神马文学网Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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Western Philosophy
19th century philosophy
G.W.F. Hegel
Name: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Birth:August 27,1770 (Stuttgart,Germany)
Death:November 14,1831 (Berlin,Germany)
School/tradition:German Idealism; Founder ofHegelianism
Main interests:Logic,Philosophy of history,Aesthetics,Religion,Metaphysics,Epistemology,Political Science,
Notable ideas:Absolute idealism,Dialectic
Influences:Aristotle,Anselm,Descartes,Goethe,Spinoza,Rousseau,Boehme,Kant,Fichte,Schelling
Influenced:Feuerbach,Croce,Marx,Engels,Bauer,Bradley,Lenin,Lee,Lukács,Heidegger,Sartre,Barth,Küng,Habermas,Gadamer,Moltmann,Kierkegaard
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (IPA: [?ge??k ?v?lh?lm ?f?i?d??ç ?he?g?l]) (August 27,1770 –November 14,1831) was aGermanphilosopher born inStuttgart, in the region ofWürttemberg in southwesternGermany.
Together withJohann Gottlieb Fichte andFriedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Hegel is considered one of the representatives ofGerman idealism. Hegel influenced writers of widely varying positions, including both his admirers (Bradley,Sartre,Küng,Bauer,Marx), and his detractors (Kierkegaard,Schopenhauer,Nietzsche,Heidegger,Schelling). Hegel made explicit, arguably for the first time, a relation between nature and freedom, immanence and transcendence, the finite and the infinite which unified these dualities intelligibly without eliminating either pole or reducing it to the other. His influential conceptions of speculative logic or "dialectic," "absolute idealism," "Spirit," the "Master/Slave" dialectic, "ethical life," and the importance of history, flow from this central accomplishment.
Contents
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1 Life and work2 Teachings3 Hegel‘s legacy3.1 Left and Right Hegelianism3.2 Triads3.3 Detractors3.4 Advocates
4 See also5 Major works6 Secondary literature7 External links7.1 Hegel texts online
[edit] Life and work
Hegel was born inGermany onAugust 27,1770. As a child he was an avid reader of literature, newspapers, philosophical essays, and writings on various other topics. In part, Hegel‘s literary childhood can be attributed to his uncharacteristically progressive mother who actively nurtured her children‘s intellectual development. The Hegels were a well-established middle class family inStuttgart. His father was acivil servant in the administrative government ofWürttemberg. Hegel was a sickly child and almost died ofsmallpox before he was six. He had a close relationship with his sister, Christiane, which would remain a strong bond throughout his life.
He received his education at theTübinger Stift (seminary of theProtestant Church in Württemberg), where he met the future philosopherFriedrich Schelling and the poetFriedrich Hölderlin. Sharing a dislike for what was regarded as the restrictive environment of theTübingen seminary, the three became close friends and mutually influenced each other‘s ideas. The three watched the unfolding of theFrench Revolution and immersed themselves in the emerging criticism of theidealist philosophy ofImmanuel Kant. To be more precise, Hölderlin and Schelling immersed themselves in theoretical debates on Kantian philosophy; Hegel‘s interest in theory came later, after his own abortive attempts to work out a Kant-inspired popular philosophy — which was his original ambition. The Popular philosophen were writers who introduced and debated issues of the day, as a way of promoting the values of the Enlightenment. Most of them were influenced by English or Scottish thinkers such asLocke orReid; Hegel wanted to "complete" the critical philosophy of Kant in the mode of a Popularphilosoph. At Tübingen he was skeptical of the highly theoretical (and technical) discussions that Hölderlin and Schelling engaged in. It was only in 1800 that Hegel admitted the need to resolve the difficulties of the Kantian system before it could hope to be put into practice.
In 1801 Hegel secured a place at theUniversity of Jena as aprivatdozent. He gave a course of lectures which became immensely popular. The university promoted Hegel to the position of Extraordinary Professor, perhaps due to the influence ofGoethe on the authorities. However, with the conquest of Prussia byNapoleon in 1806, the University had to close. Hegel worked as a journalist for a few years, marrying Marie von Tucher in 1811. After publishing The Science of Logic, Hegel attained a post at theUniversity of Heidelberg in 1816. He published The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sentences in Outline, a summary of his philosophy for students attending his lectures. In 1818 he accepted a job at theUniversity of Berlin as a full professor of philosophy.Frederick William III decorated Hegel for his service to the Prussian regime and appointed him rector of the university in 1830. He was deeply disturbed by the riots for reform in Berlin. In1831 acholera epidemic broke out in Berlin and Hegel fled; but he returned prematurely, caught the infection, and a few days later died in his sleep at the age of 61.
Hegel published only four books during his life: thePhenomenology of Spirit (or Phenomenology of Mind), his account of the evolution of consciousness from sense-perception to absolute knowledge, published in 1807; theScience of Logic, the logical andmetaphysical core of his philosophy, in three volumes, published in 1811,1812, and 1816 (revised 1831);Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, a summary of his entire philosophical system, which was originally published in 1816 and revised in 1827 and 1830; and theElements of the Philosophy of Right, his political philosophy, published in 1822. In the latter, he criticizedvon Haller‘s reactionary work, which claimed that laws were not necessary. He also published some articles early in his career and during his Berlin period. A number of other works on thephilosophy of history,religion,aesthetics, and thehistory of philosophy were compiled from the lecture notes of his students and published posthumously.
Hegel‘s Grave in Berlin
Hegel‘s works have a reputation for their difficulty and for the breadth of the topics they attempt to cover. Hegel introduced a system for understanding thehistory of philosophy and the world itself, often described as a progression in which each successive movement emerges as a solution to the contradictions inherent in the preceding movement. For example, theFrench Revolution for Hegel constitutes the introduction of realindividual political freedom intoEuropean societies for the first time in recorded history. But precisely because of its absolute novelty, it is also absolutely radical: on the one hand the upsurge of violence required to carry out the revolution cannot cease to be itself, while on the other, it has already consumed its opponent. The revolution therefore has nowhere to turn but onto its own result: the hard-won freedom is consumed by a brutalReign of Terror. History, however, progresses by learning from its mistakes: only after and precisely because of this experience can one posit the existence of aconstitutionalstate of free citizens, embodying both the benevolent organizing power of rationalgovernment and the revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality. Hegel‘s remarks on the French revolution led German poetHeinrich Heine to label him "TheOrléans of German Philosophy".
Hegel‘s writing style is difficult to read; he is described byBertrand Russell in the History of Western Philosophy as the single most difficult philosopher to understand. This is partly because Hegel tried to develop a new form of thinking and logic, which he called "speculative reason" and which includes the more famous concept of "dialectic," to try to overcome what he saw as the limitations of both common sense and of traditional philosophy at grasping philosophical problems and the relation between thought and reality.
[edit] Teachings
Hegel‘s thinking can be understood as a constructive development within the broadly Platonic tradition that includes Aristotle, Plotinus, and Kant. To this list one could add Proclus, Meister Eckhart, Leibniz, Spinoza, Jakob Boehme, and Rousseau. What all these thinkers share, which distinguishes them from materialists like Epicurus, the Stoics, and Thomas Hobbes, and from empiricists like David Hume, is that they regard freedom or self-determination both as real and as having important ontological implications, for soul or mind or divinity. This focus on freedom is what generates Plato‘s notion (in the Phaedo, Republic, and Timaeus) of the "soul" as having a higher or fuller kind of reality than inanimate objects possess. While Aristotle criticizes Plato‘s "Forms," he preserves Plato‘s preoccupation with the ontological implications of self-determination, in his conceptions of ethical reasoning, the hierarchy of soul in nature, the order of the cosmos, and the prime mover. Kant, likewise, preserves this preoccupation of Plato‘s in his notions of moral and noumenal freedom, and God.
