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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (born August 27, 1770,
Stuttgart, Württemberg [Germany]—died November 14, TABLE OF CONTENTS
1831, Berlin), German philosopher who developed a
Introduction
dialectical scheme that emphasized the progress of history
and of ideas from thesis to antithesis and thence to a Early life
synthesis. Gymnasium rector
University professor
Hegel was the last of
Personage and influence
the great philosophical
system builders of
modern times. His
work, following upon that of Immanuel Kant, Johann
Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich Schelling, thus marks
the pinnacle of classical German philosophy. As an
absolute idealist inspired by Christian insights and
grounded in his mastery of a fantastic fund of
concrete knowledge, Hegel found a place for
everything—logical, natural, human, and divine—in a
dialectical scheme that repeatedly swung from thesis
to antithesis and back again to a higher and richer
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
synthesis. His in uence has been as fertile in the
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
engraving by Lazarus Gottlieb Sichling. reactions that he precipitated—in Søren Kierkegaard,
Courtesy Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Portrait the Danish existentialist; in the Marxists, who turned
Collection 21/32 to social action; in the logical positivists; and in G.E.
Moore and Bertrand Russell, both pioneering gures
in British analytic philosophy—as in his positive impact.
This article treats Hegel’s life, thought, and in uence. For discussion of the various schools
of Hegelian thought, see Hegelianism.
Early life
Hegel was the son of a revenue of cer. He had already learned the elements of Latin from
his mother by the time he entered the Stuttgart grammar school, where he remained for
his education until he was 18. As a schoolboy he made a collection of extracts,
alphabetically arranged, comprising annotations on classical authors, passages from
newspapers, and treatises on morals and mathematics from the standard works of the
period.
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In 1788 Hegel went as a student to Tübingen with a view to taking orders, as his parents
wished. Here he studied philosophy and classics for two years and graduated in 1790.
Though he then took the theological course, he was impatient with the orthodoxy of his
teachers; and the certi cate given to him when he left in 1793 states that, whereas he had
devoted himself vigorously to philosophy, his industry in theology was intermittent. He
was also said to be poor in oral exposition, a de ciency that was to dog him throughout his
life. Though his fellow students called him “the old man,” he liked cheerful company and a
“sacri ce to Bacchus” and enjoyed the company of women as well. His chief friends during
that period were a pantheistic poet, J.C.F. Hölderlin, his contemporary, and the nature
philosopher Schelling, ve years his junior. Together they read the Greek tragedians and
celebrated the glories of the French Revolution.
On leaving college, Hegel did not enter the ministry; instead, wishing to have leisure for
the study of philosophy and Greek literature, he became a private tutor. For the next three
years he lived in Berne, with time on his hands and the run of a good library, where he
read Edward Gibbon on the fall of the Roman Empire and De l’esprit des loix (1750; The
Spirit of Laws), by Charles Louis, baron de Montesquieu, as well as the Greek and Roman
classics. He also studied the critical philosopher Immanuel Kant and was stimulated by his
essay on religion to write certain papers that became noteworthy only when, more than a
century later, they were published as a part of Hegels theologische Jugendschriften (1907;
Early Theological Writings). Kant had maintained that, whereas orthodoxy requires a faith
in historical facts and in doctrines that reason alone cannot justify and imposes on the
faithful a moral system of arbitrary commands alleged to be revealed, Jesus, on the
contrary, had originally taught a rational morality, which was reconcilable with the
teaching of Kant’s ethical works, and a religion that, unlike Judaism, was adapted to the
reason of all people. Hegel accepted this teaching; but, being more of a historian than
Kant was, he put it to the test of history by writing two essays. The rst of these was a life of
Jesus in which Hegel attempted to reinterpret the Gospel on Kantian lines. The second
essay was an answer to the question of how Christianity had ever become the
authoritarian religion that it was, if in fact the teaching of Jesus was not authoritarian but
rationalistic.
Hegel was lonely in Berne and was glad to move, at the end of 1796, to Frankfurt am Main,
where Hölderlin had gotten him a tutorship. His hopes of more companionship, however,
were unful lled: Hölderlin was engrossed in an illicit love affair and shortly lost his reason.
Hegel began to suffer from melancholia and, to cure himself, worked harder than ever,
especially at Greek philosophy and modern history and politics. He read and made
clippings from English newspapers, wrote about the internal affairs of his native
Wurtemberg, and studied economics. Hegel was now able to free himself from the
domination of Kant’s in uence and to look with a fresh eye on the problem of Christian
origins.
