BIOGRAPHY

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart, in southern Germany. Hegel and his father, a minor government official; his mother, a loving Haus Frau (housewife); and his sister and brother were all close, affectionate, and loving. It is easy to see why Hegel would later describe the family as the "immediate Ethical Substance." Following grade school in Stuttgart, at age eighteen, Hegel won a scholarship to Tübingen University, where he studied theology. While there, he met and befriended the poet Hölderlin and the philosopher Schelling. The work Hegel submitted to his professors at the university gave no indication of the brilliant philosophical career that was to follow. In fact, his diploma from the university recorded that his knowledge of theology was fair, but his knowledge of philosophy was inadequate. Nevertheless, Hegel was already beginning to write insightful essays, not for classroom assignments, but to clarify his own thoughts.

After graduating from the university in 1793, Hegel spent seven years as a tutor for wealthy families in Bern and Frankfurt. During this time he continued to write essays--mostly on religious topics--that indicated he had moved far away from orthodox Christianity. For example, one early essay compared Jesus and Socrates, and Socrates'' ethical teaching was seen as superior.

Following his father's death in 1799, Hegel inherited a modest sum of money, quit tutoring, and joined his friend Schelling at the University of Jena. There Hegel became a Privatdozent (an unsalaried lecturer) and coedited a philosophic journal with Schelling. While at Jena, Hegel wrote his first great work, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), which laid out the major themes of his philosophy. This work included a critique of Schelling's ideas, which ended the friendship. Before this important work could be published, Napoleon's war with Prussia closed the University of Jena, and so Hegel, whose inheritance had now been exhausted, was forced to find other employment.

Hegel lecturing.

After a stint as a newspaper editor, Hegel served eight years in Nürnberg as the rector of a Gymnasium (high school). There he published his second major work, Science of Logic (1812-1816). He also met and married a young woman from a distinguished family who was half his age, and they had two sons. In 1816, Hegel accepted a chair of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. He continued his practice of producing a major book at each place he worked by publishing the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline in 1817. In 1818, Hegel moved to his final institution, the University of Berlin. There he published his Philosophy of Right (1821)--and became famous throughout Europe. He remained in Berlin until his death from cholera in 1831.

Following his death, a group of his friends published an eighteen-volume collection of his works, including his early essays and his lectures on aesthetics, the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, and the philosophy of religion.

BASIC THOUGHT

Like all philosophers of his age, Hegel was greatly influenced by Kant. Kant had managed to synthesize two previously disparate realities--the rational world of ideas (emphasized by rationalists) with the phenomenal world of perception (emphasized by empiricists). But in so doing, Kant separated the noumenal world of "things-in-themselves" from the phenomenal world of experience and declared the noumenal world unknowable. In a sense he had reconciled two competing epistemologies--Continental Rationalism and British Empiricism--at the expense of abandoning metaphysics. Hegel sought to go one step further than Kant and effect a complete synthesis that would not only draw together competing epistemologies but would also show the connection between epistemology and metaphysics. The key to this synthesis is the recognition that consciousness is the ultimate reality, or, to use his famous phrase, "What is real is rational--what is rational is real." That is, metaphysical reality (the real) is Idea or Spirit or Mind (that which knows). The resulting philosophy is called "Absolute Idealism" because all things that exist are essentially related to absolute Idea or Spirit or Mind.

According to Hegel, traditional rationalism (what he calls raisonnement) tends to classify all experience formally into abstract, lifeless universals. Taken to its logical extreme, rationalists end up with the abstraction "Being": "But this mere Being, as it is mere abstraction, is therefore the absolutely negative: which, in a similarly immediate aspect, is just NOTHING." By abstracting away the concreteness or particularity of actual experience, one is left with Being which is Nothing. The short article "Who Thinks Abstractly?" (1807-1808?), reprinted here in Walter Kaufmann's translation, clearly conveys Hegel's contempt for the process of abstraction.