In his discussion of "Spirit" in his Encyclopedia, Hegel praises Aristotle‘s On the Soul as "by far the most admirable, perhaps even the sole, work of philosophical value on this topic" (par. 378). And in his Phenomenology of Spirit and his Science of Logic, Hegel‘s concern with Kantian topics such as freedom and morality, and with their ontological implications, is pervasive. Rather than simply rejecting Kant‘s dualism of freedom versus nature, Hegel aims to subsume it within "true infinity," the "Concept" (or "Notion": Begriff), "Spirit," and "ethical life" in such a way that the Kantian duality is rendered intelligible (as mentioned above), rather than remaining a brute "given."
The reason why this subsumption takes place in a series of concepts is that Hegel‘s method, in his Science of Logic and his Encyclopedia, is to begin with ultra-basic concepts like Being and Nothing, and to develop these through a long sequence of elaborations, including those mentioned in the previous paragraph. So that a solution that‘s arrived at, in principle, in the account of "true infinity" in the Science of Logic‘s chapter on "Quality," is repeated in new guises at later stages, all the way to "Spirit" and "ethical life," in the third volume of the Encyclopedia.
In this way, Hegel intends to defend the germ of truth in Kantian dualism against reductive or eliminative programs like those of materialism and empiricism (which one can see at work in many of Hegel‘s critics, including Marx, Nietzsche, and Russell). Like Plato, with his dualism of soul versus bodily appetites, Kant wants to insist on the mind‘s ability to question its felt inclinations or appetites and to come up with a standard of "duty" (or, in Plato‘s case, "good") which goes beyond them. Hegel preserves this essential Platonic and Kantian concern in the form of infinity‘s going beyond the finite (a process that Hegel in fact relates to "freedom" and the "ought": see Science of Logic, trans. Miller [Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1989], pp. 133-136 and 138, top), the universal‘s going beyond the particular (in the Concept), and Spirit‘s going beyond Nature. And Hegel renders these dualities intelligible by (ultimately) his argument in the "Quality" chapter of the Science of Logic that the finite has to become infinite in order to achieve "reality." This is because, as Hegel suggests by his introduction of the concept of "reality" (Science of Logic, p. 111), what determines itself rather than depending on its relations to other things for its essential character, is more fully "real" (following the Latin etymology of "real": more "thing-like") than what does not. Finite things don‘t determine themselves, because, as "finite" things, their essential character is determined by their boundaries, over against other finite things. So, in order to become "real," they must go beyond their finitude ("finitude is only as a transcending of itself" [Science of Logic, p. 145]).
The result of this argument is that finite and infinite--and, by extension, particular and universal, nature and freedom--don‘t face one another as two independent realities, but instead the latter (in each case) is the self-transcending of the former (see Science of Logic, p. 146, top). Thus rather than being merely "given," without explanation, the relationship between finite and infinite (and particular and universal, and nature and freedom) becomes intelligible. And a challenge is issued to reductive and eliminative programs like materialism and empiricism: What kind of "reality" do your fundamental entities or data possess?
The obscure writings ofJakob Böhme had a strong effect on Hegel. Böhme had written thatthe Fall of Man was a necessary stage in theevolution of theuniverse. This evolution was, itself, the result ofGod‘s desire for complete self-awareness. Hegel was fascinated by the works ofSpinoza,Kant,Rousseau, andGoethe, and by theFrench Revolution. Modern philosophy, culture, and society seemed to Hegel fraught with contradictions and tensions, such as those between the subject and object ofknowledge, mind and nature,self andOther, freedom and authority, knowledge and faith, theEnlightenment andRomanticism. Hegel‘s main philosophical project was to take these contradictions and tensions and interpret them as part of a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity that, in different contexts, he called "the absolute idea" or "absolute knowledge".
According to Hegel, the main characteristic of this unity was that it evolved through and manifested itself incontradiction andnegation. Contradiction and negation have a dynamic quality that at every point in each domain ofreality—consciousness,history,philosophy,art,nature,society—leads to further development until arational unity is reached that preserves the contradictions as phases and sub-parts by lifting them up (Aufhebung) to a higher unity. This whole ismental because it ismind that can comprehend all of these phases and sub-parts as steps in its own process of comprehension. It is rational because the same, underlying,logical, developmental order underlies every domain of reality and is ultimately the order of self-conscious rational thought, although only in the later stages of development does it come to full self-consciousness. The rational, self-consciouswhole is not a thing orbeing that lies outside of other existing things or minds. Rather, it comes to completion only in the philosophical comprehension of individual existing human minds who, through their own understanding, bring this developmental process to an understanding of itself.
(Note: “Mind” and “Spirit” are the common English translations of Hegel’s use of the German “Geist”. Some Hegelian scholars have argued that either of these terms overly “psychologize” Hegel,[citation needed] implying a kind of disembodied, solipsistic consciousness like "ghost" or "soul,". Geist combines the meaning of spirit, as in god, ghost or mind, with an intentional force.[citation needed])
Central to Hegel‘sconception ofknowledge and mind (and therefore also of reality) was the notion ofidentity indifference, that is that mindexternalizes itself in various forms andobjects that stand outside of it or opposed to it, and that, through recognizing itself in them, is "with itself" in these external manifestations, so that they are at one and the same time mind and other-than-mind. This notion of identity in difference, which is intimately bound up with his conception of contradiction and negativity, is a principal feature differentiating Hegel‘s thought from that of other philosophers.
There are views of Hegel‘s thought as a representation of the summit of early 19th century Germany‘s movement of philosophicalidealism. It would come to have a profound impact on many future philosophical schools, including schools that opposed Hegel‘s specific dialectical idealism, such asExistentialism, thehistorical materialism ofKarl Marx,historicism, andBritish Idealism. At the same time, modernanalytic andpositivistic philosophers have considered Hegel a principal target because of what they consider theobscurantism of his philosophy (though some Germans, notably Schopenhauer, shared that criticism of his thought).[citation needed] Hegel was aware of his ‘obscurantism‘ and saw it as part of philosophical thinking that grasps the limitations of everyday thought and concepts and tries to go beyond them. Hegel wrote in his essay "Who Thinks Abstractly?" that it is not the philosopher who thinks abstractly but the person on the street, who uses concepts as fixed, unchangeablegivens, without anycontext. It is the philosopher who thinks concretely, because they go beyond the limits of everydayconcepts to understand their broader context. This can make philosophical thought and language seem mysterious or obscure to the person on the street.
Hegel‘s influence was immense both within philosophy and in the sciences. Throughout the 19th century many chairs of philosophy around Europe were held by Hegelians, althoughKierkegaard,Feuerbach,Marx, andEngels were all opposed to the most central themes of Hegel‘s philosophy. After less than a generation, Hegel‘s philosophy was suppressed and even banned by thePrussianright-wing, and was firmly rejected by theleft-wing in multiple official writings.
After the period ofBruno Bauer, Hegel‘s influence did not make itself felt again until the philosophy ofBritish Idealism and the 20th century HegelianNeo-Marxism that began withGeorg Lukács. The more recent movement ofcommunitarianism has a strong Hegelian influence, although a Hegel specialist would argue that that influence is not strong enough, since communitarianism tends towardrelativism, which Hegel‘s philosophy does not.
[edit] Hegel‘s legacy
Some of Hegel‘s writing was intended for those with advanced knowledge of philosophy, although his "Encyclopedia" was intended as atextbook in auniversitycourse. Nevertheless, like many philosophers, Hegel assumed that his readers would be well-versed inWestern philosophy, up to and includingDescartes,Spinoza,Hume,Kant,Fichte, andSchelling. For those wishing to read his work without this background, introductions to Hegel and commentaries about Hegel may suffice. However, even this is hotly debated since the reader must choose from multiple interpretations of Hegel‘s writings from incompatible schools of philosophy. Presumably, reading Hegel directly would be the best method of understanding him, but this task has historically proved to be beyond the average reader of philosophy. This difficulty may be the most urgent problem with respect to the legacy of Hegel.
