Hegel entered the seminary at the University of Tübingen in 1788.
Career
Gallery of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770-1831. German philosopher. 19th-century lithograph by Em. Baerentzen & Co.From the book "Figaro. Journal of Literature, Art and Music" by Georg Garstensen. Published 1841.
Gallery of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Portrait of German philosopher George Wilhelm Friederich Hegel (1770-1831). Undated illustration.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770-1831. German philosopher. 19th-century lithograph by Em. Baerentzen & Co.From the book "Figaro. Journal of Literature, Art and Music" by Georg Garstensen. Published 1841.
(The Phenomenology of Spirit, also known as The Phenomenol...)
The Phenomenology of Spirit, also known as The Phenomenology of Mind, contains methodical discussions of Hegelian examination of mind and mental functioning. In Hegelianist philosophy, the notion of the spirit or mind commences with a consideration of the subjective (i.e. individual) mind. After some contemplation however, it is realised that this "individual" sort of mind is but the initial stage of the process - the so-called "in-itself stage." The stage which follows this is that of the objective mind - it is this type of mind that finds itself object of law, morals and government. This frames the condition of the mind when it is out-of-itself. The final stage of the Hegelianist posit upon the mind is that of the "absolute mind." At this point, the mind ascends above the constraints of the natural world and of mankind's institutions and laws. It is at this high stage that concepts of art, faith, and philosophy have been birthed. The concept of free thinking is here encountered: that the mind may only be truly free and capable of itself when having separated from the worldly restrictions of everyday life - this "otherness" is but binding upon the mind's true capacities and power.
(Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel's last major p...)
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel's last major published work, is an attempt to systematize ethical theory, natural right, the philosophy of law, political theory, and the sociology of the modern state into the framework of Hegel's philosophy of history.
(Hegel's Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics were delivere...)
Hegel's Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics were delivered in Berlin in the 1820s and stand today as a passionately argued work that challenged the ability of art to respond to the modern world.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a famous German philosopher who lived in the 18th century. He is the founder of Hegelianism Historicism, Naturphilosophie, and belonged to the school of German Idealism coupled with Absolute and Objective Idealism.
Background
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born on August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart, Germany to Georg Ludwig and Maria Magdalena Louisa. His father was a secretary to Karl Eugen, Duke of Wurttemberg and his mother was the daughter of a lawyer. He was brought up in an atmosphere of Protestant pietism.
Hegel had a sister named Christiane Luise and a brother, Georg Ludwig, who died as an officer in Napoleon's Russian campaign. His mother died of bilious fever when he was thirteen years old and he and his father also suffered the disease and had a close shave with death.
Education
Hegel became thoroughly acquainted with the Greek and Roman classics while studying at the Stuttgart Gymnasium (preparatory school) and was familiar with German literature and science.
Encouraged by his father to become a clergyman, Hegel entered the seminary at the University of Tübingen in 1788. There he developed friendships with the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. From Hölderlin in particular, Hegel developed a profound interest in Greek literature and philosophy. Early on and throughout his life, Hegel recorded and committed to memory everything he read - and he read profusely! Hegel worshipped Goethe and long regarded himself as inferior to his brilliant contemporaries Schelling and Hölderlin. In 1790 Hegel received his Master of Arts degree.
The Germany of Hegel's time was extremely backward from an economic point of view. Germany was a myriad of tiny, backward states, relatively insulated from the turmoils of Europe. He was an avid reader of Schiller and Rousseau. Hegel was 18 when the Bastille was stormed and the Republic declared in France and Hegel was an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution, and participated in a support group formed in Tübingen. Hegel finished his first great work, The Phenomenology of Mind on the very eve of the decisive Battle of Jena, in which Napoleon broke the Prussian armies and dismembered the kingdom. French soldiers entered Hegel's house and set it afire just after he stuffed the last pages of the Phenomenology into his pocket and took refuge in the house of a high official of the town. In the Phenomenology, he attempts to understand the revolutionary terror of the Jacobins in terms of their interpretation of Freedom. Hegel celebrated Bastille Day throughout his life.
Having completed a course of study in philosophy and theology and having decided not to enter the ministry, Hegel became (1793) a private tutor in Berne, Switzerland. In about 1794, at the suggestion of his friend Hölderlin, Hegel began a study of Immanuel Kant and Johann Fichte but his first writings at this time were Life of Jesus and The Positivity of Christian Religion.
In 1796, Hegel wrote The First Programme for a System of German Idealism jointly with Schelling. This work included the line: "... the state is something purely mechanical - and there is no [spiritual] idea of a machine. Only what is an object of freedom may be called 'Idea'. Therefore we must transcend the state! For every state must treat free men as cogs in a machine. And this is precisely what should not happen; hence the state must perish." In 1797, Hölderlin found Hegel a position in Frankfurt, but two years later his father died, leaving him enough to free him from tutoring.
In 1801, Hegel went to the University of Jena. Fichte had left Jena in 1799, and Schiller had left in 1793, but Schelling remained at Jena until 1803, and Schelling and Hegel collaborated during that time.
