816–1831)
Having received offers of a post from the Universities of Erlangen, Berlin and Heidelberg,
Hegel chose Heidelberg, where he moved in 1816. Soon after, his
illegitimate son Ludwig Fischer (now ten years old) joined the Hegel
household in April 1817, having thus far spent his childhood in an
orphanage as his mother had died in the meantime.
Hegel published The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817) as a summary of his philosophy for students attending his lectures at Heidelberg.
Hegel with his Berlin students
Sketch by Franz Kugler
Sketch by Franz Kugler
In 1818, Hegel accepted the renewed offer of the chair of philosophy
at the University of Berlin, which had remained vacant since Johann Gottlieb Fichte's death in 1814. Here, Hegel published his Philosophy of Right
(1821). Hegel devoted himself primarily to delivering his lectures; and
his lecture courses on aesthetics, the philosophy of religion, the
philosophy of history and the history of philosophy were published
posthumously from lecture notes taken by his students. His fame spread
and his lectures attracted students from all over Germany and beyond.
In 1819–1827, he made several trips to Weimar (twice), where he met Goethe, Brussels, the Northern Netherlands, Leipzig, Vienna through Prague and Paris.
Hegel was appointed Rector
of the University in October 1829, but his term as Rector ended in
September 1830. Hegel was deeply disturbed by the riots for reform in
Berlin in that year. In 1831, Frederick William III decorated him with the Order of the Red Eagle, 3rd Class for his service to the Prussian state. In August 1831, a cholera epidemic reached Berlin and Hegel left the city, taking up lodgings in Kreuzberg.
Now in a weak state of health, Hegel seldom went out. As the new
semester began in October, Hegel returned to Berlin with the (mistaken)
impression that the epidemic had largely subsided. By November 14, Hegel
was dead. The physicians pronounced the cause of death as cholera, but
it is likely he died from a different gastrointestinal disease. He is
said to have uttered the last words "And he didn't understand me" before
expiring. In accordance with his wishes, Hegel was buried on November 16 in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery next to Fichte and Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger.
Hegel's son Ludwig Fischer had died shortly before while serving with the Dutch army in Batavia and the news of his death never reached his father. Early the following year, Hegel's sister Christiane committed suicide by drowning. Hegel's remaining two sons—Karl, who became a historian; and Immanuel, who followed a theological path—lived long and safeguarded their father's Nachlaß and produced editions of his works.
Philosophical work
Freedom
Hegel's thinking can be understood as a constructive development within the broad tradition that includes Plato and Immanuel Kant. To this list, one could add Proclus, Meister Eckhart, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Plotinus, Jakob Böhme, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What all these thinkers share, which distinguishes them from materialists like Epicurus and Thomas Hobbes and from empiricists like David Hume, is that they regard freedom or self-determination both as real and as having important ontological implications for soul or mind or divinity. This focus on freedom is what generates Plato's notion (in the Phaedo, Republic and Timaeus) of the soul as having a higher or fuller kind of reality than inanimate objects possess. While Aristotle
criticizes Plato's "Forms", he preserves Plato's cornerstones of the
ontological implications for self-determination: ethical reasoning, the
soul's pinnacle in the hierarchy of nature, the order of the cosmos and
an assumption with reasoned arguments for a prime mover. Kant imports
Plato's high esteem of individual sovereignty to his considerations of
moral and noumenal freedom as well as to God. All three find common
ground on the unique position of humans in the scheme of things, known
by the discussed categorical differences from animals and inanimate
objects.
In his discussion of "Spirit" in his Encyclopedia, Hegel praises Aristotle's On the Soul as "by far the most admirable, perhaps even the sole, work of philosophical value on this topic". In his Phenomenology of Spirit and his Science of Logic,
Hegel's concern with Kantian topics such as freedom and morality and
with their ontological implications is pervasive. Rather than simply
rejecting Kant's dualism of freedom versus nature, Hegel aims to subsume
it within "true infinity", the "Concept" (or "Notion": Begriff),
"Spirit" and "ethical life" in such a way that the Kantian duality is
rendered intelligible, rather than remaining a brute "given".