One especially difficult aspect of Hegel‘s work is his innovation in logic. In response to Immanuel Kant‘s challenge to the limits ofPure Reason, Hegel developed a radically new form of logic, which he called speculation, and which is today popularly calleddialectics. The difficulty in reading Hegel was perceived in Hegel‘s own day, and persists into the 21st century. To understand Hegel fully requires paying attention to his critique of standard logic, such as thelaw of contradiction and thelaw of the excluded middle, and, whether one accepts or rejects it, at least taking it seriously. Many philosophers who came after Hegel and were influenced by him, whether adopting or rejecting his ideas, did so without fully absorbing his new speculative or dialectical logic.
[edit] Left and Right Hegelianism
Another confusing aspect about the interpretation of Hegel‘s work is the fact that past historians have spoken of Hegel‘s influence as represented by two opposing camps. TheRight Hegelians, the allegedly direct disciples of Hegel at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now known as theHumboldt-Universität zu Berlin), advocated a Protestant orthodoxy and the political conservatism of the post-Napoleon Restoration period. TheLeft Hegelians, also known as the Young Hegelians, interpreted Hegel in a revolutionary sense, leading to an advocation ofatheism in religion andliberal democracy in politics.
In more recent studies, however, this old paradigm has been questioned. For one thing, no Hegelians of the period ever referred to themselves as Right Hegelians. That was a term of insult thatDavid Strauss (a self-styled Left Hegelian) hurled atBruno Bauer (who has most often been classified by historians as a Left Hegelian, but who rejected both titles for himself). For another thing, no so-called "Left Hegelian" described himself as a follower of Hegel. This includesMoses Hess as well asKarl Marx. Several "Left Hegelians" openly repudiated or insulted the legacy of Hegel‘s philosophy. The critiques of Hegel offered from the "Left Hegelians" radically diverted Hegel‘s thinking into new directions—and form a disproportionately large part of the literature on and about Hegel.
Perhaps the main reason that so much writing about Hegel emerges from the so-called Left-Hegelians is that the Left-Hegelians spawnedMarxism, which inspired a global movement lasting more than 150 years, encompassing the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution and even more national-liberation movements of the 20th century. Yet that isn‘t, to be precise, any direct result of Hegel‘s philosophy.
20th century interpretations of Hegel were mostly shaped by one-sided schools of thought:British Idealism,logical positivism,Marxism,Fascism andpostmodernism. However, since the fall of theUSSR, a new wave of Hegel scholarship arose in the West, without the preconceptions of the prior schools of thought.
Walter Jaeschke andOtto Pöggeler in Germany, as well asPeter Hodgson andHoward Kainz in America, are notable for their many contributions to post-USSR thinking about Hegel as published by the Hegel Society of America. Perhaps the most challenging publication from that source has been the new English edition of Hegel‘s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1818-1831) which has challenged most 20th century views about Hegel.
[edit] Triads
In previous modern accounts of Hegelianism (to undergraduate classes, for example), Hegel‘s dialectic was most often characterized as a three-step process of "Thesis, antithesis, synthesis", namely, that a "thesis" (e.g. the French Revolution) would cause the creation of its "antithesis" (e.g. the Reign of Terror that followed), and would eventually result in a "synthesis" (e.g. the Constitutional state of free citizens). However, Hegel used this classification only once, and he attributed the terminology to Immanuel Kant. The terminology was largely developed earlier byJohann Fichte the neo-Kantian. It was spread by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus in a popular account of Hegelian philosophy, and since then the misfit terms have stuck.
Believing that the traditional description of Hegel‘s philosophy in terms of thesis-antithesis-synthesis was mistaken, a few scholars, likeRaya Dunayevskaya have attempted to discard the triadic approach altogether. According to their argument, although Hegel refers to "the two elemental considerations: first, the idea of freedom as the absolute and final aim; secondly, the means for realising it, i.e. the subjective side of knowledge and will, with its life, movement, and activity" (thesis and antithesis) he doesn‘t use "synthesis" but instead speaks of the "Whole": "We then recognised the State as the moral Whole and the Reality of Freedom, and consequently as the objective unity of these two elements." Furthermore, in Hegel‘s language, the "dialectical" aspect or "moment" of thought and reality, by which things or thoughts turn into their opposites or have their inner contradictions brought to the surface, is only preliminary to the "speculative" (and not "synthesizing") aspect or "moment", which grasps the unity of these opposites or contradiction. Thus for Hegel, reason is ultimately "speculative", not "dialectical".
To the contrary, scholars likeHoward Kainz explain that Hegel‘s philosophy contains thousands of triads. However, instead of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis," Hegel used different terms to speak about triads, for example, "immediate-mediate-concrete," as well as, "abstract-negative-concrete." Hegel‘s works speak of synthetic logic. Nevertheless, it is widely admitted today that the old-fashioned description of Hegel‘s philosophy in terms of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" was always inaccurate. At the same time, however, those same terms survive in scholarly works, such is the persistence of this misnomer.
[edit] Detractors
Hegel used his system of dialectics to explain the whole of the history ofphilosophy,science,art,politics andreligion, but he has had many critics over the centuries.
Perhaps the most famous critics were the Left-Hegelians, includingLudwig Feuerbach,Karl Marx andFriedrich Engels and their followers in the 19th century.
Arthur Schopenhauer despised Hegel on account of the latter‘s allegedhistoricism (among other reasons), and decried Hegel‘s work asobscurantist "pseudo-philosophy".Schopenhauer, once a colleague of Hegel‘s at the University of Berlin said: "The height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had been only previously known in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced, general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, as a monument to German stupidity." Such a judgment is the result of Hegel‘s repudiation, in his bookScience of Logic, of eachlaw of thought that is the normal basis of rational thinking and discourse.
Actually, Hegel had the most well-attended classes of any philosopher of his time. The belief that Hegel once said, "Only one man understands me, and even he does not" (Strathern, 1997), is incorrect, since it was actually stated byFichte aboutFriedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling when Hegel persuaded Schelling to abandon his teacherFichte.
Søren Kierkegaard, one of Hegel‘s earliest critics, criticized Hegel‘s "absolute knowledge" unity, not only because it was arrogant for a mere human to claim such a unity, but also because such a system negates the importance of the individual in favour of the whole unity. InConcluding Unscientific Postscript, one of Kierkegaard‘s main attacks of Hegel, Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard‘s pseudonymous author, writes: "So-called systems have often been characterized and challenged in the assertion that they abrogate the distinction between good and evil, and destroy freedom. Perhaps one would express oneself quite as definitely, if one said that every such system fantastically dissipates the concept existence. ... Being an individual man is a thing that has been abolished, and every speculative philosopher confuses himself with humanity at large; whereby he becomes something infinitely great, and at the same time nothing at all."
Santayana called attention to Hegel‘s apologetics for whoever held power, as though dominance equated with goodness.
The worship of power is an old religion, and Hegel, to go no farther back, is full of it; but like traditional religion his system qualified its veneration for success by attributing success, in the future at least, to what could really inspire veneration; and such a master in equivocation could have no difficulty in convincing himself that the good must conquer in the end if whatever conquers in the end is the good.
–George Santayana, Winds of Doctrine, I
Some 20th century critics suggested that Hegel glosses over the realities of history in order to fit it into his dialectical mold.Karl Popper, a critic of Hegel inThe Open Society and Its Enemies, suggests that Hegel‘s system forms a thinly veiled justification for the rule ofFrederick William III, and that Hegel‘s idea of the ultimate goal of history is to reach a state approximating that of 1830sPrussia.[1] "Indeed, Hegel points out that all personal relations can thus be reduced to the fundamental relation of master and slave, of domination and submission. Each must strive to assert and prove himself, and he who has not the nature, the courage, and the general capacity for preserving his independence, must be reduced to servitude. This charming theory of personal relations has, of course, its counterpart in Hegel‘s theory of international relations. Nations must assert themselves on the Stage of History; it is their duty to attempt the domination of the World." Popper also accused Hegel of having a vacuous philosophy, labelling it "bombastic and mystifying cant".
Erich Heller opines in his The Disinherited Mind (1952) that Hegel was proved wrong — by the poets who succeeded him, not by the unfolding reality. Some newer philosophers who prefer to follow the tradition ofBritish Philosophy have made similar statements. In Britain, Hegel exercised an influence on the philosophical school called "British Idealism," which includedFrancis Herbert Bradley andBernard Bosanquet, in England, andJosiah Royce at Harvard.Analytic philosophy, which dominated philosophy departments in the United States and the United Kingdom, was virtually founded whenG. E. Moore andBertrand Russell rejected British Idealism and their colleagues‘ admiration for Hegel. Hegel remained largely out of fashion in these departments for much of the twentieth century.
Perhaps the harshest criticism has come from the famous psychologist,Carl G. Jung, who seemed to charge Hegel with mental illness when he wrote:
A philosophy like Hegel‘s is a self-revelation of the psychic background and, philosophically, a presumption. Psychologically it amounts to an invasion by the Unconscious. The peculiar, high-flown language Hegel uses bears out this view -- it is reminiscent of the megalomaniac language of schizophrenics, who use terrific, spellbinding words to reduce the transcendent to subjective form, to give banalities the charm of novelty, or pass off commonplaces as searching wisdom. So bombastic a terminology is a symptom of weakness, ineptitude, and lack of substance."
– Carl G. Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche, 1928
[edit] Advocates
In the latter half of the 20th century, Hegel‘s philosophy underwent a major renaissance. This was due to: (a) the rediscovery and reevaluation of Hegel as a possible philosophical progenitor of Marxism by philosophically oriented Marxists; (b) a resurgence of the historical perspective that Hegel brought to everything; and (c) an increasing recognition of the importance of hisdialectical method.
The book that did the most to reintroduce Hegel into the Marxist canon was perhapsGeorg Lukács‘ History and Class Consciousness. This sparked a renewed interest in Hegel reflected in the work ofHerbert Marcuse,Theodor W. Adorno,Ernst Bloch,Raya Dunayevskaya,Alexandre Kojève andGotthard Günther among others. The Hegel renaissance also highlighted the significance of Hegel‘s early works, i.e. those published prior to thePhenomenology of Spirit. The direct and indirect influence of Kojève‘s lectures and writings (on the Phenomenology of Spirit, in particular) mean that it is not possible to understand most French philosophers fromJean-Paul Sartre toJacques Derrida without understanding Hegel.
Beginning in the 1960s, Anglo-American Hegel scholarship has attempted to challenge the traditional interpretation of Hegel as offering a metaphysical system: this has also been the approach of Z.A.Pelczynski andShlomo Avineri. This view, sometimes referred to as the ‘non-metaphysical option‘, has had a decided influence on many major English language studies of Hegel in the past 40 years.
U.S.neoconservativepolitical theoristFrancis Fukuyama‘s controversial bookThe End of History and the Last Man was heavily influenced by Alexandre Kojève. Among modern scientists, the physicistDavid Bohm, the mathematicianWilliam Lawvere, the logicianKurt Gödel and the biologistErnst Mayr have been interested in Hegel‘s philosophical work.
A late 20th century literature in Western Theology that is friendly to Hegel includes such writers as Dale M. Schlitt (1984), Theodore Geraets (1985), Philip M. Merklinger (1991), Stephen Rocker (1995) and Cyril O‘Regan (1995). The contemporary theologianHans Küng has also advanced contemporary scholarship in Hegel studies.
Recently, two prominent American philosophers,John McDowell andRobert Brandom (sometimes, half-seriously, referred to as thePittsburgh Hegelians), have produced philosophical works exhibiting a marked Hegelian influence.
Beginning in the 1990s, after the fall of theUSSR, a fresh reading of Hegel took place in the West. For these scholars, fairly well represented by the Hegel Society of America and in cooperation with German scholars such as Otto Pöggeler and Walter Jaeschke, Hegel‘s works should be read without preconceptions. Marx plays a minor role in these new readings, and some contemporary scholars have suggested that Marx‘s interpretation of Hegel is irrelevant to a proper reading of Hegel. Some American philosophers associated with this movement include Clark Butler, Daniel Shannon, David Duquette, David MacGregor, Edward Beach, John Burbidge, Lawrence Stepelevich, Rudolph Siebert, Theodore Geraets and William Desmond.
Since 1990, new aspects of Hegel‘s philosophy have been published that were not typically seen in the West. One example is the idea that the essence of Hegel‘s philosophy is the idea offreedom. With the idea of freedom, Hegel attempts to explainworld history,fine art,political science, the free thinking that isscience, the attainment ofspirituality, and the resolution to problems of metaphysics.
[edit] See also
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis
[edit] Major works
Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes Sometimes translated as Phenomenology of Mind) 1807 (This gives an example of the problem: The English translators of the Phänomenologie des Geistes are not sure if they should translate "Geist" by "Spirit" or by "Mind", although the terms "Spirit" and "Mind" are sharply distinct in the English language.)Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik) 1812–1816 (last edition of the first part 1831)Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Enzyklopaedie der philosophischen Wissenschaften) 1817–1830Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) 1821Lectures on AestheticsLectures on the Philosophy of History (also translated as Lectures on the Philosophy of World History) 1837Lectures on Philosophy of Religion Lectures on the History of Philosophy
[edit] Secondary literature
Theodor W. Adorno, 1994. Hegel: Three Studies. MIT Press. Translated by Shierry M. Nicholsen, with an introduction by Nicholsen and Jeremy J. Shapiro,ISBN 0-262-51080-4. Essays on Hegel‘s concept of spirit/mind, Hegel‘s concept of experience, and why Hegel is difficult to read. Avineri, Shlomo, 1974. Hegel‘s Theory of the Modern State. Cambridge University Press. Best introduction to Hegel‘s political philosophy.Frederick C. Beiser, ed., 1993. The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-38711-6. The Cambridge Companions are a good way to start learning about a particular philosopher; this one is no exception.Frederick C. Beiser, 2005. Hegel. Routledge. One of the best introductions in all aspects of Hegel‘s philosophy, deep, informed and comprehensible. Desmond, William, 2003. Hegel‘s God: A Counterfeit Double?. Ashgate.ISBN 0-7546-0565-5 Laurence Dickey, 1987. Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-33035-1. A fascinating account of how "Hegel became Hegel", using the guiding hypothesis that Hegel "was basically a theologian manqué".John N. Findlay, 1958. Hegel: A Re-examination. Oxford University Press.ISBN 0-19-519879-4 Forster, Michael, 1989. Hegel and Skepticism. Harvard University Press.ISBN 0-674-38707-4 ------, 1998. Hegel‘s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit. University of Chicago Press.ISBN 0-226-25742-8. Best commentary in English on Hegel‘s most important work.Harris, H. S., Hegel: Phenomenology and System. A distillation of the author‘s magisterial two-volume Hegel‘s Ladder, now the standard commentary on the Phenomenology.Justus Hartnack, 1998. An Introduction to Hegel‘s Logic. Indianapolis: Hackett.ISBN 0-87220-424-3Martin Heidegger, 1988. Hegel‘s Phenomenology of Spirit. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.ISBN 0-253-32766-0Jean Hyppolite, 1979. Genesis and Structure of "Hegel‘s Phenomenology of Spirit." Northwestern University Press.ISBN 0-8101-0594-2 Kadvany, John, 2001,Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason. Duke University Press.ISBN 0-8223-2659-0 Kainz, Howard P., 1996, G. W. F. Hegel. Ohio University Press.ISBN 0-8214-1231-0. Kainz, Howard P.,1994, Hegel‘s Phenomenology of Spirit: Selections Translated and Annotated by Howard P. Kainz. The Pennsylvania State University Press.ISBN 0-271-01076-2.Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit.ISBN 0-8014-9203-3 Influential European reading of Hegel.Herbert Marcuse, 1941. Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. An introduction to the philosophy of Hegel, devoted to debunking the conception that Hegel‘s work included in nuce theFascisttotalitarianism ofNational Socialism; the negation of philosophy throughhistorical materialism. Muller, Jerry Z., 2002. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought. Anchor Books. Chpt. 6 devoted to Hegel and the market economy. O‘Regan, Cyril, 1994. The Heterodox Hegel. State University of New York Press, Albany.ISBN 0-7914-2006-X The most authoritative work to date on Hegel‘s philosophy of religion. Pinkard, Terry P., 2000. Hegel: a biography. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-49679-9. By a leading American Hegel scholar; debunks popular misconceptions about Hegel‘s thought.Robert B. Pippin, 1989. Hegel‘s Idealism: the Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-37923-7. Advocates a stronger continuity between Hegel and Kant‘s idealism. Russon, John, 2004. Reading Hegel‘s Phenomenology. Indiana University Press.ISBN 0-253-21692-3. Ritter, Joachim, 1984. Hegel and the French Revolution. MIT Press.Tom Rockmore, 1993. Before & After Hegel: A Historical Introduction to Hegel‘s Thought. Hackett.ISBN 0-87220-648-3. Stern, Robert, 2002, "Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit" Routledge.ISBN 0-415-21788-1 Stewart, Jon, ed., 1996. The Hegel Myths and Legends. Northwestern Univ. Press.Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel.ISBN 0-262-12070-4 Westphal, Kenneth R., 2003. Hegel‘s Epistemology: A Philosophical Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Indianapolis: Hackett.ISBN 0-87220-645-9Charles Taylor, 1975. Hegel. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-29199-2. A comprehensive study and singularly lucid exposition by the important Canadian philosopher of Hegel‘s thought and its impact on the central intellectual and spiritual issues of his and our time. Taylor concludes that "Hegel‘s central thesis is dead" (p. 546). Wallace, Robert M., 2005. Hegel‘s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-84484-3. Through a detailed analysis of Hegel‘s Science of Logic, Wallace shows how Hegel contributes to the broadly Platonic tradition of philosophy that includes Aristotle, Plotinus, and Kant. In the course of doing this, Wallace defends Hegel against major critiques, including the one presented by Charles Taylor in his Hegel.
[edit] External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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The new HegelWikiA superior biography of Hegel with graphicsHegel.net - resources available under the GNU FDLHegel.net - wiki article on HegelAlicia Farinati - Hegelian Works Several articles on Hegel. Available in English, Spanish and FrenchCommented link listHegel mailing lists in the internetExplanation of Hegel, mostly in GermanDiscussion of the Hegelian tradition, including the Left and Right schismThe Hegel Society of AmericaHegel in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophyhttp://www.gwfhegel.org/Hegel page in ‘The History Guide‘Is Hegel a Christian?Rethinking the Place of Philosophy with Hegel - Call for Papers for Cosmos and History
[edit] Hegel texts online
Works by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel atProject GutenbergPhilosophy of History IntroductionHegel‘s The Philosophy of RightHegel‘s The Philosophy of HistoryHegel by HyperText, reference archive onMarxists.org
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NAME Hegel, Georg
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
SHORT DESCRIPTION German philosopher
DATE OF BIRTHAugust 27,1770
PLACE OF BIRTHStuttgart,Germany
DATE OF DEATHNovember 14,1831
PLACE OF DEATHBerlin,Germany
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Western Philosophy
19th century philosophy
G.W.F. HegelName: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Birth:August 27,1770 (Stuttgart,Germany)
Death:November 14,1831 (Berlin,Germany)
School/tradition:German Idealism; Founder ofHegelianism
Main interests:Logic,Philosophy of history,Aesthetics,Religion,Metaphysics,Epistemology,Political Science,
Notable ideas:Absolute idealism,Dialectic
Influences:Aristotle,Anselm,Descartes,Goethe,Spinoza,Rousseau,Boehme,Kant,Fichte,Schelling
Influenced:Feuerbach,Croce,Marx,Engels,Bauer,Bradley,Lenin,Lee,Lukács,Heidegger,Sartre,Barth,Küng,Habermas,Gadamer,Moltmann,Kierkegaard
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (IPA: [?ge??k ?v?lh?lm ?f?i?d??ç ?he?g?l]) (August 27,1770 –November 14,1831) was aGermanphilosopher born inStuttgart, in the region ofWürttemberg in southwesternGermany.
Together withJohann Gottlieb Fichte andFriedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Hegel is considered one of the representatives ofGerman idealism. Hegel influenced writers of widely varying positions, including both his admirers (Bradley,Sartre,Küng,Bauer,Marx), and his detractors (Kierkegaard,Schopenhauer,Nietzsche,Heidegger,Schelling). Hegel made explicit, arguably for the first time, a relation between nature and freedom, immanence and transcendence, the finite and the infinite which unified these dualities intelligibly without eliminating either pole or reducing it to the other. His influential conceptions of speculative logic or "dialectic," "absolute idealism," "Spirit," the "Master/Slave" dialectic, "ethical life," and the importance of history, flow from this central accomplishment.
Contents
[hide]
1 Life and work2 Teachings3 Hegel‘s legacy3.1 Left and Right Hegelianism3.2 Triads3.3 Detractors3.4 Advocates
4 See also5 Major works6 Secondary literature7 External links7.1 Hegel texts online
[edit] Life and work
Hegel was born inGermany onAugust 27,1770. As a child he was an avid reader of literature, newspapers, philosophical essays, and writings on various other topics. In part, Hegel‘s literary childhood can be attributed to his uncharacteristically progressive mother who actively nurtured her children‘s intellectual development. The Hegels were a well-established middle class family inStuttgart. His father was acivil servant in the administrative government ofWürttemberg. Hegel was a sickly child and almost died ofsmallpox before he was six. He had a close relationship with his sister, Christiane, which would remain a strong bond throughout his life.
He received his education at theTübinger Stift (seminary of theProtestant Church in Württemberg), where he met the future philosopherFriedrich Schelling and the poetFriedrich Hölderlin. Sharing a dislike for what was regarded as the restrictive environment of theTübingen seminary, the three became close friends and mutually influenced each other‘s ideas. The three watched the unfolding of theFrench Revolution and immersed themselves in the emerging criticism of theidealist philosophy ofImmanuel Kant. To be more precise, Hölderlin and Schelling immersed themselves in theoretical debates on Kantian philosophy; Hegel‘s interest in theory came later, after his own abortive attempts to work out a Kant-inspired popular philosophy — which was his original ambition. The Popular philosophen were writers who introduced and debated issues of the day, as a way of promoting the values of the Enlightenment. Most of them were influenced by English or Scottish thinkers such asLocke orReid; Hegel wanted to "complete" the critical philosophy of Kant in the mode of a Popularphilosoph. At Tübingen he was skeptical of the highly theoretical (and technical) discussions that Hölderlin and Schelling engaged in. It was only in 1800 that Hegel admitted the need to resolve the difficulties of the Kantian system before it could hope to be put into practice.
In 1801 Hegel secured a place at theUniversity of Jena as aprivatdozent. He gave a course of lectures which became immensely popular. The university promoted Hegel to the position of Extraordinary Professor, perhaps due to the influence ofGoethe on the authorities. However, with the conquest of Prussia byNapoleon in 1806, the University had to close. Hegel worked as a journalist for a few years, marrying Marie von Tucher in 1811. After publishing The Science of Logic, Hegel attained a post at theUniversity of Heidelberg in 1816. He published The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sentences in Outline, a summary of his philosophy for students attending his lectures. In 1818 he accepted a job at theUniversity of Berlin as a full professor of philosophy.Frederick William III decorated Hegel for his service to the Prussian regime and appointed him rector of the university in 1830. He was deeply disturbed by the riots for reform in Berlin. In1831 acholera epidemic broke out in Berlin and Hegel fled; but he returned prematurely, caught the infection, and a few days later died in his sleep at the age of 61.
