Philosopher
G. W. F. Hegel
1770–1831
Also known as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The most systematic of the German idealists, who saw reality and history as the unfolding of spirit, and whose dialectical method shaped much of later philosophy.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel belongs to the generation of German idealists who followed Kant. He taught at Jena, Heidelberg and finally Berlin. The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) traces the development of consciousness through ever more adequate forms of knowing, up to philosophical knowledge itself.
The most systematic of the idealists, Hegel tried to build a comprehensive philosophy from a purportedly logical starting point, in which nature, history, society, art, religion and philosophy are all stages in the self-realisation of “spirit” (Geist). His ideas, including the view that history has a rational structure, shaped thinkers as different as Marx and Kierkegaard, who both developed their own views in response to him.
Key ideas
- A system from logic
- The most systematic of the German idealists, Hegel tried to build a comprehensive philosophy from a purportedly logical starting point, set out in works such as the Science of Logic and his Encyclopaedia.
- The struggle for recognition
- Self-consciousness depends on others. I become a self-conscious subject only by recognising others who in turn recognise me, and these patterns of mutual recognition make up “spirit” (Geist).
- Sublation
- In Hegel’s triads, the third term integrates the first two. They are “sublated” (aufgehoben), negated but also preserved, so they go on working within the new context the third creates.
- Ethical life (Sittlichkeit)
- Social life is ordered by customs and shared practices. Hegel’s account of spirit begins from this “ethical order”, the forms of life made actual in the lives of the people who share them.
- History as development
- Hegel is best known for his teleological account of history, in which spirit develops through a necessary sequence of stages. Marx later “inverted” it into a materialist theory of history.
- Tradition
- Western
- Region
- Jena, Heidelberg and Berlin
- Period
- Late modern
Influences
Influenced by
G. W. F. Hegel1770–1831
Influenced
Key works
- Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes), 1807
- Read free at Project Gutenberg (in German)
- Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik)
- Read free at Project Gutenberg (in German, volume 1 of 2)
- Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts)
Sources
- Paul Redding, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy