Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel a German philosopher (1770-1831), one of the most systematic and influential thinkers of the modern age, whose vast philosophical system sought to comprehend reality as the self-development of reason or spirit through history, and whose ideas shaped philosophy, politics, history and theology for generations after his death.

Life and Formation

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart on 27 August 1770, the son of a civil servant in the service of the duchy of Wurttemberg. He studied at the Tubingen theological seminary, where he shared a room with the poet Friedrich Holderlin and with the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, and together they responded with enthusiasm to the early events of the French Revolution and to the philosophy of Kant, which had transformed the intellectual climate of Germany and set the terms of the debate to which Hegel would devote his life.

After the upheavals of the war he edited a newspaper in Bamberg and then served as headmaster of a school in Nuremberg, where he married and where he wrote his Science of Logic, the central work of his system. In 1816 he was appointed to a professorship at Heidelberg and in 1818 to the chair of philosophy at Berlin, the most prestigious position in the German academic world, which he filled with great success until his death and from which his influence spread across Europe. He was by then the most celebrated philosopher in Germany, and students came from many lands to hear him expound the system that he had built over three decades of ceaseless labour.

The System and the Dialectic

Hegel constructed one of the last and grandest of the philosophical systems, comprehending logic, the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit in a single interconnected whole. His central idea was that reality is not a collection of separate things but a process, the self-unfolding of a rational principle which he called spirit or the absolute, and that the task of philosophy is to grasp this process in thought and to exhibit the necessity of its successive stages and their inner connection with one another.

He held that the rational is the real and the real is the rational, by which he meant that the world is intelligible and that what exists is the unfolding of reason in history and nature. Philosophy, on this view, does not prescribe what ought to be but comprehends what is, arriving always too late to change the shape of things and content to recognise the work of reason in the actual course of events and in the institutions that embody it, and this identification of reason with actuality gave his thought its monumental calm.

History, Spirit and Freedom

Hegel's philosophy of history is among his most influential contributions. He interpreted the whole course of human events as the progressive realisation of freedom, in which spirit advances through a series of stages represented by the great civilisations of the East, of Greece and Rome, and of the modern world. Each stage embodies a partial truth and is surpassed by the next, and the process, though marked by struggle and suffering, is understood as rational in its outcome and intelligible to the philosopher who surveys it as a whole.

The modern state, in his account, is the institutional form in which freedom is actualised, giving rational expression to the family and to civil society and binding the particular interests of individuals to the general good. He did not regard all existing states as rational, but he held that the state as an idea is the ethical whole within which the freedom of the person can be realised and secured, and he criticised those who set the individual against the community as though the two were enemies rather than partners.

Lectures and Later Works

After his move to Berlin, Hegel published little in his own lifetime but delivered a series of celebrated lecture courses on the philosophy of history, on aesthetics, on religion and on the history of philosophy. These lectures were assembled by his students after his death and published as books, and they extended his system into the study of art, religion and the history of thought, and they made his ideas known to a far wider public than his technical writings could reach. In his lectures on aesthetics he treated art as one of the forms in which spirit knows itself, tracing its development through symbolic, classical and romantic phases and identifying each with a stage in its growth.

In his political philosophy, set out most fully in the Philosophy of Right, he discussed property, contract, morality, the family, civil society and the state, and he criticised the abstract individualism that regarded society as a mere aggregate of separate wills. He insisted that freedom is realised only in institutions and in a community, and that the individual becomes fully human through participation in the ethical life of a people and in the customs and laws that give that life its shape and its enduring strength.

Influence and Legacy

Hegel died in Berlin on 14 November 1831, during a cholera epidemic, at the height of his fame. His followers soon divided into factions that drew opposed conclusions from his thought, and his system became a battleground for the interpretation of religion, politics and history throughout the nineteenth century. His authority in the German universities was immense for a generation, and his students occupied many of the leading chairs of philosophy and carried his ideas into law, theology and the study of history.

He is remembered as one of the greatest and most difficult of modern philosophers, a thinker whose ambition to grasp the whole of reality in a single system set a challenge that later philosophers could neither ignore nor easily repeat. His ideas about history, freedom and the social nature of the self continue to inform debate about the nature of reason and the direction of human affairs, and his influence upon the intellectual life of the modern world has been compared to that of Plato and Aristotle.

See also

• Phenomenology of Spirit
• Hegelian dialectic
• Philosophy of history
• German idealism