Hegel published only four books during his life: thePhenomenology of Spirit (or Phenomenology of Mind), his account of the evolution of consciousness from sense-perception to absolute knowledge, published in 1807; theScience of Logic, the logical andmetaphysical core of his philosophy, in three volumes, published in 1811,1812, and 1816 (revised 1831);Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, a summary of his entire philosophical system, which was originally published in 1816 and revised in 1827 and 1830; and theElements of the Philosophy of Right, his political philosophy, published in 1822. In the latter, he criticizedvon Haller‘s reactionary work, which claimed that laws were not necessary. He also published some articles early in his career and during his Berlin period. A number of other works on thephilosophy of history,religion,aesthetics, and thehistory of philosophy were compiled from the lecture notes of his students and published posthumously.
Hegel‘s Grave in Berlin
Hegel‘s works have a reputation for their difficulty and for the breadth of the topics they attempt to cover. Hegel introduced a system for understanding thehistory of philosophy and the world itself, often described as a progression in which each successive movement emerges as a solution to the contradictions inherent in the preceding movement. For example, theFrench Revolution for Hegel constitutes the introduction of realindividual political freedom intoEuropean societies for the first time in recorded history. But precisely because of its absolute novelty, it is also absolutely radical: on the one hand the upsurge of violence required to carry out the revolution cannot cease to be itself, while on the other, it has already consumed its opponent. The revolution therefore has nowhere to turn but onto its own result: the hard-won freedom is consumed by a brutalReign of Terror. History, however, progresses by learning from its mistakes: only after and precisely because of this experience can one posit the existence of aconstitutionalstate of free citizens, embodying both the benevolent organizing power of rationalgovernment and the revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality. Hegel‘s remarks on the French revolution led German poetHeinrich Heine to label him "TheOrléans of German Philosophy".
Hegel‘s writing style is difficult to read; he is described byBertrand Russell in the History of Western Philosophy as the single most difficult philosopher to understand. This is partly because Hegel tried to develop a new form of thinking and logic, which he called "speculative reason" and which includes the more famous concept of "dialectic," to try to overcome what he saw as the limitations of both common sense and of traditional philosophy at grasping philosophical problems and the relation between thought and reality.
[edit] Teachings
Hegel‘s thinking can be understood as a constructive development within the broadly Platonic tradition that includes Aristotle, Plotinus, and Kant. To this list one could add Proclus, Meister Eckhart, Leibniz, Spinoza, Jakob Boehme, and Rousseau. What all these thinkers share, which distinguishes them from materialists like Epicurus, the Stoics, and Thomas Hobbes, and from empiricists like David Hume, is that they regard freedom or self-determination both as real and as having important ontological implications, for soul or mind or divinity. This focus on freedom is what generates Plato‘s notion (in the Phaedo, Republic, and Timaeus) of the "soul" as having a higher or fuller kind of reality than inanimate objects possess. While Aristotle criticizes Plato‘s "Forms," he preserves Plato‘s preoccupation with the ontological implications of self-determination, in his conceptions of ethical reasoning, the hierarchy of soul in nature, the order of the cosmos, and the prime mover. Kant, likewise, preserves this preoccupation of Plato‘s in his notions of moral and noumenal freedom, and God.
In his discussion of "Spirit" in his Encyclopedia, Hegel praises Aristotle‘s On the Soul as "by far the most admirable, perhaps even the sole, work of philosophical value on this topic" (par. 378). And in his Phenomenology of Spirit and his Science of Logic, Hegel‘s concern with Kantian topics such as freedom and morality, and with their ontological implications, is pervasive. Rather than simply rejecting Kant‘s dualism of freedom versus nature, Hegel aims to subsume it within "true infinity," the "Concept" (or "Notion": Begriff), "Spirit," and "ethical life" in such a way that the Kantian duality is rendered intelligible (as mentioned above), rather than remaining a brute "given."
The reason why this subsumption takes place in a series of concepts is that Hegel‘s method, in his Science of Logic and his Encyclopedia, is to begin with ultra-basic concepts like Being and Nothing, and to develop these through a long sequence of elaborations, including those mentioned in the previous paragraph. So that a solution that‘s arrived at, in principle, in the account of "true infinity" in the Science of Logic‘s chapter on "Quality," is repeated in new guises at later stages, all the way to "Spirit" and "ethical life," in the third volume of the Encyclopedia.
In this way, Hegel intends to defend the germ of truth in Kantian dualism against reductive or eliminative programs like those of materialism and empiricism (which one can see at work in many of Hegel‘s critics, including Marx, Nietzsche, and Russell). Like Plato, with his dualism of soul versus bodily appetites, Kant wants to insist on the mind‘s ability to question its felt inclinations or appetites and to come up with a standard of "duty" (or, in Plato‘s case, "good") which goes beyond them. Hegel preserves this essential Platonic and Kantian concern in the form of infinity‘s going beyond the finite (a process that Hegel in fact relates to "freedom" and the "ought": see Science of Logic, trans. Miller [Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1989], pp. 133-136 and 138, top), the universal‘s going beyond the particular (in the Concept), and Spirit‘s going beyond Nature. And Hegel renders these dualities intelligible by (ultimately) his argument in the "Quality" chapter of the Science of Logic that the finite has to become infinite in order to achieve "reality." This is because, as Hegel suggests by his introduction of the concept of "reality" (Science of Logic, p. 111), what determines itself rather than depending on its relations to other things for its essential character, is more fully "real" (following the Latin etymology of "real": more "thing-like") than what does not. Finite things don‘t determine themselves, because, as "finite" things, their essential character is determined by their boundaries, over against other finite things. So, in order to become "real," they must go beyond their finitude ("finitude is only as a transcending of itself" [Science of Logic, p. 145]).
The result of this argument is that finite and infinite--and, by extension, particular and universal, nature and freedom--don‘t face one another as two independent realities, but instead the latter (in each case) is the self-transcending of the former (see Science of Logic, p. 146, top). Thus rather than being merely "given," without explanation, the relationship between finite and infinite (and particular and universal, and nature and freedom) becomes intelligible. And a challenge is issued to reductive and eliminative programs like materialism and empiricism: What kind of "reality" do your fundamental entities or data possess?
The obscure writings ofJakob Böhme had a strong effect on Hegel. Böhme had written thatthe Fall of Man was a necessary stage in theevolution of theuniverse. This evolution was, itself, the result ofGod‘s desire for complete self-awareness. Hegel was fascinated by the works ofSpinoza,Kant,Rousseau, andGoethe, and by theFrench Revolution. Modern philosophy, culture, and society seemed to Hegel fraught with contradictions and tensions, such as those between the subject and object ofknowledge, mind and nature,self andOther, freedom and authority, knowledge and faith, theEnlightenment andRomanticism. Hegel‘s main philosophical project was to take these contradictions and tensions and interpret them as part of a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity that, in different contexts, he called "the absolute idea" or "absolute knowledge".
According to Hegel, the main characteristic of this unity was that it evolved through and manifested itself incontradiction andnegation. Contradiction and negation have a dynamic quality that at every point in each domain ofreality—consciousness,history,philosophy,art,nature,society—leads to further development until arational unity is reached that preserves the contradictions as phases and sub-parts by lifting them up (Aufhebung) to a higher unity. This whole ismental because it ismind that can comprehend all of these phases and sub-parts as steps in its own process of comprehension. It is rational because the same, underlying,logical, developmental order underlies every domain of reality and is ultimately the order of self-conscious rational thought, although only in the later stages of development does it come to full self-consciousness. The rational, self-consciouswhole is not a thing orbeing that lies outside of other existing things or minds. Rather, it comes to completion only in the philosophical comprehension of individual existing human minds who, through their own understanding, bring this developmental process to an understanding of itself.
(Note: “Mind” and “Spirit” are the common English translations of Hegel’s use of the German “Geist”. Some Hegelian scholars have argued that either of these terms overly “psychologize” Hegel,[citation needed] implying a kind of disembodied, solipsistic consciousness like "ghost" or "soul,". Geist combines the meaning of spirit, as in god, ghost or mind, with an intentional force.[citation needed])
Central to Hegel‘sconception ofknowledge and mind (and therefore also of reality) was the notion ofidentity indifference, that is that mindexternalizes itself in various forms andobjects that stand outside of it or opposed to it, and that, through recognizing itself in them, is "with itself" in these external manifestations, so that they are at one and the same time mind and other-than-mind. This notion of identity in difference, which is intimately bound up with his conception of contradiction and negativity, is a principal feature differentiating Hegel‘s thought from that of other philosophers.