The reason why this subsumption takes place in a series of concepts is that Hegel's method in his Science of Logic and his Encyclopedia
is to begin with basic concepts like "Being" and "Nothing" and to
develop these through a long sequence of elaborations, including those
already mentioned. In this manner, a solution that is reached in
principle in the account of "true infinity" in the Science of Logic's
chapter on "Quality" is repeated in new guises at later stages, all the
way to "Spirit" and "ethical life" in the third volume of the Encyclopedia.
In this way, Hegel intends to defend the germ of truth in Kantian
dualism against reductive or eliminative programs like those of
materialism and empiricism. Like Plato, with his dualism of soul versus
bodily appetites, Kant pursues the mind's ability to question its felt
inclinations or appetites and to come up with a standard of "duty" (or,
in Plato's case, "good") which transcends bodily restrictiveness. Hegel
preserves this essential Platonic and Kantian concern in the form of
infinity going beyond the finite (a process that Hegel in fact relates
to "freedom" and the "ought"),
the universal going beyond the particular (in the Concept) and Spirit
going beyond Nature. Hegel renders these dualities intelligible by
(ultimately) his argument in the "Quality" chapter of the "Science of
Logic". The finite has to become infinite in order to achieve reality.
The idea of the absolute excludes multiplicity so the subjective and
objective must achieve synthesis to become whole. This is because as
Hegel suggests by his introduction of the concept of "reality",
what determines itself—rather than depending on its relations to other
things for its essential character—is more fully "real" (following the
Latin etymology of "real", more "thing-like") than what does not. Finite
things do not determine themselves because as "finite" things their
essential character is determined by their boundaries over against other
finite things, so in order to become "real" they must go beyond their
finitude ("finitude is only as a transcending of itself").
The result of this argument is that finite and infinite—and by
extension, particular and universal, nature and freedom—do not face one
another as two independent realities, but instead the latter (in each
case) is the self-transcending of the former.
Rather than stress the distinct singularity of each factor that
complements and conflicts with others—without explanation—the
relationship between finite and infinite (and particular and universal
and nature and freedom) becomes intelligible as a progressively
developing and self-perfecting whole.
Progress
The mystical writings of Jakob Böhme had a strong effect on Hegel. Böhme had written that the Fall of Man was a necessary stage in the evolution of the universe.
This evolution was itself the result of God's desire for complete
self-awareness. Hegel was fascinated by the works of Kant, Rousseau and Johann Wolfgang Goethe and by the French Revolution.
Modern philosophy, culture and society seemed to Hegel fraught with
contradictions and tensions, such as those between the subject and
object of knowledge, mind and nature, self and Other, freedom and authority, knowledge and faith, or the Enlightenment and Romanticism.
Hegel's main philosophical project was to take these contradictions and
tensions and interpret them as part of a comprehensive, evolving,
rational unity that in different contexts he called "the absolute Idea" (Science of Logic, sections 1781–1783) or "absolute knowledge" (Phenomenology of Spirit, "(DD) Absolute Knowledge").
According to Hegel, the main characteristic of this unity was that it evolved through and manifested itself in contradiction and negation. Contradiction and negation have a dynamic quality that at every point in each domain of reality—consciousness, history, philosophy, art, nature and society—leads to further development until a rational unity is reached that preserves the contradictions as phases and sub-parts by lifting them up (Aufhebung)
to a higher unity. This whole is mental because it is mind that can
comprehend all of these phases and sub-parts as steps in its own process
of comprehension. It is rational because the same, underlying, logical,
developmental order underlies every domain of reality and is ultimately
the order of self-conscious rational thought, although only in the
later stages of development does it come to full self-consciousness. The
rational, self-conscious whole is not a thing or being
that lies outside of other existing things or minds. Rather, it comes
to completion only in the philosophical comprehension of individual
existing human minds who through their own understanding bring this
developmental process to an understanding of itself. Hegel's thought is
revolutionary to the extent that it is a philosophy of absolute
negation—as long as absolute negation is at the center, systematization
remains open, and makes it possible for human beings to become subjects.