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Emancipation from Kantianism
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance that this problem had for Hegel. It is true
that his early theological writings contain hard sayings about Christianity and the
churches; but the object of his attack was orthodoxy, not theology itself. All that he wrote
at this period throbs with a religious conviction of a kind that is totally absent from Kant
and Hegel’s other 18th-century teachers. Above all, he was inspired by a doctrine of the
Holy Spirit. The spirit of humanity, its reason, is the candle of the Lord, he held, and
therefore cannot be subject to the limitations that Kant had imposed upon it. This faith in
reason, with its religious basis, henceforth animated the whole of Hegel’s work.
His outlook had also become that of a historian—which again distinguishes him from
Kant, who was much more in uenced by the concepts of physical science. Every one of
Hegel’s major works was a history; and, indeed, it was among historians and classical
scholars rather than among philosophers that his work mainly fructi ed in the 19th
century.
When in 1798 Hegel turned back to look over the essays that he had written in Berne two
or three years earlier, he saw with a historian’s eye that, under Kant’s in uence, he had
misrepresented the life and teachings of Jesus and the history of the Christian church. His
newly won insight then found expression in his essay “Der Geist des Christentums und
sein Schicksal” (“The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate”), likewise unpublished until 1907.
This is one of Hegel’s most remarkable works. Its style is often dif cult and the connection
of thought not always plain, but it is written with passion, insight, and conviction.
He begins by sketching the essence of Judaism, which he paints in the darkest colours.
The Jews were slaves to the Mosaic Law, leading a life unlovely in comparison with that of
the ancient Greeks and content with the material satisfaction of a land owing with milk
and honey. Jesus taught something entirely different. Humans are not to be the slaves of
objective commands: the law is made for them. They are even to rise above the tension in
moral experience between inclination and reason’s law of duty, for the law is to be
“ful lled” in the love of God, wherein all tension ceases and the believer does God’s will
wholeheartedly and single-mindedly. A community of such believers is the Kingdom of
God.
This is the kingdom that Jesus came to teach. It is founded on a belief in the unity of the
divine and the human. The life that ows in them both is one; and it is only because
humans are spirit that they can grasp and comprehend the Spirit of God. Hegel works out
this conception in an exegesis of passages in the Gospel According to John. The kingdom,
however, can never be realized in this world: humans are not spirit alone but esh also.
“Church and state, worship and life, piety and virtue, spiritual and worldly action can never
dissolve into one.”
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In this essay the leading ideas of Hegel’s system of philosophy are rooted. Kant had argued
that humans can have knowledge only of a nite world of appearances and that,
whenever their reason attempts to go beyond this sphere and grapple with the in nite or
with ultimate reality, it becomes entangled in insoluble contradictions. Hegel, however,
found in love, conceived as a union of opposites, a pre gurement of spirit as the unity in
which contradictions, such as in nite and nite, are embraced and synthesized. His choice
of the word Geist to express this his leading conception was deliberate: the word means
“spirit” as well as “mind” and thus has religious overtones. Contradictions in thinking at the
scienti c level of Kant’s “understanding” are indeed inevitable, but thinking as an activity
of spirit or “reason” can rise above them to a synthesis in which the contradictions are
resolved. All of this, expressed in religious phraseology, is contained in the manuscripts
written toward the end of Hegel’s stay in Frankfurt. “In religion,” he wrote, “ nite life rises
to in nite life.” Kant’s philosophy had to stop short of religion. But there is room for
another philosophy, based on the concept of spirit, that will distill into conceptual form the
insights of religion. This was the philosophy that Hegel now felt himself ready to expound.
Career as lecturer at Jena
Fortunately, his circumstances changed at this moment, and he was at last able to
embark on the academic career that had long been his ambition. His father’s death in
1799 had left him an inheritance—slender, indeed, but suf cient to enable him to
surrender a regular income and take the risk of becoming a privatdozent (unsalaried
lecturer). In January 1801 he arrived in Jena, where Schelling had been a professor since
1798. Jena, which had harboured the fantastic mysticism of the Schlegel brothers
(Friedrich and August) and their colleagues, as well as the Kantianism and ethical idealism
of Fichte, had already seen its golden age, for these great scholars had all left. The
precocious Schelling, who was but 26 on Hegel’s arrival, already had several books to his
credit. Apt to “philosophize in public,” Schelling had been ghting a lone battle in the
university against the rather dull followers of Kant. It was suggested that Hegel had been
summoned as a new champion to aid his friend. This impression received some
con rmation from the dissertation by which Hegel quali ed as a university teacher, which
betrays the in uence of Schelling’s philosophy of nature, as well as from Hegel’s rst
publication, an essay entitled “Differenz des Fichte’schen und Schelling’schen Systems der
Philosophie” (1801; “The Difference Between the Fichtean and Schellingian Systems of
Philosophy”), in which he gave preference to the latter. Nevertheless, even in this essay
and still more in its successors, Hegel’s difference from Schelling was clearly marked. They
had a common interest in the Greeks; they both wished to carry forward Kant’s work; and
they were both iconoclasts. Schelling had too many romantic enthusiasms for Hegel’s
liking, however, and all that Hegel took from him—and then only for a very short period—
was a terminology.
