Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
Part 10 of a review of Wolfgang Förster, Klassische deutsche Philosophie: Grundlinien ihrer Entwicklung [Classical German Philosophy: The Basic Lines of Its Development] (2008)
Hegel is the most influential of the philosophers of the German classic period and of Western philosophy generally.
He focused on developing a comprehensive philosophy. „Das Wahre ist das Ganze” (“The truth is the whole”), he wrote.
Georg Hegel, like Kant, was such an enormous influence on German and world philosophy that even trying to summarize what his system involved seems a futile undertaking. So, as with Kant, I’ll refer the reader to the Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel article by Paul Redding at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 06/26/06 for a more complete summary.
Hegel studied theology at the Stift Tübingen along with Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) and Friedrich von Schelling (1775-1854) and the three had strong mutual influences on each others philosophies. Schelling and Hegel edited a philosophical journal together. But after Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) was published, the views of the two began to diverge sharply.
Hegel constructed a system that was intended to be comprehensive, to include not only the scope of the physical sciences as they were known then but history, government, religion and ethics. A key difference with Kant’s transcendental Idealism was Hegel’s concept of human perception, the Subject/Object relationship. Where Kant had argued that human perception was restricted so that people could never observe the true essence of an external object, the “thing-in-itself” as he called it. The task of thought was to synthesize the perception as received by the sense organs with Reason.
Hegel’s view assumed a dynamic interaction between Subject and Object. This is part of Hegel’s holistic approach in which he attempted to understand the objects of perception in all their connections. The Subject and the Object have a mutual effect on each other. Hegel understood this according to his own version of dialectic thought.
Dialectics is often summarized by the process thesis-antithesis-synthesis in which there is a statement of a proposition (thesis) and a statement of a contradictory proposition (antithesis) follow by a reconciling combination (synthesis). This schema fits more comfortably with Kant’s thought than with Hegel’s.
Hegel understood dialectics as a process of development through the struggle of contradictions. A seed is a seed, not a tree. But it has an inner force and direction that contradicts its being as a seed. It “wants” to stop being a seed and instead be a tree. Or a bush or a flower depending on what kind of seed it is. But it’s existence is in the form of a process of development, in which it goes from being a seed to being the opposite of a seed, i.e., a tree. The process that is translated into English as negation is “aufheben”, which in Hegel’s usage includes the notions of preserved, cancelled and lifted up to a higher level. The seed is preserved in the tree but cancelled in that it is no longer a seed; it has progressed, lifted itself up to a higher stage of development.
It would later become a topic of considerable discussion and controversy how much Hegel understood his dialectics as being an idealist concept that applied to thought and Spirit and how much a reflection of what he saw as being the laws of nature. Hegel was certainly a philosophical Idealist, seeing the process of development including the development of history as being driven by a non-material Spirit. But it’s also clear that he understood dialectics as also a process at work in the material world and derived his understanding of the dialectical manifestations of Spirit from his observations of history and the natural world.
Hegel’s saw three stages or levels of the development of the Spirit, which he called Subjective Spirit, Objective Spirit and Absolute Spirit. This notion of Spirit was not the same as his conception of God. Subjective Spirit is realized in ordinary habits and customs, Objective Spirit in institutions like the family and the state, and Absolute Spirit in philosophy, religion and the arts. Hegel argued that Objective Spirit found its highest, truest realization in the Christian religion.
Although much of Hegel’s philosophy sounds very abstract, he developed his theories based on close acquaintance with scientific theories of the day and on the study of history and world religions. He also studied English political economists such as Adam Smith and gave particular importance to technological developments; he argued that tools had a higher significance in history than the uses to which they were put!
The schools that developed around Hegel’s philosophy became known as Old Hegelians and Young Hegelians, the latter also known as Left Hegelians. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are the best-known of the latter, but their fame came primarily from their publications and political acts after they had left Hegelianism behind them.
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