"Mind" and "Spirit" are the common English translations of Hegel's use of the German "Geist". Some have argued that either of these terms overly "psychologize" Hegel, implying a kind of disembodied, solipsistic consciousness like ghost
or "soul". Geist combines the meaning of spirit—as in god, ghost, or
mind—with an intentional force. In Hegel's early philosophy of nature
(draft manuscripts written during his time at the University of Jena),
Hegel's notion of "Geist" was tightly bound to the notion of "Aether", from which Hegel also derived the concepts of space and time, but in his later works (after Jena) he did not explicitly use his old notion of "Aether" anymore.
Central to Hegel's conception of knowledge and mind (and therefore also of reality) was the notion of identity in difference—that is, that mind externalizes itself in various forms and objects
that stand outside of it or opposed to it; and that through recognizing
itself in them, is "with itself" in these external manifestations so
that they are at one and the same time mind and other-than-mind. This
notion of identity in difference, which is intimately bound up with his
conception of contradiction and negativity, is a principal feature
differentiating Hegel's thought from that of other philosophers.
Civil society
Hegel made the distinction between civil society and state in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right. In this work, civil society (Hegel used the term "bürgerliche Gesellschaft" though it is now referred to as Zivilgesellschaft in German to emphasize a more inclusive community) was a stage in the dialectical relationship that occurs between Hegel's perceived opposites, the macro-community of the state and the micro-community of the family. Broadly speaking, the term was split, like Hegel's followers, to the political left and right. On the left, it became the foundation for Karl Marx's civil society as an economic base;
to the right, it became a description for all non-state (and the state
is the peak of the objective spirit) aspects of society, including
culture, society and politics. This liberal distinction between political society and civil society was followed by Alexis de Tocqueville.
In fact, Hegel's distinctions as to what he meant by civil society are
often unclear. For example, while it seems to be the case that he felt
that a civil society such as the German society in which he lived was an
inevitable movement of the dialectic, he made way for the crushing of
other types of "lesser" and not fully realized types of civil society as
these societies were not fully conscious or aware—as it were—as to the
lack of progress in their societies. Thus, it was perfectly legitimate
in the eyes of Hegel for a conqueror such as Napoleon to come along and
destroy that which was not fully realized.
State
Hegel's State is the final culmination of the embodiment of freedom or right (Rechte) in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. The State subsumes family and civil society and fulfills them. All three together are called "ethical life" (Sittlichkeit). The State involves three "moments".
In a Hegelian State, citizens both know their place and choose their
place. They both know their obligations and choose to fulfill their
obligations. An individual's "supreme duty is to be a member of the
state" (Elements of the Philosophy of Right, section 258). The
individual has "substantial freedom in the state". The State is
"objective spirit" so "it is only through being a member of the state
that the individual himself has objectivity, truth, and ethical life"
(section 258). Furthermore, every member both loves the State with
genuine patriotism, but has transcended mere "team spirit" by
reflectively endorsing their citizenship. Members of a Hegelian State
are happy even to sacrifice their lives for the State.
Heraclitus
According to Hegel, "Heraclitus
is the one who first declared the nature of the infinite and first
grasped nature as in itself infinite, that is, its essence as process.
The origin of philosophy is to be dated from Heraclitus. His is the
persistent Idea that is the same in all philosophers up to the present
day, as it was the Idea of Plato and Aristotle".
For Hegel, Heraclitus's great achievements were to have understood the
nature of the infinite, which for Hegel includes understanding the
inherent contradictoriness and negativity of reality; and to have
grasped that reality is becoming or process and that "being" and
"nothingness" are mere empty abstractions. According to Hegel,
Heraclitus's "obscurity" comes from his being a true (in Hegel's terms
"speculative") philosopher who grasped the ultimate philosophical truth
and therefore expressed himself in a way that goes beyond the abstract
and limited nature of common sense and is difficult to grasp by those
who operate within common sense. Hegel asserted that in Heraclitus he
had an antecedent for his logic: "[...] there is no proposition of
Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my logic".