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Hegel’s lectures, delivered in the winter of 1801–02, on
logic and metaphysics, were attended by about 11
students. Later, in 1804, with a class of about 30, he
lectured on his whole system, gradually working it out
as he taught. Notice after notice of his lectures
promised a textbook of philosophy—which, however,
failed to appear. After the departure of Schelling from
Jena (1803), Hegel was left to work out his own views
untrammelled. Besides philosophical and political
studies, he made extracts from books, attended
lectures on physiology, and dabbled in other sciences.
As a result of representations made by himself at
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Weimar, he was in February 1805 appointed
von
extraordinary professor at Jena; and in July 1806, on
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling.
Goethe’s intervention, he drew his rst stipend—100
thalers. Though some of his hearers became attached
to him, Hegel was not yet a popular lecturer.
Hegel, like Goethe, felt no patriotic shudder when Napoleon won his victory at Jena (1806):
in Prussia he saw only a corrupt and conceited bureaucracy. Writing to a friend on the day
before the battle, he spoke with admiration of the “world soul” and the emperor and with
satisfaction at the probable overthrow of the Prussians.
At this time Hegel published his rst great work, the Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807;
The Phenomenology of Mind). This, perhaps the most brilliant and dif cult of Hegel’s
books, describes how the human mind has risen from mere consciousness, through self-
consciousness, reason, spirit, and religion, to absolute knowledge. Though humans’ native
attitude toward existence is reliance on the senses, a little re ection is suf cient to show
that the reality attributed to the external world is due as much to intellectual conceptions
as to the senses and that these conceptions are elusive. If consciousness cannot detect a
permanent object outside itself, so self-consciousness cannot nd a permanent subject in
itself. Through aloofness, skepticism, or imperfection, self-consciousness has isolated itself
from the world; it has closed its gates against the stream of life. The perception of this is
reason. Reason thus abandons its efforts to mold the world and is content to let the aims
of individuals work out their results independently.
The stage of Geist, however, reveals the consciousness no longer as isolated, critical, and
antagonistic but as the indwelling spirit of a community. This is the lowest stage of
concrete consciousness, the age of unconscious morality. But, through increasing culture,
the mind gradually emancipates itself from conventions, which prepares the way for the
rule of conscience. From the moral world the next step is religion. But the idea of
Godhead, too, has to pass through nature worship and art before it reaches a full utterance
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in Christianity. Religion thus approaches the stage of absolute knowledge, of “the spirit
knowing itself as spirit.” Here, according to Hegel, is the eld of philosophy.
Gymnasium rector
In spite of the Phänomenologie, however, Hegel’s fortunes were now at their lowest ebb.
He was, therefore, glad to become editor of the Bamberger Zeitung (1807–08). This,
however, was not a suitable vocation, and he gladly accepted the rectorship of the
Aegidiengymnasium in Nürnberg, a post he held from December 1808 to August 1816 and
one that offered him a small but assured income. There Hegel inspired con dence in his
pupils and maintained discipline without pedantic interference in their associations and
sports.
In 1811 Hegel married Marie von Tucher (22 years his junior), of Nürnberg. The marriage was
entirely happy. His wife bore him two sons: Karl, who became eminent as a historian; and
Immanuel, whose interests were theological. The family circle was joined by Ludwig, a
natural son of Hegel’s from Jena. At Nürnberg in 1812 appeared Die objektive Logik
(Objective Logic), being the rst part of his Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic),
which in 1816 was completed by the second part, Die subjektive Logik (Subjective Logic).
University professor
This work, in which his system was rst presented in what was essentially its ultimate
shape, earned him the offer of professorships at Erlangen, at Berlin, and at Heidelberg.