There are views of Hegel‘s thought as a representation of the summit of early 19th century Germany‘s movement of philosophicalidealism. It would come to have a profound impact on many future philosophical schools, including schools that opposed Hegel‘s specific dialectical idealism, such asExistentialism, thehistorical materialism ofKarl Marx,historicism, andBritish Idealism. At the same time, modernanalytic andpositivistic philosophers have considered Hegel a principal target because of what they consider theobscurantism of his philosophy (though some Germans, notably Schopenhauer, shared that criticism of his thought).[citation needed] Hegel was aware of his ‘obscurantism‘ and saw it as part of philosophical thinking that grasps the limitations of everyday thought and concepts and tries to go beyond them. Hegel wrote in his essay "Who Thinks Abstractly?" that it is not the philosopher who thinks abstractly but the person on the street, who uses concepts as fixed, unchangeablegivens, without anycontext. It is the philosopher who thinks concretely, because they go beyond the limits of everydayconcepts to understand their broader context. This can make philosophical thought and language seem mysterious or obscure to the person on the street.
Hegel‘s influence was immense both within philosophy and in the sciences. Throughout the 19th century many chairs of philosophy around Europe were held by Hegelians, althoughKierkegaard,Feuerbach,Marx, andEngels were all opposed to the most central themes of Hegel‘s philosophy. After less than a generation, Hegel‘s philosophy was suppressed and even banned by thePrussianright-wing, and was firmly rejected by theleft-wing in multiple official writings.
After the period ofBruno Bauer, Hegel‘s influence did not make itself felt again until the philosophy ofBritish Idealism and the 20th century HegelianNeo-Marxism that began withGeorg Lukács. The more recent movement ofcommunitarianism has a strong Hegelian influence, although a Hegel specialist would argue that that influence is not strong enough, since communitarianism tends towardrelativism, which Hegel‘s philosophy does not.
[edit] Hegel‘s legacy
Some of Hegel‘s writing was intended for those with advanced knowledge of philosophy, although his "Encyclopedia" was intended as atextbook in auniversitycourse. Nevertheless, like many philosophers, Hegel assumed that his readers would be well-versed inWestern philosophy, up to and includingDescartes,Spinoza,Hume,Kant,Fichte, andSchelling. For those wishing to read his work without this background, introductions to Hegel and commentaries about Hegel may suffice. However, even this is hotly debated since the reader must choose from multiple interpretations of Hegel‘s writings from incompatible schools of philosophy. Presumably, reading Hegel directly would be the best method of understanding him, but this task has historically proved to be beyond the average reader of philosophy. This difficulty may be the most urgent problem with respect to the legacy of Hegel.
One especially difficult aspect of Hegel‘s work is his innovation in logic. In response to Immanuel Kant‘s challenge to the limits ofPure Reason, Hegel developed a radically new form of logic, which he called speculation, and which is today popularly calleddialectics. The difficulty in reading Hegel was perceived in Hegel‘s own day, and persists into the 21st century. To understand Hegel fully requires paying attention to his critique of standard logic, such as thelaw of contradiction and thelaw of the excluded middle, and, whether one accepts or rejects it, at least taking it seriously. Many philosophers who came after Hegel and were influenced by him, whether adopting or rejecting his ideas, did so without fully absorbing his new speculative or dialectical logic.
[edit] Left and Right Hegelianism
Another confusing aspect about the interpretation of Hegel‘s work is the fact that past historians have spoken of Hegel‘s influence as represented by two opposing camps. TheRight Hegelians, the allegedly direct disciples of Hegel at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now known as theHumboldt-Universität zu Berlin), advocated a Protestant orthodoxy and the political conservatism of the post-Napoleon Restoration period. TheLeft Hegelians, also known as the Young Hegelians, interpreted Hegel in a revolutionary sense, leading to an advocation ofatheism in religion andliberal democracy in politics.
In more recent studies, however, this old paradigm has been questioned. For one thing, no Hegelians of the period ever referred to themselves as Right Hegelians. That was a term of insult thatDavid Strauss (a self-styled Left Hegelian) hurled atBruno Bauer (who has most often been classified by historians as a Left Hegelian, but who rejected both titles for himself). For another thing, no so-called "Left Hegelian" described himself as a follower of Hegel. This includesMoses Hess as well asKarl Marx. Several "Left Hegelians" openly repudiated or insulted the legacy of Hegel‘s philosophy. The critiques of Hegel offered from the "Left Hegelians" radically diverted Hegel‘s thinking into new directions—and form a disproportionately large part of the literature on and about Hegel.
Perhaps the main reason that so much writing about Hegel emerges from the so-called Left-Hegelians is that the Left-Hegelians spawnedMarxism, which inspired a global movement lasting more than 150 years, encompassing the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution and even more national-liberation movements of the 20th century. Yet that isn‘t, to be precise, any direct result of Hegel‘s philosophy.
20th century interpretations of Hegel were mostly shaped by one-sided schools of thought:British Idealism,logical positivism,Marxism,Fascism andpostmodernism. However, since the fall of theUSSR, a new wave of Hegel scholarship arose in the West, without the preconceptions of the prior schools of thought.
Walter Jaeschke andOtto Pöggeler in Germany, as well asPeter Hodgson andHoward Kainz in America, are notable for their many contributions to post-USSR thinking about Hegel as published by the Hegel Society of America. Perhaps the most challenging publication from that source has been the new English edition of Hegel‘s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1818-1831) which has challenged most 20th century views about Hegel.
[edit] Triads
In previous modern accounts of Hegelianism (to undergraduate classes, for example), Hegel‘s dialectic was most often characterized as a three-step process of "Thesis, antithesis, synthesis", namely, that a "thesis" (e.g. the French Revolution) would cause the creation of its "antithesis" (e.g. the Reign of Terror that followed), and would eventually result in a "synthesis" (e.g. the Constitutional state of free citizens). However, Hegel used this classification only once, and he attributed the terminology to Immanuel Kant. The terminology was largely developed earlier byJohann Fichte the neo-Kantian. It was spread by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus in a popular account of Hegelian philosophy, and since then the misfit terms have stuck.
Believing that the traditional description of Hegel‘s philosophy in terms of thesis-antithesis-synthesis was mistaken, a few scholars, likeRaya Dunayevskaya have attempted to discard the triadic approach altogether. According to their argument, although Hegel refers to "the two elemental considerations: first, the idea of freedom as the absolute and final aim; secondly, the means for realising it, i.e. the subjective side of knowledge and will, with its life, movement, and activity" (thesis and antithesis) he doesn‘t use "synthesis" but instead speaks of the "Whole": "We then recognised the State as the moral Whole and the Reality of Freedom, and consequently as the objective unity of these two elements." Furthermore, in Hegel‘s language, the "dialectical" aspect or "moment" of thought and reality, by which things or thoughts turn into their opposites or have their inner contradictions brought to the surface, is only preliminary to the "speculative" (and not "synthesizing") aspect or "moment", which grasps the unity of these opposites or contradiction. Thus for Hegel, reason is ultimately "speculative", not "dialectical".
To the contrary, scholars likeHoward Kainz explain that Hegel‘s philosophy contains thousands of triads. However, instead of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis," Hegel used different terms to speak about triads, for example, "immediate-mediate-concrete," as well as, "abstract-negative-concrete." Hegel‘s works speak of synthetic logic. Nevertheless, it is widely admitted today that the old-fashioned description of Hegel‘s philosophy in terms of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" was always inaccurate. At the same time, however, those same terms survive in scholarly works, such is the persistence of this misnomer.
[edit] Detractors
Hegel used his system of dialectics to explain the whole of the history ofphilosophy,science,art,politics andreligion, but he has had many critics over the centuries.