Hegel studied, wrote and lectured, although he did not receive a salary until the end of 1806, just before completing the first draft of The Phenomenology of Mind - the first work to present his own unique philosophical contribution - part of which was taken through the French lines by a courier to his friend Niethammer in Bamburg, Bavaria, before Jena was taken by Napoleon's army and Hegel was forced to flee - the remaining pages in his pocket.
Having exhausted the legacy left him by his father, Hegel became editor of the Catholic daily Bamberger Zeitung. He disliked journalism, however, and moved to Nuremberg, where he served for eight years as headmaster of a Gymnasium. He continued to work on the Phenomenology. Almost everything that Hegel was to develop systematically over the rest of his life is prefigured in the Phenomenology, but this book is far from systematic and extremely difficult to read. The Phenomenology attempts to present human history, with all its revolutions, wars, and scientific discoveries, as an idealistic self-development of an objective Spirit or Mind.
While at Nuremberg, Hegel published over a period of several years The Science of Logic (1812, 1813, 1816). In 1816, Hegel accepted a professorship in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. Soon after, he published in summary form a systematic statement of his entire philosophy entitled Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences which was first translated into English in 1959 and includes The Shorter Logic, as Part I. The Encyclopaedia was continually revised up till 1827, and the final version was published in 1830.
In 1818, he took up a Chair of Philosophy at the University of Berlin, which was vacant since 1814. During this period his lectures attracted students from all over Germany and the world. He went on to be appointed as the Rector of the University in 1829, when he was 59. He was deeply disturbed by the riots for reform in Berlin during this period.
In 1831, Frederick William III decorated Hegel with the Order of the Red Eagle, 3rd Class for his service to the Prussian state.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel died on November 14, 1831, due to cholera and a gastrointestinal complication. At the time of his death, he was one of Germany's most prominent philosophers.
The last full-length work published by Hegel was The Philosophy of Right (1821), although several sets of his lecture notes, supplemented by students' notes, were published after his death. Published lectures include The Philosophy of Fine Art (1835-1838), Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1833-1836), Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1832), and Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837).
Hegel's entire system rests on the triad Idea-Nature-Spirit. Idea-in-itself (God in His eternal essence before Creation of Nature and finite mind) is the dynamic reality that gives rise to all that exists. All existence is the manifestation (actualization) of Idea-in-itself, which receives full reality only by being so manifested. In this state God does not yet "exist," but in Creation God passes out of Himself into Nature. Idea-outside-of-itself (the antithesis of Idea-in-itself) is Creation, the divine manifestation in space as Nature. Essence assumes existence. Logic (thesis) is externalized as Nature (antithesis). The triadic structure of Nature emerges as mechanics, physics, and organics - developing from mineral and vegetable stages to man, in whose consciousness Idea becomes Self-conscious. The highest synthesis of organics is the free ego; Nature passes back into Spirit as mind awakens to the realization of the unity of idea (logic) and Nature (space) in the free ego (Self), conscious of itself as Spirit. Idea-in-andfor-itself (Self-conscious or Spirit) is the antithesis of idea-in-itself and Idea-outside-of-itself, whose development in time is history.
Politics
Hegel's social and political views emerge most clearly in his discussion of morality and social ethics. At the level of morality, right and wrong is a matter of individual conscience. One must, however, move beyond this to the level of social ethics, for duty, according to Hegel, is not essentially the product of individual judgment. Individuals are complete only in the midst of social relationships; thus, the only context in which duty can truly exist is a social one. Hegel considered membership in the state one of the individual’s highest duties. Ideally, the state is the manifestation of the general will, which is the highest expression of the ethical spirit. Obedience to this general will is the act of a free and rational individual.
Views
Before Hegel, the word dialectic referred to the process of argument and refutation through which philosophers sought to discover the truth. Plato's dialogues offer a prime example. One person advances a proposition or belief, and Socrates refutes it and shows why that proposition is wrong, which clears the way for a better, more convincing argument to take its place. The point of dialectical reasoning, before Hegel, was to clear away misconceptions and arrive at first principles - basic, fundamental truths on which we can all agree and that the philosopher can use as a starting point on which to base a philosophical system, such as Descartes' famous principle that if we're thinking, we can at least be sure that we exist.
Hegel used the dialectic for a different purpose than arriving at first principles. To understand what the dialectic means for Hegel, we have to first understand that Hegel was an idealist, in the tradition of his predecessor, Kant. Like Kant, Hegel believed that we do not perceive the world or anything in it directly and that all our minds have access to is ideas of the world - images, perceptions, concepts. For Kant and Hegel, the only reality we know is a virtual reality. Hegel's idealism differs from Kant's in two ways. First, Hegel believed that the ideas we have of the world are social, which is to say that the ideas that we possess individually are utterly shaped by the ideas that other people possess. Our minds have been shaped by the thoughts of other people through the language we speak, the traditions and mores of our society, and the cultural and religious institutions of which we are a part. Spirit is Hegel's name for the collective consciousness of a given society, which shapes the ideas and consciousness of each individual.