Hegel cites a number of fragments of Heraclitus in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy.
One to which he attributes great significance is the fragment he
translates as "Being is not more than Non-being", which he interprets to
mean the following:
Sein und Nichts sei dasselbe
Being and non-being are the same.
Heraclitus does not form any abstract nouns from his ordinary use of
"to be" and "to become" and in that fragment seems to be opposing any
identity A to any other identity B, C and so on, which is not-A.
However, Hegel interprets not-A as not existing at all, not nothing at
all, which cannot be conceived, but indeterminate or "pure" being without particularity or specificity.
Pure being and pure non-being or nothingness are for Hegel pure
abstractions from the reality of becoming and this is also how he
interprets Heraclitus. This interpretation of Heraclitus cannot be ruled
out, but even if present is not the main gist of his thought.
For Hegel, the inner movement of reality is the process of God
thinking as manifested in the evolution of the universe of nature and
thought; that is, Hegel argued that when fully and properly understood, reality is being thought
by God as manifested in a person's comprehension of this process in and
through philosophy. Since human thought is the image and fulfillment of
God's thought, God is not ineffable
(so incomprehensible as to be unutterable), but can be understood by an
analysis of thought and reality. Just as humans continually correct
their concepts of reality through a dialectical process, so God himself becomes more fully manifested through the dialectical process of becoming.
For his god, Hegel does not take the logos of Heraclitus but refers rather to the nous of Anaxagoras,
although he may well have regarded them the same as he continues to
refer to god's plan, which is identical to God. Whatever the nous thinks
at any time is actual substance
and is identical to limited being, but more remains to be thought in
the substrate of non-being, which is identical to pure or unlimited
thought.
The universe as becoming is therefore a combination of being and
non-being. The particular is never complete in itself, but to find
completion is continually transformed into more comprehensive, complex,
self-relating particulars. The essential nature of being-for-itself is
that it is free "in itself;" that is, it does not depend on anything
else such as matter for its being. The limitations represent fetters,
which it must constantly be casting off as it becomes freer and more
self-determining.
Although Hegel began his philosophizing with commentary on the
Christian religion and often expresses the view that he is a Christian,
his ideas of God are not acceptable to some Christians even though he
has had a major influence on 19th- and 20th-century theology.
Religion
As a graduate of a Protestant seminary, Hegel's theological concerns were reflected in many of his writings and lectures. Hegel's thoughts on the person of Jesus Christ stood out from the theologies of the Enlightenment. In his posthumously published Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Part 3, Hegel is shown as being particularly interested with the demonstrations of God's existence and the ontological proof.
He espouses that "God is not an abstraction but a concrete God [...]
God, considered in terms of his eternal Idea, has to generate the Son,
has to distinguish himself from himself; he is the process of
differentiating, namely, love and Spirit". This means that Jesus as the
Son of God is posited by God over against himself as other. Hegel sees
both a relational unity and a metaphysical unity between Jesus and God
the Father. To Hegel, Jesus is both divine and human. Hegel further
attests that God (as Jesus) not only died, but "[...] rather, a reversal
takes place: God, that is to say, maintains himself in the process, and
the latter is only the death of death. God rises again to life, and
thus things are reversed".
The philosopher Walter Kaufmann
has argued that there was great stress on the sharp criticisms of
traditional Christianity appearing in Hegel's so-called early
theological writings. Kaufmann admits that Hegel treated many
distinctively Christian themes and "sometimes could not resist equating"
his conception of spirit (Geist) "with God, instead of saying clearly:
in God I do not believe; spirit suffices me".
Kaufmann also points out that Hegel's references to God or to the
divine—and also to spirit—drew on classical Greek as well as Christian
connotations of the terms. Kaufmann goes on:
In addition to his beloved Greeks, Hegel saw before him the example of Spinoza and, in his own time, the poetry of Goethe, Schiller, and Hölderlin, who also liked to speak of gods and the divine. So he, too, sometimes spoke of God and, more often, of the divine; and because he occasionally took pleasure in insisting that he was really closer to this or that Christian tradition than some of the theologians of his time, he has sometimes been understood to have been a Christian.
According to Hegel himself, his philosophy was consistent with Christianity. This led Hegelian philosopher, jurist and politician Carl Friedrich Göschel
(1784–1861) to write a treatise demonstrating the consistency of
Hegel's philosophy with the Christian doctrine of the immortality of the
human soul. Göschel's book on this subject was titled Von den Beweisen für die Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele im Lichte der spekulativen Philosophie: eine Ostergabe (Berlin: Verlag von Duncker und Humblot, 1835).
Hegel seemed to have an ambivalent relationship with magic, myth and Paganism. He formulates an early philosophical example of a disenchantment narrative, arguing that Judaism was responsible both for realizing the existence of Geist and, by extension, for separating nature from ideas of spiritual and magical forces and challenging polytheism. However, Hegel's manuscript "The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism"
suggests that Hegel was concerned about the perceived decline in myth
and enchantment in his age, and that he therefore called for a "new
myth" to fill the cultural vacuum.
Works
Hegel published four works during his lifetime:
(1) The Phenomenology of Spirit (or The Phenomenology of Mind), his account of the evolution of consciousness from sense-perception to absolute knowledge, published in 1807.
(2) Science of Logic, the logical and metaphysical core of his philosophy, in three volumes (1812, 1813 and 1816, respectively), with a revised first volume published in 1831.
(3) Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, a summary of his entire philosophical system, which was originally published in 1816 and revised in 1827 and 1830.
(4) Elements of the Philosophy of Right, his political philosophy, published in 1820.
During the last ten years of his life, Hegel did not publish another book, but thoroughly revised the Encyclopedia (second edition, 1827; third, 1830).[80] In his political philosophy, he criticized Karl Ludwig von Haller's
reactionary work, which claimed that laws were not necessary. He also
published some articles early in his career and during his Berlin
period. A number of other works on the philosophy of history, religion, aesthetics and the history of philosophy were compiled from the lecture notes of his students and published posthumously.
Legacy
Hegel's tombstone in Berlin
There are views of Hegel's thought as a representation of the summit of early 19th-century Germany's movement of philosophical idealism. It would come to have a profound impact on many future philosophical schools, including schools that opposed Hegel's specific dialectical idealism, such as existentialism, the historical materialism of Marx, historism and British Idealism.
Hegel's influence was immense both within philosophy and in the
other sciences. Throughout the 19th century many chairs of philosophy
around Europe were held by Hegelians and Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—among
many others—were all deeply influenced by, but also strongly opposed to
many of the central themes of Hegel's philosophy. Scholars continue to
find and point out Hegelian influences and approaches in a wide range of
theoretical and/or learned works, such as Carl von Clausewitz's magnum opus on strategic thought, On War (1831). After less than a generation, Hegel's philosophy was suppressed and even banned by the Prussian right-wing and was firmly rejected by the left-wing in multiple official writings.
After the period of Bruno Bauer, Hegel's influence did not make itself felt again until the philosophy of British Idealism and the 20th-century Hegelian Western Marxism that began with György Lukács. The more recent movement of communitarianism has a strong Hegelian influence.
Reading Hegel
Some of Hegel's writing was intended for those with advanced knowledge of philosophy, although his Encyclopedia was intended as a textbook in a university course. Nevertheless, Hegel assumes that his readers are well-versed in Western philosophy. Especially crucial are Aristotle, Immanuel Kant and Kant's immediate successors, most prominently Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling.
Those without this background would be well-advised to begin with one
of the many general introductions to his thought. As is always the case,
difficulties are magnified for those reading him in translation. In
fact, Hegel himself argues in his Science of Logic that the German language was particularly conducive to philosophical thought.
