Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher who was a major figure in German idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality revolutionized European philosophy and served as an important precursor to Continental philosophy, Marxism and historism.
Background
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born on August 27, 1770 in Stuttgart, in the Duchy of Württemberg in southwestern Germany (now Stuttgart, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany). He was known as Wilhelm to his close family. His father, Georg Ludwig, was secretary to the revenue office at the court of Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg. Hegel's mother, Maria Magdalena Louisa, was the daughter of a lawyer at the High Court of Justice at the Württemberg court. She died of a bilious fever when Georg was thirteen. Hegel and his father also caught the disease but narrowly survived. He had a sister, Christiane Luise and a brother, Georg Ludwig, who was to perish as an officer in Napoleon's Russian campaign.
Education
At age of three Georg Hegel 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. During his adolescence Georg read voraciously, copying lengthy extracts in his diary.
At the age of eighteen Georg Hegel entered the Tübinger Stift, where two fellow students were to become vital to his development - poet Friedrich Hölderlin, and 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.
Career
Georg Hegel having received his theological certificate from the Tübingen Seminary, he became house tutor to an aristocratic family in Bern from 1793 to 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".
In 1801 Georg Hegel came to Jena with the encouragement of his old friend Schelling, who held the position of Extraordinary Professor at the University there.He secured a position at the University as a unsalaried lecturer after submitting a dissertation on the orbits of the planets. In 1805 the University promoted Georg Hegel to the position of Extraordinary Professor, after Hegel wrote a letter to the poet and minister of culture Johann Wolfgang von Goethe protesting at the promotion of his philosophical adversary Jakob Friedrich Fries ahead of him.
In March 1807, aged 37, Georg Hegel moved to Bamberg, where Niethammer had declined and passed on to Georg an offer to become editor of a newspaper, the Bamberger Zeitung. He, unable to find more suitable employment, reluctantly accepted. He was then, in November 1808, again through Niethammer, appointed headmaster of a Gymnasium in Nuremberg, a post he held until 1816. While in Nuremberg he adapted his recently published Phenomenology of Spirit for use in the classroom.
In 1818 Georg Hegel accepted the renewed offer of the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin. Here he published his Philosophy of Right (1821). He devoted himself primarily to delivering his lectures; 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. He was appointed Rector of the University in 1830, when he was 60.
Views
Hegel's views can be best represented by his development of absolute idealism as a means to integrate the notions of mind, nature, subject, object, psychology, the state, history, art, religion and philosophy. In particular, he developed the notion of the master - slave dialectic and the concept of Geist ("mind-spirit") as the expression of the integration ("sublation", Aufheben), without elimination or reduction, of otherwise seemingly contradictory or opposing ideas. Examples include relationships between nature and freedom and between immanence and transcendence. Georg Hegel also made original and influential contributions to speculative logic, the role of history and the notions of the negative and the ethical. Liberty, according to Hegel, is the basic element of the spirit. His main interests were logic , Aesthetics, Religion, Philosophy of history, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Political philosophy.