At Heidelberg
He accepted the chair at Heidelberg. For use at his lectures there, he published his
Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1817; Encyclopaedia of
the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline), an exposition of his system as a whole.
Hegel’s philosophy is an attempt to comprehend the entire universe as a systematic
whole. The system is grounded in faith. In the Christian religion God has been revealed as
truth and as spirit. As spirit, humans can receive this revelation. In religion the truth is
veiled in imagery; but in philosophy the veil is torn aside, so that humans can know the
in nite and see all things in God. Hegel’s system is thus a spiritual monism but a monism
in which differentiation is essential. Only through an experience of difference can the
identity of thought and the object of thought be achieved—an identity in which thinking
attains the through-and-through intelligibility that is its goal. Thus, truth is known only
because error has been experienced and truth has triumphed; and God is in nite only
because he has assumed the limitations of nitude and triumphed over them. Similarly,
the Fall of Man was necessary so that humans could attain moral goodness. Spirit,
including the In nite Spirit, knows itself as spirit only by contrast with nature. Hegel’s
system is monistic in having a single theme: what makes the universe intelligible is to see
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it as the eternal cyclical process whereby Absolute Spirit comes to knowledge of itself as
spirit (1) through its own thinking, (2) through nature, and (3) through nite spirits and
their self-expression in history and their self-discovery—in art, in religion, and in philosophy
—as one with Absolute Spirit itself.
The compendium of Hegel’s system, the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, is in
three parts: Logic, Nature, and Mind. Hegel’s method of exposition is dialectical. It often
happens that in a discussion two people who at rst present diametrically opposed points
of view ultimately agree to reject their own partial views and to accept a new and broader
view that does justice to the substance of each. Hegel believed that thinking always
proceeds according to this pattern: it begins by laying down a positive thesis that is at
once negated by its antithesis; then further thought produces the synthesis. But this in
turn generates an antithesis, and the same process continues once more. The process,
however, is circular: ultimately, thinking reaches a synthesis that is identical with its
starting point, except that all that was implicit there has now been made explicit. Thus,
thinking itself, as a process, has negativity as one of its constituent moments, and the
nite is, as God’s self-manifestation, part and parcel of the in nite itself. This is the sort of
dialectical process of which Hegel’s system provides an account in three phases.
Logic
The system begins with an account of God’s thinking “before the creation of nature and
nite spirit”—i.e., with the categories or pure forms of thought, which are the structure of
all physical and intellectual life. Throughout, Hegel is dealing with pure essentialities, with
spirit thinking its own essence; and these are linked together in a dialectical process that
advances from abstract to concrete. If one tries to think the notion of pure Being (the
most abstract category of all), one nds that it is simply emptiness—i.e., Nothing. Yet
Nothing is. The notion of pure Being and the notion of Nothing are opposites; and yet
each, as one tries to think it, passes over into the other. But the way out of the
contradiction is at once to reject both notions separately and to af rm them both
together; i.e., to assert the notion of becoming, since what becomes both is and is not at
once. The dialectical process advances through categories of increasing complexity and
culminates with the absolute idea, or with the spirit as objective to itself.
Nature
Nature is the opposite of spirit. The categories studied in Logic were all internally related to
one another; they grew out of one another. Nature, on the other hand, is a sphere of
external relations. Parts of space and moments of time exclude one another; and
everything in nature is in space and time and is thus nite. But nature is created by spirit
and bears the mark of its creator. Categories appear in it as its essential structure, and it is
the task of the philosophy of nature to detect that structure and its dialectic; but nature, as
the realm of externality, cannot be rational through and through, though the rationality
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pre gured in it becomes gradually explicit when humanity appears. In humanity nature
rises to self-consciousness.
Mind
Here Hegel follows the development of the human mind through the subconscious,
consciousness, and the rational will; then through human institutions and human history
as the embodiment or objecti cation of that will; and nally to art, religion, and
philosophy, in which nally humans know themselves as spirit, as one with God and
possessed of absolute truth. Thus, it is now open to them to think their own essence—i.e.,
the thoughts expounded in Logic. They have nally returned to the starting point of the
system, but en route they have made explicit all that was implicit in it and have discovered
that “nothing but spirit is, and spirit is pure activity.”
