Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831), one of the most influential and systematic of the German idealists, also well known for his philosophy of history and philosophy of religion.
Life and works. Hegel, the eldest of three children, was born in Stuttgart, the son of a minor financial official in the court of the Duchy of Württemberg. His mother died when he was eleven. At eighteen, he began attending the theology seminary or Stift attached to the University at Tübingen; he studied theology and classical languages and literature and became friendly with his future colleague and adversary, Schelling, as well as the great genius of German Romantic poetry, Hölderlin. In 1793, upon graduation, he accepted a job as a tutor for a family in Bern, and moved to Frankfurt in 1797 for a similar post. In 1799 his father bequeathed him a modest income and the freedom to resign his tutoring job, pursue his own work, and attempt to establish himself in a university position. In 1801, with the help of Schelling, he moved to the university town of Jena, already widely known as the home of Schiller, Fichte, and the Schlegel brothers. After lecturing for a few years, he became a professor in 1805. Prior to the move to Jena, Hegel’s essays had been chiefly concerned with problems in morality, the theory of culture, and the philosophy of religion. Hegel shared with Rousseau and the German Romantics many doubts about the political and moral implications of the European Enlightenment and modern philosophy in general, even while he still enthusiastically championed what he termed the principle of modernity, ‘absolute freedom.’ Like many, he feared that the modern attack on feudal political and religious authority would merely issue in the reformulation of new internalized and still repressive forms of authority. And he was among that legion of German intellectuals infatuated with ancient Greece and the superiority of their supposedly harmonious social life, compared with the authoritarian and legalistic character of the Jewish and later Christian religions. At Jena, however, he coedited a journal with Schelling, The Critical Journal of Philosophy, and came to work much more on the philosophic issues created by the critical philosophy or ‘transcendental idealism’ of Kant, and its legacy in the work of Rheinhold, Fichte, and Schelling. His written work became much more influenced by these theoretical projects and their attempt to extend Kant’s search for the basic categories necessary for experience to be discriminated and evaluated, and for a theory of the subject that, in some non-empirical way, was responsible for such categories. Problems concerning the completeness, interrelation, and ontological status of such a categorial structure were quite prominent, along with a continuing interest in the relation between a free, self-determining agent and the supposed constraints of moral principles and other agents. In his early years at Jena (especially before Schelling left in 1803), he was particularly preoccupied with this problem of a systematic philosophy, a way of accounting for the basic categories of the natural world and for human practical activity that would ground all such categories on commonly presupposed and logically interrelated, even interdeducible, principles. (In Hegel’s terms, this was the problem of the relation between a ‘Logic’ and a ‘Philosophy of Nature’ and ‘Philosophy of Spirit.’) After 1803, however, while he was preparing his own systematic philosophy for publication, what had been planned as a short introduction to this system took on a life of its own and grew into one of Hegel’s most provocative and influential books. Working at a furious pace, he finished what would be eventually called The Phenomenology of Spirit in a period of great personal and political turmoil. During the final writing of the book, he had learned that Christina Burkhard would give birth to his illegitimate son. (Ludwig was born in February 1807.) And he is supposed to have completed the text on October 13, 1807, the day Napoleon’s armies captured Jena.
It was certainly an unprecedented work. In conception, it is about the human race itself as a developing, progressively more self-conscious subject, but its content seems to take in a vast, heterogeneous range of topics, from technical issues in empiricist epistemology to the significance of burial rituals. Its range is so heterogeneous that there is controversy to this day about whether it has any overall unity, or whether it was pieced together at the last minute. Adding to the interpretive problem, Hegel often invented his own striking language of ‘inverted worlds,’ ‘struggles to the death for recognition,’ ‘unhappy consciousness,’ ‘spiritual animal kingdoms,’ and ‘beautiful souls.’
