Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Born August 27, 1770Stuttgart, Württemberg

Died November 14, 1831(aged 61)Berlin, Prussia

Era 19th-century philosophyRegion Western PhilosophySchool German Idealism;

Founder of Hegelianism, Historicism

Main interests Logic, Philosophy of history, Aesthetics, Religion, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Political Philosophy,

Notable ideas Absolute idealism, Dialectic, Sublation, master-slave dialectic

INTRODUCTION• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (German pronunciation: [ˈɡeɔɐ̯k ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈheːɡəl])

(August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.

• Hegel developed a comprehensive philosophical framework, or "system", of Absolute idealism to account in an integrated and developmental way for the relation of mind and nature, the subject and object of knowledge, psychology, the state, history, art, religion and philosophy. In particular, he developed the concept that mind or spirit manifested itself in a set of contradictions and oppositions that it ultimately integrated and united, without eliminating either pole or reducing one to the other. Examples of such contradictions include those between nature and freedom, and between immanence and transcendence.

• Hegel influenced writers of widely varying positions, including both his admirers (Strauss, Bauer , Feuerbach, T. H. Green, Marx, Vygotsky, F.H. Bradley, Dewey, Sartre, Croce, Küng, Kojève,Fukuyama, Žižek, Brandom, Iqbal) and his detractors (Schopenhauer, Schelling, Kierkegaard,Stirner, Nietzsche, Peirce, Popper, Russell, Heidegger).His influential conceptions are of speculative logic or "dialectic", "absolute idealism", "Spirit", negativity, sublation (Aufhebung in German), the "Master/Slave" dialectic, "ethical life" and the importance of history.

• His father, an official in the fiscal service of Wurttemberg, is not otherwise known to fame; and of his mother we hear only that she had scholarship enough to teach him the elements of Latin. He had one sister, Christiana, who died unmarried, and a brother Ludwig, who served in the campaigns of Napoleon. At the grammar school of Stuttgart, where Hegel was educated between the ages of seven and eighteen, he was not remarkable. His main productions were a diary kept at intervals during eighteen months (1785-1787), and translations of the Antigone, the Manual of Epictetus, &c. But the characteristic feature of his studies was the copious extracts which from this time onward he unremittingly made and preserved. This collection, alphabetically arranged, comprised annotations on classical authors, passages from newspapers, treatises on morals and mathematics from the standard works of the period. In this way he absorbed in their integrity the raw materials for elaboration. Yet as evidence that he was not merely receptive we have essays already breathing that admiration of the classical world which he never lost. His chief amusement was cards, and he began the habit of taking snuff.

 Hegel's Philosophy• Hegel's own pithy account of the nature of philosophy given in the “Preface” to his Elements of the Philosophy of Right captures a

characteristic tension in his philosophical approach and, in particular, in his approach to the nature and limits of human cognition. “Philosophy,” he says there, “is its own time raised to the level of thought.”

• On the one hand we can clearly see in the phrase “its own time” the suggestion of an historical or cultural conditionedness and variability which applies even to the highest form of human cognition, philosophy itself. The contents of philosophical knowledge, we might suspect, will come from the historically changing contents of its cultural context. On the other, there is the hint of such contents being “raised” to some higher level, presumably higher than other levels of cognitive functioning such as those based in everyday perceptual experience, for example, or those characteristic of other areas of culture such as art and religion. This higher level takes the form of conceptually articulated “thought,” a type of cognition commonly taken as capable of having “eternal” contents (think of Plato and Frege, for example).

• This antithetical combination within human cognition of the temporally-conditioned and the eternal, a combination which reflects a broader conception of the human being as what Hegel describes elsewhere as a “finite-infinite,” has led to Hegel being regarded in different ways by different types of philosophical readers. For example, an historically-minded pragmatist like Richard Rorty, distrustful of all claims or aspirations to the “God's-eye view,” could praise Hegel as a philosopher who had introduced this historically reflective dimension into philosophy (and set it on the characteristically “romantic” path which has predominated in modern continental philosophy) but who had unfortunately still remained bogged down in the remnants of the Platonistic idea of the search for a historical truths (Rorty 1982). Those adopting such an approach to Hegel tend to have in mind the (relatively) young author of the Phenomenology of Spirit and have tended to dismiss as “metaphysical” later and more systematic works like the Science of Logic. In contrast, the British Hegelian movement at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, tended to ignore the Phenomenology and the more historicist dimensions of his thought, and found in Hegel a systematic metaphysician whose Logic provided a systematic and definitive philosophical ontology. This latter traditional “metaphysical” view of Hegel dominated Hegel reception for most of the twentieth century, but from the 1980s came to be challenged by scholars who offered an alternative “non-metaphysical” “post-Kantian” view of Hegel. In turn, the post-Kantian reading has been challenged by a revised metaphysical view, in which appeal is often made to Aristotelian conceptual realist features of Hegel's thought.

• Before surveying these competing views, however, something needs to be said about the confusing term “idealism,” and about the variety of idealism that is characteristic of Hegel and other German idealists.

QUOTES OF HEGEL’S•

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

•Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

•I'm not ugly, but my beauty is a total creation.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

•It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

•Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

•Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

CONCEPT

• His influential conceptions are of speculative logic or "dialectic", "absolute idealism", "Spirit", negativity, sublation (Aufhebung in German), the "Master/Slave" dialectic, "ethical life" and the importance of history.

CONCLUSION•  being the influence of the master, and of philosophy as he explained it,

the formation of a new school by the earnest, liberal men who drew very different conclusions from the master’s first principles, was to be expected.  But the “New Hegelians,” as they were called, became disbelievers in religion and in spiritual things altogether, and either lapsed, like Strauss, into intellectual scepticism, or, like Feuerbach, became aggressive materialists.  The ideal elements in Hegel’s system were appropriated by Christianity, and were employed against liberty and progress.  Spiritualists, whether in the old world or the new, had little interest in a philosophy that so readily favored two opposite tendencies, both of which they abhorred.  To them the spiritual philosophy was represented by Hegel’s predecessors.  The disciples of sentiment accepted Jacobi; the loyalists of conscience followed Fichte; the severe metaphysicians, of whom there were a few, adhered to Kant; the soaring speculators and imaginative theosophists spread their “sheeny vans,” and soared into the regions of the absolute with Schelling.  The idealists of New England were largest debtors to Jacobi and Fichte.