Hegel’s system depends throughout on the results of scienti c, historical, theological, and
philosophical inquiry. No reader can fail to be impressed by the penetration and breadth
of his mind nor by the immense range of knowledge that, in his view, had to precede the
work of philosophizing. A civilization must be mature and, indeed, in its death throes
before, in the philosophical thinking that has implicitly been its substance, it becomes
conscious of itself and of its own signi cance. Thus, when philosophy comes on the scene,
some form of the world has grown old.
At Berlin
In 1818 Hegel accepted the renewed offer of the chair of philosophy at Berlin, which had
been vacant since Fichte’s death. There his in uence over his pupils was immense, and
there he published his Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, alternatively
entitled Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821; The Philosophy of Right). In Hegel’s
works on politics and history, the human mind objecti es itself in its endeavour to nd an
object identical with itself. The Philosophy of Right (or The Philosophy of Law) falls into
three main divisions. The rst is concerned with law and rights as such: persons (i.e.,
people as people, quite independently of their individual characters) are the subject of
rights, and what is required of them is mere obedience, no matter what the motives of
obedience may be. Right is thus an abstract universal and therefore does justice only to
the universal element in the human will. The individual, however, cannot be satis ed
unless the act that he does accords not merely with law but also with his own
conscientious convictions. Thus, the problem in the modern world is to construct a social
and political order that satis es the claims of both. And thus no political order can satisfy
the demands of reason unless it is organized so as to avoid, on the one hand, a
centralization that would make people slaves or ignore conscience and, on the other hand,
an antinomianism that would allow freedom of conviction to any individual and so
produce a licentiousness that would make social and political order impossible. The state
that achieves this synthesis rests on the family and on the guild. It is unlike any state
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existing in Hegel’s day; it is a form of limited monarchy, with parliamentary government,
trial by jury, and toleration for Jews and dissenters.
After his publication of The Philosophy of Right, Hegel seems to have devoted himself
almost entirely to his lectures. Between 1823 and 1827 his activity reached its maximum.
His notes were subjected to perpetual revisions and additions. It is possible to form an idea
of them from the shape in which they appear in his published writings. Those on
Aesthetics, on the Philosophy of Religion, on the Philosophy of History, and on the History
of Philosophy have been published by his editors, mainly from the notes of his students,
whereas those on logic, psychology, and the philosophy of nature have been appended in
the form of illustrative and explanatory notes to the corresponding sections of his
Encyklopädie. During these years hundreds of hearers from all parts of Germany and
beyond came under his in uence; and his fame was carried abroad by eager or intelligent
disciples.
Three courses of lectures are especially the product of his Berlin period: those on
aesthetics, on the philosophy of religion, and on the philosophy of history. In the years
preceding the revolution of 1830, public interest, excluded from political life, turned to
theatres, concert rooms, and picture galleries. At these Hegel became a frequent and
appreciative visitor, and he made extracts from the art notes in the newspapers. During
his holiday excursions, his interest in the ne arts more than once took him out of his way
to see some old painting. This familiarity with the facts of art, though neither deep nor
historical, gave a freshness to his lectures on aesthetics, which, as put together from the
notes taken in different years from 1820 to 1829, are among his most successful efforts.
The lectures on the philosophy of religion are another application of his method, and
shortly before his death he had prepared for the press a course of lectures on the proofs
for the existence of God. On the one hand, he turned his weapons against the rationalistic
school, which reduced religion to the modicum compatible with an ordinary worldly mind.
On the other hand, he criticized the school of Friedrich Schleiermacher, who elevated
feeling to a place in religion above systematic theology. In his middle way, Hegel
attempted to show that the dogmatic creed is the rational development of what was
implicit in religious feeling. To do so, of course, philosophy must be made the interpreter
and the superior discipline.
In his philosophy of history, Hegel presupposed that the whole of human history is a
process through which humankind has been making spiritual and moral progress and
advancing to self-knowledge. History has a plot, and the philosopher’s task is to discern it.
Some historians have found its key in the operation of natural laws of various kinds.
Hegel’s attitude, however, rested on the faith that history is the enactment of God’s
purpose and that humans had now advanced far enough to descry what that purpose is: it
is the gradual realization of human freedom.
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The rst step was to make the transition from a natural life of savagery to a state of order
and law. States had to be founded by force and violence; there is no other way to make
people law-abiding before they have advanced far enough mentally to accept the
rationality of an ordered life. There will be a stage at which some people have accepted the
law and become free, while others remain slaves. In the modern world, humanity has
come to appreciate that all people, as minds, are free in essence, and its task is thus to
frame institutions under which they will be free in fact.