According to Walter Kaufmann, the basic idea of Hegel's works, especially the Phenomenology of Spirit,
is that a philosopher should not "confine him or herself to views that
have been held but penetrate these to the human reality they reflect".
In other words, it is not enough to consider propositions, or even the
content of consciousness; "it is worthwhile to ask in every instance
what kind of spirit would entertain such propositions, hold such views,
and have such a consciousness. Every outlook in other words, is to be
studied not merely as an academic possibility but as an existential
reality".
Kaufmann has argued that as unlikely as it may sound, it is not the
case that Hegel was unable to write clearly, but that Hegel felt that
"he must and should not write in the way in which he was gifted".
Left and right Hegelianism
Some historians have spoken of Hegel's influence as represented by two opposing camps. The Right Hegelians, the allegedly direct disciples of Hegel at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, advocated a Protestant orthodoxy and the political conservatism of the post-Napoleon Restoration period. Today this faction continues among conservative Protestants, such as the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, which was founded by missionaries from Germany when the Hegelian Right was active. The Left Hegelians, also known as the Young Hegelians, interpreted Hegel in a revolutionary sense, leading to an advocation of atheism in religion and liberal democracy in politics.
In more recent studies, this paradigm has been questioned. No Hegelians of the period ever referred to themselves as "Right Hegelians", which was a term of insult originated by David Strauss,
a self-styled Left Hegelian. Critiques of Hegel offered from the Left
Hegelians radically diverted Hegel's thinking into new directions and
eventually came to form a disproportionately large part of the
literature on and about Hegel.
The Left Hegelians also influenced Marxism, which inspired global movements, encompassing the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution and myriad revolutionary practices up until the present moment.
20th-century interpretations of Hegel were mostly shaped by British idealism, logical positivism, Marxism and Fascism. According to Benedetto Croce, the Italian Fascist Giovanni Gentile
"holds the honor of having been the most rigorous neo-Hegelian in the
entire history of Western philosophy and the dishonor of having been the
official philosopher of Fascism in Italy".
However, since the fall of the Soviet Union a new wave of Hegel
scholarship arose in the West without the preconceptions of the prior
schools of thought. Walter Jaeschkeand Otto Pöggeler in Germany as well as Peter Hodgson and Howard Kainz in the United States are notable for their recent contributions to post-Soviet Union thinking about Hegel.
Triads
In previous modern accounts of Hegelianism (to undergraduate classes,
for example), especially those formed prior to the Hegel renaissance,
Hegel's dialectic was most often characterized as a three-step process, "thesis, antithesis, synthesis"; namely, that a "thesis" (e.g. the French Revolution) would cause the creation of its "antithesis" (e.g. the Reign of Terror that followed) and would eventually result in a "synthesis" (e.g. the constitutional state
of free citizens). However, Hegel used this classification only once
and he attributed the terminology to Kant. The terminology was largely
developed earlier by Fichte. It was spread by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus in accounts of Hegelian philosophy and since then the terms have been used as descriptive of this type of framework.
The "thesis–antithesis–synthesis" approach gives the sense that
things or ideas are contradicted or opposed by things that come from
outside them. To the contrary, the fundamental notion of Hegel's
dialectic is that things or ideas have internal contradictions. From
Hegel's point of view, analysis or comprehension of a thing or idea
reveals that underneath its apparently simple identity or unity is an
underlying inner contradiction. This contradiction leads to the
dissolution of the thing or idea in the simple form in which it
presented itself and to a higher-level, more complex thing or idea that
more adequately incorporates the contradiction. The triadic form that
appears in many places in Hegel (e.g. being–nothingness–becoming,
immediate–mediate–concrete and abstract–negative–concrete) is about this
movement from inner contradiction to higher-level integration or
unification.
For Hegel, reason is but "speculative", not "dialectical".
