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Portrait of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Philosophy

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

1770–1831 · German (Württemberg)

German idealism; absolute idealism

G. W. F. Hegel was the culminating figure of German idealism. He portrayed reality and history as the dialectical self-development of Spirit (Geist) towards freedom and self-knowledge, and his system shaped later thinkers on both left and right, from Marx to the British idealists.

How to spot them

  • ▸Geist (Spirit), the Absolute, dialectic and Aufhebung (sublation)
  • ▸Master–slave (lord–bondsman) dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit
  • ▸"The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk"
  • ▸Young (Left) Hegelians and Right Hegelians; roommate of Schelling and Hölderlin at Tübingen

Key works

Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes) (1807)

Traces consciousness through stages — including the master–slave dialectic and the "unhappy consciousness" — up to absolute knowing; completed at Jena as Napoleon won the battle there (1806)

Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik) (1812–1816)

Dialectical development of pure thought, beginning with Being, Nothing and Becoming

Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817)

Outline of his whole system in three parts: Logic, Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy of Spirit

Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) (1820)

Political philosophy of abstract right, morality and ethical life (family, civil society, the state); title page dated 1821

Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837)

Posthumously published lectures presenting world history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom

Key ideas

  • Dialectic: concepts and historical forms develop through internal contradiction, each stage being overcome yet preserved in a higher one (Aufhebung). The triad "thesis–antithesis–synthesis" is a later label, owed more to Fichte, not Hegel's own terminology
  • Absolute idealism: reality is ultimately the self-realisation of Spirit or reason coming to know itself
  • History is rational: "the history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom"
  • Master–slave dialectic: self-consciousness requires recognition by another; the bondsman, through labour, gains a truer self-consciousness than the lord
  • "What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational" (Preface to the Philosophy of Right)
  • Ethical life (Sittlichkeit): freedom is realised concretely in social institutions — family, civil society and the state

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Stuttgart; died in Berlin in 1831, probably of cholera
  • •Shared a room at the Tübingen seminary (Stift) with Friedrich Schelling and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin
  • •After seeing Napoleon at Jena in 1806 he described him in a letter as the "world-soul" on horseback
  • •Held the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin from 1818, succeeding Fichte
  • •Schopenhauer deliberately scheduled rival lectures at the same hour in Berlin and attracted few students
  • •Marx said he found Hegel's dialectic "standing on its head" and turned it right side up
  • •The Young Hegelians included Ludwig Feuerbach, David Strauss, Bruno Bauer and the young Marx

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Sources