Continuing his university career at Jena in those times looked out of the question, so Hegel accepted a job at Bamberg editing a newspaper, and in the following year began an eight-year stint (1808–16) as headmaster and philosophy teacher at a Gymnasium (or secondary school) at Nürnberg. During this period, at forty-one, he married the twenty-year-old Marie von Tucher. He also wrote what is easily his most difficult work, and the one he often referred to as his most important, a magisterial two-volume Science of Logic, which attempts to be a philosophical account of the concepts necessary in all possible kinds of account-givings.
Finally, in 1816, Hegel was offered a chair in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, where he published the first of several versions of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, his own systematic account of the relation between the ‘logic’ of human thought and the ‘real’ expression of such interrelated categories in our understanding of the natural world and in our understanding and evaluation of our own activities. In 1818, he accepted the much more prestigious post in philosophy at Berlin, where he remained until his death in 1831. Soon after his arrival in Berlin, he began to exert a powerful influence over German letters and intellectual life. In 1821, in the midst of a growing political and nationalist crisis in Prussia, he published his controversial book on political philosophy, The Philosophy of Right. His lectures at the university were later published as his philosophy of history, of aesthetics, and of religion, and as his history of philosophy. Philosophy. Hegel’s most important ideas were formed gradually, in response to a number of issues in philosophy and often in response to historical events. Moreover, his language and approach were so heterodox that he has inspired as much controversy about the meaning of his position as about its adequacy. Hence any summary will be as much a summary of the controversies as of the basic position. His dissatisfactions with the absence of a public realm, or any forms of genuine social solidarity in the German states and in modernity generally, and his distaste with what he called the ‘positivity’ of the orthodox religions of the day (their reliance on law, scripture, and abstract claims to authority), led him to various attempts to make use of the Greek polis and classical art, as well as the early Christian understanding of love and a renewed ‘folk religion,’ as critical foils to such tendencies. For some time, he also regarded much traditional and modern philosophy as itself a kind of lifeless classifying that only contributed to contemporary fragmentation, myopia, and confusion. These concerns remained with him throughout his life, and he is thus rightly known as one of the first modern thinkers to argue that what had come to be accepted as the central problem of modern social and political life, the legitimacy of state power, had been too narrowly conceived. There are now all sorts of circumstances, he argued, in which people might satisfy the modern criterion of legitimacy and ‘consent’ to the use of some power, but not fully understand the terms within which such issues are posed, or assent in an attenuated, resentful, manipulated, or confused way. In such cases they would experience no connection between their individual will and the actual content of the institutions they are supposed to have sanctioned. The modern problem is as much alienation (Entfremdung) as sovereignty, an exercise of will in which the product of one’s will appears ‘strange’ or ‘alien,’ ‘other,’ and which results in much of modern life, however chosen or willed, being fundamentally unsatisfying. However, during the Jena years, his views on this issue changed. Most importantly, philosophical issues moved closer to center stage in the Hegelian drama. He no longer regarded philosophy as some sort of self-undermining activity that merely prepared one for some leap into genuine ‘speculation’ (roughly Schelling’s position) and began to champion a unique kind of comprehensive, very determinate reflection on the interrelations among all the various classical alternatives in philosophy. Much more controversially, he also attempted to understand the way in which such relations and transitions were also reflected in the history of the art, politics, and religions of various historical communities. He thus came to think that philosophy should be some sort of recollection of its past history, a realization of the mere partiality, rather than falsity, of its past attempts at a comprehensive teaching, and an account of the centrality of these continuously developing attempts in the development of other human practices. Through understanding the ‘logic’ of such a development, a reconciliation of sorts with the implications of such a rational process in contemporary life, or at least with the potentialities inherent in contemporary life, would be possible.
In all such influences and developments, one revolutionary aspect of Hegel’s position became clearer. For while Hegel still frequently argued that the subject matter of philosophy was ‘reason,’ or ‘the Absolute,’ the unconditioned presupposition of all human account-giving and evaluation, and thereby an understanding of the ‘whole’