Believing that the traditional description of Hegel's philosophy in
terms of thesis–antithesis–synthesis was mistaken, a few scholars like Raya Dunayevskaya
have attempted to discard the triadic approach altogether. According to
their argument, although Hegel refers to "the two elemental
considerations: first, the idea of freedom as the absolute and final
aim; secondly, the means for realizing it, i.e. the subjective side of
knowledge and will, with its life, movement, and activity" (thesis and
antithesis), he does not use "synthesis", but instead speaks of the
"Whole": "We then recognized the State as the moral Whole and the
Reality of Freedom, and consequently as the objective unity of these two
elements". Furthermore, in Hegel's language the "dialectical" aspect or
"moment" of thought and reality, by which things or thoughts turn into
their opposites or have their inner contradictions brought to the
surface, what he called Aufhebung,
is only preliminary to the "speculative" (and not "synthesizing")
aspect or "moment", which grasps the unity of these opposites or
contradiction.
It is widely admitted today that the old-fashioned description of
Hegel's philosophy in terms of thesis–antithesis–synthesis is
inaccurate. Nevertheless, such is the persistence of this misnomer that
the model and terminology survive in a number of scholarly works.
Renaissance
In
the last half of the 20th century, Hegel's philosophy underwent a major
renaissance. This was due to (a) the rediscovery and re-evaluation of
Hegel as a possible philosophical progenitor of Marxism by
philosophically oriented Marxists; (b) a resurgence of the historical
perspective that Hegel brought to everything; and (c) an increasing
recognition of the importance of his dialectical method. György Lukács' History and Class Consciousness (1923) helped to reintroduce Hegel into the Marxist canon. This sparked a renewed interest in Hegel reflected in the work of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Raya Dunayevskaya, Alexandre Kojève and Gotthard Günther among others. In Reason and Revolution (1941), Herbert Marcuse made the case for Hegel as a revolutionary and criticized Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse's thesis that Hegel was a totalitarian. The Hegel renaissance also highlighted the significance of Hegel's early works, i.e. those written before The Phenomenology of Spirit. The direct and indirect influence of Kojève's lectures and writings (on The Phenomenology of Spirit in particular) mean that it is not possible to understand most French philosophers from Jean-Paul Sartre to Jacques Derrida without understanding Hegel. American neoconservative political theorist Francis Fukuyama's controversial book The End of History and the Last Man (1992) was heavily influenced by Kojève. The Swiss theologian Hans Küng has also advanced contemporary scholarship in Hegel studies.
Beginning in the 1960s, Anglo-American Hegel scholarship has
attempted to challenge the traditional interpretation of Hegel as
offering a metaphysical system: this has also been the approach of Z. A. Pelczynski and Shlomo Avineri.
This view, sometimes referred to as the "non-metaphysical option", has
had a decided influence on many major English language studies of Hegel
in the past forty years.
Late 20th-century literature in Western Theology that is friendly to Hegel includes works by such writers as Walter Kaufmann (1966), Dale M. Schlitt (1984), Theodore Geraets (1985), Philip M. Merklinger (1991), Stephen Rocker (1995) and Cyril O'Regan (1995).
Two prominent American philosophers, John McDowell and Robert Brandom (sometimes referred to as the "Pittsburgh Hegelians"), have produced philosophical works exhibiting a marked Hegelian influence. Each is avowedly influenced by the late Wilfred Sellars, also of Pittsburgh, who referred to his seminal work Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956) as a series of "incipient Méditations Hegeliennes" (in homage to Edmund Husserl's 1931 work, Méditations cartésiennes).
Beginning in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, a
fresh reading of Hegel took place in the West. For these scholars,
fairly well represented by the Hegel Society of America and in
cooperation with German scholars such as Otto Pöggeler and Walter
Jaeschke, Hegel's works should be read without preconceptions. Marx
plays little-to-no role in these new readings. Some American
philosophers associated with this movement include Lawrence Stepelevich, Rudolf Siebert, Richard Dien Winfield and Theodore Geraets.
Criticism
Criticism of Hegel has been widespread in the 19th and the 20th centuries. A diverse range of individuals including Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Eric Voegelin and A. J. Ayer
have challenged Hegelian philosophy from a variety of perspectives.