Hegel did not believe, despite the charge of some critics, that history had ended in his
lifetime. In particular, he maintained against Kant that to eliminate war is impossible. Each
nation-state is an individual; and, as Thomas Hobbes had said of relations between
individuals in the state of nature, pacts without the sword are but words. Clearly, Hegel’s
reverence for fact prevented him from accepting Kant’s idealism.
The lectures on the history of philosophy are especially remarkable for their treatment of
Greek philosophy. Working without modern indexes and annotated editions, Hegel’s grasp
of Plato and Aristotle is astounding, and it is only just to recognize that it was from Hegel
that the scholarship lavished on Greek philosophy in the century after his death received
its original impetus.
At this time a Hegelian school began to gather. The ock included intelligent pupils,
empty-headed imitators, and romantics who turned philosophy into lyric measures.
Opposition and criticism only served to de ne more precisely the adherents of the new
doctrine. Though he had soon resigned all direct of cial connection with the schools of
Brandenburg, Hegel’s real in uence in Prussia was considerable. In 1830 he was rector of
the university. In 1831 he received a decoration from Frederick William III. One of his last
literary undertakings was the establishment of the Berlin Jahrbücher für
wissenschaftliche Kritik (“Yearbook for Philosophical Criticism”).
The revolution of 1830 was a great blow to Hegel, and the prospect of mob rule almost
made him ill. His last literary work, the rst part of which appeared in the Preussische
Staatszeitung while the rest was censored, was an essay on the English Reform Bill of 1832,
considering its probable effects on the character of the new members of Parliament and
the measures that they might introduce. In the latter connection he enlarged on several
points in which England had done less than many continental states for the abolition of
monopolies and abuses.
In 1831 cholera entered Germany. Hegel and his family retired for the summer to the
suburbs, and there he nished the revision of the rst part of his Science of Logic. Home
again for the winter session, on November 14, after one day’s illness, he died of cholera and
was buried, as he had wished, between Fichte and Karl Solger, author of an ironic dialectic.
Personage and in uence
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In his classroom Hegel was more impressive than fascinating. His students saw a plain,
old-fashioned face, without life or lustre—a gure that had never looked young and was
now prematurely aged. Sitting with his snuffbox before him and his head bent down, he
looked ill at ease and kept turning the folios of his notes. His utterance was interrupted by
frequent coughing; every sentence came out with a struggle. The style was no less
irregular: sometimes in plain narrative the lecturer would be specially awkward, while in
abstruse passages he seemed especially at home, rose into a natural eloquence, and
carried away the hearer by the grandeur of his diction.
The early theological writings and the Phenomenology of Mind are packed with brilliant
metaphors. In his later works, produced as textbooks for his lectures, the Encyclopaedia of
the Philosophical Sciences and the Philosophy of Right, he compresses his material into
relatively short, numbered paragraphs. It is only necessary to translate them to appreciate
their conciseness and precision. The common idea that Hegel’s is a philosophy of
exceptional dif culty is quite mistaken. Once his terminology is understood and his main
principles grasped, he presents far less dif culty than Kant, for example. One reason for
this is a certain air of dogmatism: Kant’s statements are often hedged around with
quali cations; but Hegel had, as it were, seen a vision of absolute truth, and he expounds it
with con dence.
Hegel’s system is avowedly an attempt to unify opposites—spirit and nature, universal and
particular, ideal and real—and to be a synthesis in which all the partial and contradictory
philosophies of his predecessors are alike contained and transcended. It is thus both
idealism and realism at once; hence, it is not surprising that his successors, emphasizing
now one and now another strain in his thought, have interpreted him variously.
Conservatives and revolutionaries, believers and atheists alike have professed to draw
inspiration from him. In one form or another his teaching dominated German universities
for some years after his death and spread to France and to Italy. In the mid-20th century,
interest in the early theological writings and in the Phänomenologie was increased by the
spread of existentialism. At the same time, political thinkers turned to the study of Hegel,
particularly his political works but also his Logic, because of their in uence on Marx. By the
time of his bicentennial in 1970, a Hegelian renaissance was under way.
T. Malcolm Knox
https://www.britannica.com/print/article/259378 11/12
2/9/2020 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia
CITATION INFORMATION
ARTICLE TITLE: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
WEBSITE NAME: Encyclopaedia Britannica
PUBLISHER: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
DATE PUBLISHED: 24 December 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Georg-Wilhelm-Friedrich-Hegel
ACCESS DATE: February 09, 2020
https://www.britannica.com/print/article/259378 12/12