The second way that Hegel differs from Kant is that he sees Spirit as evolving according to the same kind of pattern in which ideas might evolve in an argument - namely, the dialectic. First, there is a thesis, an idea or proposition about the world and how we relate to it. Every thesis, or idea about the world, contains an inherent contradiction or flaw, which thus gives rise to its antithesis, a proposition that contradicts the thesis. Finally, the thesis and antithesis are reconciled into a synthesis, a new idea combining elements of both.
Essentially, Hegel sees human societies evolving in the same way that an argument might evolve. An entire society or culture begins with one idea about the world, which naturally and irresistibly evolves into a succession of different ideas through a dialectical pattern. Since Hegel believes that this succession is logical, meaning that it could only happen one way, he thinks that we can figure out the entire course of human history without recourse to archaeology or other empirical data, but purely through logic.
The German word that is normally translated as "spirit" in English versions of Hegel is Geist, a word that can mean both "spirit" and "mind," depending on the context. Hegel uses it to refer to the collective consciousness of a society, in the sense that we might speak (following Hegel) of the spirit of the age. In both English and German, spirit can also mean a ghost, and it can be used to refer to religious phenomena as well. Both of these senses are relevant to Hegel's term because the collective dimension of consciousness, what we might call culture, is similarly intangible and mysterious. Spirit is located neither in objects nor in individual minds, but in a nonmaterial third realm that contains ideas that a whole society has in common.
Spirit does not exist from the earliest moments of human history but is instead a modern phenomenon toward which humanity had to evolve. According to the process outlined in the Phenomenology of Spirit, human consciousness starts from a position of trying to grasp objects through sensory inputs and moves on to more sophisticated ways of relating to the external world, until it finally reaches the level of Spirit. At this stage, consciousness understands that individuals are bound to other individuals in a single communal consciousness, or culture. Spirit is the self-consciousness of the community, the whole of which individuals are only a part. As the consciousness of spirit unfolds and changes, so do the values and actions of the individual parts of which it is made.
Hegel agrees with other idealists, such as Kant, that consciousness of an object necessarily implies consciousness of a subject, which is a self perceiving the object. In other words, human beings are not only conscious of objects but also self-conscious. Hegel takes this view a step further to suggest that self-consciousness involves not only a subject and an object but other subjects as well. Individuals become aware of selves through the eyes of another. Thus, true self-consciousness is a social process and involves a moment of radical identification with another consciousness, a taking on of another's view of the world to obtain a self-image. The consciousness of self is always the consciousness of the other. In relationships of inequality and dependence, the subordinate partner, the bondsman, is always conscious of his subordinate status in the eyes of the other, while the independent partner, the lord, enjoys the freedom of negating consciousness of the subordinate other who is unessential to him. However, in doing so, the lord is uneasy because he has negated a consciousness with which he has radically identified in order to assure himself of his independent and free status. In short, he feels guilty for denying the moment of mutual identification and sameness to preserve his sense of independence and superiority. Social life is founded on this dynamic of competing moments of mutual identification and objectification, of identifying with and also distancing oneself from the other.
Ethical life is a given cultural expression of Spirit, the collective entity that transcends all individuals and determines their beliefs and actions whether they are aware of it or not. Ethical life reflects the fundamental interdependence among individuals in a society and finds articulation in their shared customs and morals. Hegel argues that the tendency in modern life characterized by economic individualism and the Enlightenment idea of the individual as a subject possessing various rights represents a movement away from the recognition of essential social bonds. Before the Enlightenment, human beings were generally considered in terms of how they fit into social hierarchies and communal institutions, but following Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant, the individual on his own came to be considered sacred. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel explains that the modern state is the institution that will correct this imbalance in modern culture. Although economic and legal individualism play a positive role in modern society, Hegel foresees the need for institutions that will affirm common bonds and ethical life while preserving individual freedom. He believes, for example, that the state must regulate the economy and provide for the poor in society and that there should be "corporative" institutions, somewhat similar to modern trade unions, in which different occupational groups affirm a sense of social belonging and a feeling of being connected to the larger society.
Quotations:
"Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion."
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
"To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great."
"Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights."
"What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it."
"Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two."
"Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself."
"Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me."
"Education is the art of making man ethical."
"It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; ...the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness."
"The valor that struggles is better than the weakness that endures."
Personality
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was inspired by Chinese philosophy and the concepts of Yin and Yang.
Interests
Reading
Philosophers & Thinkers
Immanuel Kant
Writers
Friedrich Schiller, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Goethe
Connections
During the Nuremberg years, Hegel met and married Marie von Tucher (1791-1855). They had three children - a daughter who died soon after birth, and two sons, Karl (1813-1901) and Immanuel (1814-91). Hegel had also fathered an illegitimate son, Ludwig, to the wife of his former landlord in Jena. Ludwig was born soon after Hegel had left Jena but eventually came to live with the Hegels, too.