Whereas Being and Nothing are both identical and yet contradictory, according to Hegel, "the truth of Being and Nothing is ... the unity of the two: and this unity is BECOMING." The unity of Becoming does not obliterate Being and Nothing but holds both in tension in a higher truth. The two parts of the contradiction, together with that which unites or overcomes them, make up a triad. This method of overcoming contradictions by moving to a higher level of truth is known as the "dialectic." Hegel proposed to develop a complete dialectical System of reality based on the three foundational triads of "Being--Nothing--Becoming," "Being--Essence--Notion," and "Idea--Nature--Mind." Though he developed several proposals for this System, Hegel never completed any of them. Our selection from the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, translated by William Wallace, with revisions by M.J. Inwood, presents the introduction to one such uncompleted proposal.

Although Hegel never developed a complete System, he did use the dialectical method to explain consciousness. In the section entitled "Relations of Master and Servant" from The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel explains one stage in the dialectical development of consciousness. He begins by pointing out that only by acknowledging an "other" is self-consciousness possible. But if there is an other, then the original self-consciousness feels threatened and asserts its freedom by trying to dominate that other and force acknowledgment of its dominance. The ensuing struggle results in a master who dominates and a servant who is dominated. The master then forces the servant to produce material goods for the enjoyment of the master.

But at this point the master is now dependent upon the servant he has dominated. In the first place, his self-consciousness as master is subject to his recognition as master by the servant. But more important, while the master has been consuming or destroying what the servant makes, the servant has been learning to create--to bend nature to his will--and so has established his own self-consciousness in relation to what he has created. Furthermore, the labor of the servant has a permanent quality whereas the master's consumption is again dependent on the servant's production. So by dominating the servant, the master is dominated.

The solution to this contradiction is to acknowledge that neither master nor servant is free and that freedom is not possible in relationships of domination. The next stage in the dialectic is for the mind to seek freedom within itself.

This dialectical development of the consciousness of freedom can also be understood in relation to world history. As Hegel says in his "General Introduction" to the Philosophy of History (1832), "the study of world history ... represents the rationally necessary course of the World Spirit, the Spirit whose nature is indeed always one and the same, but whose one nature unfolds in the course of the world." In other words, the Absolute Spirit as manifested in history through human consciousness is the World Spirit (Weltgeist), and all of human history is a process whereby this World Spirit comes to self-consciousness of itself as free. To understand this development of Spirit, Hegel examines the three elements that structure historical movement: (1) the nature of Spirit, (2) its means of actualization, and (3) the shape of its perfect embodiment. This final embodiment of Spirit as freedom is found in the State. As Hegel explains each of these three elements, he makes it clear that the individual is unimportant: "In world history the 'individuals' that we have to deal with are peoples." In fact, the individual as an individual is outside of history entirely and only finds freedom and meaning within the unified self-consciousness of a people known as the State.

In the concluding chapter from Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel explains that the entire history of philosophy is a "necessary development." The dialectical movement from one philosophy to the next is not a "blind collection of brain-waves, nor a fortuitous progression." Instead, it is the gradual unfolding of Idea or Spirit or Mind. The question left for succeeding philosophers was whether Hegel's philosophy was the final statement of Absolute Spirit or only another step in the dialectical movement.

INFLUENCE

Hegel's ideas have been both lauded and attacked. His insights on the master-servant relationship made a powerful impression on Marx and Nietzsche. Indeed, Hegel's understanding of dialectical development became a central feature of Marx's thought--though Marx rejected the notion of Absolute Spirit. Phenomenology developed Hegel's insights about the different types of consciousness. The sociology of knowledge developed his notions about the connection between consciousness and the culture of a particular epoch. Chief among Hegel's critics was Kierkegaard, who objected strenuously to the devaluing of the individual, questioned the implicit optimism of the dialectic, and mocked the incompleteness of Hegel's "System." Perhaps Hegel's greatest legacy was not any specific idea, but the vision of a complete historical development of thought.