Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 - November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, in present-day southwest Germany. He received his education at the Tübinger Stift (seminary of the Protestant Church in Württemberg), where he was friends with the future philosophers Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Hölderlin. He became fascinated by the works of Spinoza, Kant, and Rousseau, 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, 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" or "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, society -- leads to further development until a rational unity is reached that preserves the contradictions as phases and sub-parts of a larger, evolutionary whole. 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 the order of rational thought. It 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 legacy

One common joke about Hegel's legacy for subsequent thought is that ironically Hegel has managed to be both one of the most influential thinkers in modern philosophy while simultaneously being one of the most inaccessible. Because of this, Hegel's ultimate legacy will be debated for a very long time. He has been such a formative influence on such a wide range of thinkers that one can give him credit or assign him blame for almost any position.

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One famous philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer for a very short time a fellow colleague of Hegel's at the University of Berlin said this about his philosophy:

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"The height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had been only previously known in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced, general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, as a monument to German stupidity."

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Historians have spoken of Hegel's influence as represented by two opposing camps. The Right Hegelians, the direct disciples of Hegel at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now known as the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), advocated evangelical orthodoxy and the political conservatism of the post-Napoleon Restoration period.

Related Topics:
Right Hegelians - Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Napoleon

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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. Thinkers and writers traditionally associated with the Young Hegelians include Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, David Friedrich Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner, and most famously, the younger Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - all of whom knew and were familiar with the writings of each other. A group of the Young Hegelians known as Die Freien ("The Free") gathered frequently for debate in Hippel's Weinstube (a winebar) in Friedrichsstrasse, in Berlin in the 1830's and 1840's. In this environment, some of the most influential thinking of the last 160 years was nurtured - the radical critique and fierce debates of the Young Hegelians inspired and shaped influential ideas of atheism, humanism, communism, anarchism and egoism.

Related Topics:
Left Hegelians - Young Hegelians - Atheism - Liberal democracy - Bruno Bauer - Arnold Ruge - David Friedrich Strauss - Ludwig Feuerbach - Max Stirner - Karl Marx - Friedrich Engels - Die Freien - Humanism - Communism - Anarchism - Egoism

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Except for Marx and Marxists, almost none of the so-called "Left Hegelians" actually described themselves as followers of Hegel, and several of them openly repudiated or insulted the legacy of Hegel's philosophy. Nevertheless, this historical category is often deemed useful in modern academic philosophy. The critiques of Hegel offered from the "Left Hegelians" led the line of Hegel's thinking into radically new directions - and form an important part of the literature on and about Hegel.

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In modern accounts of Hegelianism — to undergraduate classes, for example — Hegel's dialectic often appears broken up for convenience into three moments called "thesis" (in the French historical example, the revolution), "antithesis" (the terror which followed), and "synthesis" (the constitutional state of free citizens). Hegel used this classification only once, when discussing Kant: it was developed earlier by Fichte in his loosely analogous account of the relation between the individual subject and the world. Much Hegel scholarship does not recognize the usefulness of this triadic classification for shedding light on Hegel's thought. Although Hegel refers to "the two elemental considerations: first, the idea of freedom as the absolute and final aim; secondly, the means for realising it, i.e. the subjective side of knowledge and will, with its life, movement, and activity" (thesis and antithesis) he doesn't use "synthesis" but instead speaks of the "Whole":

Related Topics:
Dialectic - Fichte

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"We then recognised 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, is only preliminary to the "speculative" (and not "synthesizing") aspect or "moment", which grasps the unity of these opposites or contradiction. Thus for Hegel, reason is ultimately "speculative", not "dialectical".

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Hegel used this system of dialectics to explain the whole of the history of philosophy, science, art, politics and religion, but many modern critics point out that Hegel often seems to gloss over the realities of history in order to fit it into his dialectical mold. Karl Popper, a critic of Hegel in The Open Society and Its Enemies, suggests that the Hegel's system forms a thinly veiled justification for the rule of Frederick William III, and that Hegel's idea of the ultimate goal of history is to reach a state approximating that of 1830s Prussia. This view of Hegel as an apologist of state power and precursor of 20th century totalitarianism was criticized thoroughly by Herbert Marcuse in his Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, on the grounds that Hegel was not an apologist for any state or form of authority simply because it existed: for Hegel the state must always be rational. Arthur Schopenhauer despised Hegel on account of the latter's historicism (among other reasons), and decried Hegel's work as obscurantist "pseudo-philosophy". Many other newer philosophers who prefer to follow the tradition of British Philosophy have made similar statements. But even in Britain, Hegel exercised a major influence on the philosophical school called "British Idealism," which included Francis Herbert Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet, in England, and Josiah Royce at Harvard.

Related Topics:
Science - Art - Politics - Religion - Karl Popper - The Open Society and Its Enemies - Frederick William III - Prussia - Totalitarianism - Herbert Marcuse - Arthur Schopenhauer - Historicism - Obscurantist - Pseudo-philosophy - British Philosophy - Francis Herbert Bradley - Bernard Bosanquet - Josiah Royce

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In the 20th century, Hegel's philosophy underwent a major renaissance. This was due partly to the rediscovery and reevaluation of him as the philosophical progenitor of Marxism by philosophically oriented Marxists, partly through a resurgence of the historical perspective that Hegel brought to everything, and partly through increasing recognition of the importance of his dialectical method. The book that did the most to reintroduce Hegel into the Marxist canon was perhaps Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness. This sparked a renewed interest in Hegel reflected in the work of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Raya Dunayevskaya, Alexandre Kojève and Gotthard Günther among others. The Hegel renaissance also highlighted the significance of Hegel's early works, i.e. those published prior to the Phenomenology of Spirit. More recently two prominent American philosophers, John McDowell and Robert Brandom (sometimes, half-seriously, referred to as the Pittsburgh Hegelians), have exhibited a marked Hegelian influence. Beginning in the 1960's, Anglo-American Hegel scholarship has attempted to challenge the traditional interpretation of Hegel as offering a metaphysical system. This view, often referred to as the 'non-metaphysical option', has had a decided influence on most major English language studies of Hegel in the past 40 years. The works of U.S. neoconservative Francis Fukuyama's controversial book The End of History and the Last Man was heavily influenced by Hegel's interpreter Alexandre Kojève. Among modern scientists, the physicist David Bohm, the mathematician William Lawvere, the logician Kurt Godel and the biologist Ernst Mayr have been deeply interested in or influenced by Hegel's philosophical work.

Related Topics:
Marxism - Georg Lukacs - History and Class Consciousness - Herbert Marcuse - Theodor Adorno - Ernst Bloch - Raya Dunayevskaya - Alexandre Kojève - Gotthard Günther - Phenomenology of Spirit - John McDowell - Robert Brandom - Pittsburgh - Francis Fukuyama - David Bohm - William Lawvere - Kurt Godel - Ernst Mayr

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