HEGEL, GEORG FRIEDRICH WILHELM. — He is the principal representative of modern idealism: b. Stuttgart, 24 Aug. 1770; d. Berlin, 14 Nov. 1831.
CONTENTS:
I. Life
II. Writings
III. Doctrine
IV. Problems of Hegelianism.I. LIFE
Hegel’s life marks, in its successive stages, the main phases in the formation of his thought. After completing his secondary studies at the grammar school of his native city, in 1788 he entered the theological seminary at Tübingen, remaining there until 1793: this was the period of his first elaboration of thought, in the comparative study of Graeco-Roman civilization and revealed religion (Judaism and Christianity), and of his friendship with Hölderlin and Schelling, whose influence he deeply felt. From 1793 to 1796 he was in Bern as a private tutor, and in the same capacity he passed to Frankfurt in the years 1797–1800. His first academic activity was at Jena from 1801 to 1807, a period of maturation of his philosophy and of progressive detachment from Schelling’s naturalism. After the brief interlude of the Bamberg *Zeitung*, in 1808 as editor of the *Bamberger Zeitung*, in 1809 he was appointed director of the *Nürnberger Gymnasium*; in 1816 he took up the chair of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, and finally in 1818 he obtained the coveted chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, of which he was also rector in the academic year 1829–30. His sudden death was caused by a cholera epidemic.II. WRITINGS
They may be divided into four classes according to chronology and doctrinal importance.1) Early writings. Unpublished during his lifetime, they were discovered and described as a whole by Dilthey at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1905 and published in full by H. Nohl in 1907 under the title *Hegel’s theologisch-literarische Jugendschriften*. They include the following essays: *Volksreligion und Christentum* (pp. 1–72): five fragments; *Das Leben Jesu* (pp. 73–136); *Die Positivität der christlichen Religion* (pp. 137–240); *Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal* (pp. 241–342); *Systemfragment*, known as the Frankfurt Fragment, of 1800 (pp. 345–51). Some minor fragments are collected by Nohl in an appendix (pp. 355–402).
2) Preparatory writings of the period 1801–12, which may be subdivided into three phases: a) the *Erste Druckschriften* (principal works: *Differenz des Fichte’schen und Schelling’schen Systems der Philosophie*, published separately in 1801; *Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie* [1802]; *Glaube und Wissen* [1802]). These two extensive essays were published as articles in the *Kritisches Journal der Philosophie*, which Hegel edited together with Schelling. b) *System der Sittlichkeit* of 1802 and the important body of Jena lecture courses (*Jenaer Logik, Metaphysik und Naturphilosophie* [1802–1803] and *Jenaer Realphilosophie* [1804–1806]). c) *Die Phänomenologie des Geistes* (1807), which is the first exposition of the system and marks the definitive break with Schelling. In this new climate are the Nuremberg courses published under the title *Philosophische Propädeutik* (1808–1809).
3) Systematic works published by Hegel: a) *Wissenschaft der Logik*, the most characteristic work of Hegelian philosophy; the 2nd ed. was prepared by Hegel with a new preface in 1831. b) *Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse* of 1817, divided into three parts (I, the science of logic; II, the philosophy of nature; III, the philosophy of spirit) in the form of a textbook. A successful work because of its conciseness and stylistic force, which Hegel expanded in the two subsequent editions of 1827 and 1830.
4) Berlin lecture courses. a) *Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse*, written out in full in 1820 and published by Hegel in 1821. b) The imposing corpus of *Vorlesungen* on the various fields of spirit (aesthetics, philosophy of religion, history of philosophy, and philosophy of history), collected and published by his disciples after his death on the basis of fragments and notes left by the master.
III. DOCTRINE
1. The genesis of Hegelian thought
In Hegelian philosophy the deepest motifs of classical thought, Christian theology, and modern thought are brought into operation and synthesized: such as the necessity of the concept as the truth of the particular, the presence of the Absolute in the finite, and the productivity of consciousness as the definitive affirmation of the autonomy of human thought. Seen in its cultural setting, Hegel’s work appears almost as the dialectical conclusion after the dominance of absolute Reason proclaimed by the Enlightenment on the one hand, and the appeal to the dynamism of the real and to its deep original springs in the Absolute itself asserted by Romantic irrationalism on the other. In this thought there is a continual oscillation or tension (*Spannung*) between a multiple and diverse reality striving to attain absolute unity and identity, and the Absolute itself—which, as the concept or idea of the whole—embraces and penetrates the reality of nature and human history, realizing itself in its forms and degrees of development. Hence Hegelian idealism starts from multiplicity and diversity, from doubt and contradiction as they present themselves immediately in reality, and seeks to fix absolute Truth in the supreme identity of the true, which is the totality of being and the life of the Absolute Spirit.This metaphysical approach to the problem of truth H. derives from diverse currents. a) First of all, there is the Lutheran principle of faith with which H. declares his full solidarity, considering his own philosophy as the development and maturation of the same: “What Luther began as belief in feeling and in the testimony of the spirit is the same as what the Spirit, further matured, has striven to understand in the concept” (*Philosophie des Rechts*, *Vorende*, ed. E. Gans, Berlin 1840, p. 19). “Luther,” H. declares again, “shattered truth and its religious forms in Christendom and the hierarchical structure of the Church [with his ‘we are all shepherds!’] and obtained the freedom and autonomy of the spirit that unfolds in and for itself and is therefore divinity itself. Only with Luther did the freedom of the spirit begin in germ... Thus in the innermost part of man a place has been made where he is solely taken up with himself and with God, and with God he is solely insofar as he is himself: in conscience he must find himself at home with himself” (*Gesch. der Philosophie*, ed. C. L. Michelet [Werke, 15], Berlin 1844, pp. 227 sg., 230 sg.). The task was to elevate Lutheran faith from the condition of closed subjectivity and immediate feeling to absolute certainty that embraces all its content and expresses it “as absolute objectivity,” and this is the work of objective idealism (cf. *Philosophie der Religion*, I. *Begriff der Religion*, ed. G. Lasson [Sämtl. Werke, 12], Leipzig 1925, p. 288).