Among the first to take a critical view of Hegel's system was the
19th-century German group known as the Young Hegelians, which included Feuerbach, Marx, Engels and their followers. In Britain, the Hegelian British idealism school (members of which included Francis Herbert Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet and in the United States Josiah Royce) was challenged and rejected by analytic philosophers Moore and Russell. In particular, Russell considered "almost all" of Hegel's doctrines to be false.
Regarding Hegel's interpretation of history, Russell commented: "Like
other historical theories, it required, if it was to be made plausible,
some distortion of facts and considerable ignorance". Logical positivists such as Ayer and the Vienna Circle criticized both Hegelian philosophy and its supporters, such as Bradley.
Hegel's contemporary Schopenhauer was particularly critical and
wrote of Hegel's philosophy as "a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all
mental powers, stifling all real thinking". In 1820, Schopenhauer became a lecturer at the University of Berlin and he scheduled his lectures to coincide with those of Hegel, whom Schopenhauer had also described as a "clumsy charlatan". However, only five students ended up attending Schopenhauer's lectures so he dropped out of academia. Kierkegaard criticized Hegel's "absolute knowledge" unity. The physicist and philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann
also criticized the obscure complexity of Hegel's works, referring to
Hegel's writing as an "unclear thoughtless flow of words".
In a similar vein, Robert Pippin notes that some view Hegel as having
"the ugliest prose style in the history of the German language". Russell wrote in A History of Western Philosophy (1945) that Hegel was "the hardest to understand of all the great philosophers".
Karl Popper
wrote that "there is so much philosophical writing (especially in the
Hegelian school) which may justly be criticized as meaningless
verbiage". Popper also makes the claim in the second volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) that Hegel's system formed a thinly veiled justification for the absolute rule of Frederick William III and that Hegel's idea of the ultimate goal of history was to reach a state approximating that of 1830s Prussia. Popper further proposed that Hegel's philosophy served not only as an inspiration for communist and fascist
totalitarian governments of the 20th century, whose dialectics allow
for any belief to be construed as rational simply if it could be said to
exist. Kaufmann and Shlomo Avineri have criticized Popper's theories about Hegel.
Isaiah Berlin listed Hegel as one of the six architects of modern authoritarianism who undermined liberal democracy, along with Rousseau, Claude Adrien Helvétius, Fichte, Saint-Simon and Joseph de Maistre.
Voegelin argued that Hegel should be understood not as a philosopher, but as a "sorcerer", i.e. as a mystic and hermetic thinker. This concept of Hegel as a hermetic thinker was elaborated by Glenn Alexander Magee,
who argued that interpreting Hegel's body of work as an expression of
mysticism and hermetic ideas leads to a more accurate understanding of
Hegel.
Selected works
Published during Hegel's lifetime
- Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie, 1801
- The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy, tr. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf, 1977
- Phenomenology of Mind, tr. J. B. Baillie, 1910; 2nd ed. 1931
- Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller, 1977
- Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Terry Pinkard, 2012
- Wissenschaft der Logik, 1812, 1813, 1816, "Doctrine of Being" revised 1831
- Science of Logic, tr. W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers, 2 vols., 1929; tr. A. V. Miller, 1969; tr. George di Giovanni, 2010
- Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, 1817; 2nd ed. 1827; 3rd ed. 1830 (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences)
- (Pt. I:) The Logic of Hegel, tr. William Wallace, 1874, 2nd ed. 1892; tr. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris, 1991; tr. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom 2010
- (Pt. II:) Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, tr. A. V. Miller, 1970
- (Pt. III:) Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, tr. William Wallace, 1894; rev. by A. V. Miller, 1971; rev. 2007 by Michael Inwood
- Elements of the Philosophy of Right, tr. T. M. Knox, 1942; tr. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood, 1991
Published posthumously
- Lectures on Aesthetics
- Lectures on the Philosophy of History (also translated as Lectures on the Philosophy of World History), 1837
- Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
- Lectures on the History of Philosophy