b) In the second place comes the Spinozist principle of the unity of substance, which Romanticism and above all the idealism of Fichte and Schelling had rediscovered, overcoming the dualism of Kantian gnoseologism. For H., “to be a Spinozist is the beginning of the philosopher”: Spinoza’s merit is to have affirmed in a more concrete way than Descartes’ *cogito* the metaphysical identity of thought and being (unity of attributes and modes in Substance), thereby ensuring the essential presence of the Absolute to itself in its manifestations. The enormous progress of Spinoza, according to H., lies in the methodological principle: “Omnis determinatio est negatio,” by which Being is given only as the totality of all its modes and forms (*Gesch. der Philosophie*, ed. cit., I, p. 460 sg.). The Spinozist point of view must therefore be recognized as essential and necessary before proceeding to the formation of the completed system (*Wissenschaft der Logik*, II, 2nd ed., ed. G. Lasson, Berlin 1934, p. 218). H. reproaches Spinoza’s Substance for its rigid, intellectualistic, and pantheistic conception of divinity, identifying it outright with things (“God is everything, this piece of paper!”), thus lapsing into the indeterminacy of Indian religion and the immobile *vivum* of the Eleatics (*Philosophie der Religion*, ed. cit., I, p. 191 sg.): lacking in Spinoza’s Substance is “the return to itself” from its modes and attributes, and thus it is not conceived as Absolute Subject that differentiates itself (*Wissenschaft der Logik*, ed. cit., I, p. 337).
c) Third comes the speculative and truly decisive principle, which is Kant’s “I think,” or the transcendental unity of consciousness, conceived not, as by Kant, in gnoseological and instrumental form with respect to the determination of Being and truth, but as productive and constitutive of the same. To Kant is also owed the clarification of the antinomic structure of “reason” (*Vernunft*): from Kant H. learned also the dissolving critique of positive revealed religions. H. reproaches Kant for having shattered truth into a dualistic system of abstract intellectualistic oppositions without any way of reconciliation (subject-object, intellect-reason, matter and form, thing-in-itself-thought, nature-God, freedom-necessity, etc.), incapable of rising to a higher point of view (cf. *Enzyklop. der philos. Wissenschaft*, especially §§ 56-60; ed. I. von Henning, Berlin 1840, pp. 11-725). But H. unreservedly praises the *Critique of Judgment*, where Kant, expounding the “kingdom of ends” proper to the life of the spirit, presents finality as “life,” and this is also Aristotle’s position (*Philos. d. Relig.*, ed. cit., I, p. 216): the task is to specify what is the motive principle of the process, which for H. is dialectic. A strong suggestion in this direction, and in continuity with the Spinozist principle (“omnis determinatio est negatio”), H. drew from Böhme: to him H. expressly attributes the conception of dialectic as a process of synthesis of opposites through the mediation of negativity and of considering everything in function of the “sacred triplicity”: “In him the principle of the concept is perfectly alive... for everything consists in thinking the negative as simple, since it is at the same time an opposite: torment (*Qual*) is therefore this inner division, and at the same time the simple,” and it is H. himself who brings Böhme close to Proclus, the theorist of triadic dialectic. H. still admires in the mystic of Görlitz the discovery that God, to be God, must become, through a process of “return to itself” through contraries, and in this the Trinitarian mystery of the Christian religion, creation, Redemption, etc., have meaning and truth—a principle that H. states with a felicitous expression: “the sundering of God in himself” (*Gottes Dirimption seiner selbst*; *Gesch. d. Philos.*, ed. cit., I, p. 297). The most immediate influence that his thought underwent from the idealisms of Fichte and Schelling could mature his detachment from them and the conception of an objective metaphysical idealism only in reflection on the themes and principles now indicated, which give to his philosophy an interest of universal historical value.
2. Dialectic
The aim of philosophical consideration is to “eliminate the accidental,” that is, the manifold and the contingent of immediacy, and to attain an absolute universal principle: “A content that gives and bears in itself testimony of itself and on which is based everything that man can consider as his own interest” (*Vorles. über d. Philos. d. Geschichte*, I, *Die Vernunft in der Geschichte*, ed. G. Lasson, Leipzig 1930, p. 5). Previous philosophies either stopped at immediate data (empiricism, theories of feeling) or isolated the true in the abstraction of particular formalities, each outside the other, or in formal categories that precede rather than spring from the original determination of being (*Verstandsmetaphysik*). From this one must take the beginning (*Aufgang*) to pass over (*übergehen, hinausgehen*) from the finite to the infinite; this is the path of dialectic.a) The principle of consciousness. — Granted that the Absolute is the term, and not the starting point (as Schelling held), of knowing, the organ, or rather the principle of truth, is not the intellect (*Verstand*) but reason (*Vernunft*): that is, thought in its unfolding from form to form is no longer a subjective activity that reveals something other than itself that would be Being itself, but is this same Being, and every form of Being is a form of knowing, and the totality of Being is the totality of knowing.