Perhaps the most famous critics were the Left-Hegelians, includingLudwig Feuerbach,Karl Marx andFriedrich Engels and their followers in the 19th century.
Arthur Schopenhauer despised Hegel on account of the latter‘s allegedhistoricism (among other reasons), and decried Hegel‘s work asobscurantist "pseudo-philosophy".Schopenhauer, once a colleague of Hegel‘s at the University of Berlin said: "The height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had been only previously known in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced, general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, as a monument to German stupidity." Such a judgment is the result of Hegel‘s repudiation, in his bookScience of Logic, of eachlaw of thought that is the normal basis of rational thinking and discourse.
Actually, Hegel had the most well-attended classes of any philosopher of his time. The belief that Hegel once said, "Only one man understands me, and even he does not" (Strathern, 1997), is incorrect, since it was actually stated byFichte aboutFriedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling when Hegel persuaded Schelling to abandon his teacherFichte.
Søren Kierkegaard, one of Hegel‘s earliest critics, criticized Hegel‘s "absolute knowledge" unity, not only because it was arrogant for a mere human to claim such a unity, but also because such a system negates the importance of the individual in favour of the whole unity. InConcluding Unscientific Postscript, one of Kierkegaard‘s main attacks of Hegel, Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard‘s pseudonymous author, writes: "So-called systems have often been characterized and challenged in the assertion that they abrogate the distinction between good and evil, and destroy freedom. Perhaps one would express oneself quite as definitely, if one said that every such system fantastically dissipates the concept existence. ... Being an individual man is a thing that has been abolished, and every speculative philosopher confuses himself with humanity at large; whereby he becomes something infinitely great, and at the same time nothing at all."
Santayana called attention to Hegel‘s apologetics for whoever held power, as though dominance equated with goodness.
The worship of power is an old religion, and Hegel, to go no farther back, is full of it; but like traditional religion his system qualified its veneration for success by attributing success, in the future at least, to what could really inspire veneration; and such a master in equivocation could have no difficulty in convincing himself that the good must conquer in the end if whatever conquers in the end is the good.
–George Santayana, Winds of Doctrine, I
Some 20th century critics suggested that Hegel glosses over the realities of history in order to fit it into his dialectical mold.Karl Popper, a critic of Hegel inThe Open Society and Its Enemies, suggests that Hegel‘s system forms a thinly veiled justification for the rule ofFrederick William III, and that Hegel‘s idea of the ultimate goal of history is to reach a state approximating that of 1830sPrussia.[1] "Indeed, Hegel points out that all personal relations can thus be reduced to the fundamental relation of master and slave, of domination and submission. Each must strive to assert and prove himself, and he who has not the nature, the courage, and the general capacity for preserving his independence, must be reduced to servitude. This charming theory of personal relations has, of course, its counterpart in Hegel‘s theory of international relations. Nations must assert themselves on the Stage of History; it is their duty to attempt the domination of the World." Popper also accused Hegel of having a vacuous philosophy, labelling it "bombastic and mystifying cant".
Erich Heller opines in his The Disinherited Mind (1952) that Hegel was proved wrong — by the poets who succeeded him, not by the unfolding reality. Some newer philosophers who prefer to follow the tradition ofBritish Philosophy have made similar statements. In Britain, Hegel exercised an influence on the philosophical school called "British Idealism," which includedFrancis Herbert Bradley andBernard Bosanquet, in England, andJosiah Royce at Harvard.Analytic philosophy, which dominated philosophy departments in the United States and the United Kingdom, was virtually founded whenG. E. Moore andBertrand Russell rejected British Idealism and their colleagues‘ admiration for Hegel. Hegel remained largely out of fashion in these departments for much of the twentieth century.
Perhaps the harshest criticism has come from the famous psychologist,Carl G. Jung, who seemed to charge Hegel with mental illness when he wrote:
A philosophy like Hegel‘s is a self-revelation of the psychic background and, philosophically, a presumption. Psychologically it amounts to an invasion by the Unconscious. The peculiar, high-flown language Hegel uses bears out this view -- it is reminiscent of the megalomaniac language of schizophrenics, who use terrific, spellbinding words to reduce the transcendent to subjective form, to give banalities the charm of novelty, or pass off commonplaces as searching wisdom. So bombastic a terminology is a symptom of weakness, ineptitude, and lack of substance."
– Carl G. Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche, 1928
[edit] Advocates
In the latter half of the 20th century, Hegel‘s philosophy underwent a major renaissance. This was due to: (a) the rediscovery and reevaluation of Hegel as a possible philosophical progenitor of Marxism by philosophically oriented Marxists; (b) a resurgence of the historical perspective that Hegel brought to everything; and (c) an increasing recognition of the importance of hisdialectical method.
The book that did the most to reintroduce Hegel into the Marxist canon was perhapsGeorg Lukács‘ History and Class Consciousness. This sparked a renewed interest in Hegel reflected in the work ofHerbert Marcuse,Theodor W. Adorno,Ernst Bloch,Raya Dunayevskaya,Alexandre Kojève andGotthard Günther among others. The Hegel renaissance also highlighted the significance of Hegel‘s early works, i.e. those published prior to thePhenomenology of Spirit. The direct and indirect influence of Kojève‘s lectures and writings (on the Phenomenology of Spirit, in particular) mean that it is not possible to understand most French philosophers fromJean-Paul Sartre toJacques Derrida without understanding Hegel.
Beginning in the 1960s, Anglo-American Hegel scholarship has attempted to challenge the traditional interpretation of Hegel as offering a metaphysical system: this has also been the approach of Z.A.Pelczynski andShlomo Avineri. This view, sometimes referred to as the ‘non-metaphysical option‘, has had a decided influence on many major English language studies of Hegel in the past 40 years.
U.S.neoconservativepolitical theoristFrancis Fukuyama‘s controversial bookThe End of History and the Last Man was heavily influenced by Alexandre Kojève. Among modern scientists, the physicistDavid Bohm, the mathematicianWilliam Lawvere, the logicianKurt Gödel and the biologistErnst Mayr have been interested in Hegel‘s philosophical work.
A late 20th century literature in Western Theology that is friendly to Hegel includes such writers as Dale M. Schlitt (1984), Theodore Geraets (1985), Philip M. Merklinger (1991), Stephen Rocker (1995) and Cyril O‘Regan (1995). The contemporary theologianHans Küng has also advanced contemporary scholarship in Hegel studies.
Recently, two prominent American philosophers,John McDowell andRobert Brandom (sometimes, half-seriously, referred to as thePittsburgh Hegelians), have produced philosophical works exhibiting a marked Hegelian influence.
Beginning in the 1990s, after the fall of theUSSR, a fresh reading of Hegel took place in the West. For these scholars, fairly well represented by the Hegel Society of America and in cooperation with German scholars such as Otto Pöggeler and Walter Jaeschke, Hegel‘s works should be read without preconceptions. Marx plays a minor role in these new readings, and some contemporary scholars have suggested that Marx‘s interpretation of Hegel is irrelevant to a proper reading of Hegel. Some American philosophers associated with this movement include Clark Butler, Daniel Shannon, David Duquette, David MacGregor, Edward Beach, John Burbidge, Lawrence Stepelevich, Rudolph Siebert, Theodore Geraets and William Desmond.
Since 1990, new aspects of Hegel‘s philosophy have been published that were not typically seen in the West. One example is the idea that the essence of Hegel‘s philosophy is the idea offreedom. With the idea of freedom, Hegel attempts to explainworld history,fine art,political science, the free thinking that isscience, the attainment ofspirituality, and the resolution to problems of metaphysics.
[edit] See also
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis
[edit] Major works
Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes Sometimes translated as Phenomenology of Mind) 1807 (This gives an example of the problem: The English translators of the Phänomenologie des Geistes are not sure if they should translate "Geist" by "Spirit" or by "Mind", although the terms "Spirit" and "Mind" are sharply distinct in the English language.)Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik) 1812–1816 (last edition of the first part 1831)Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Enzyklopaedie der philosophischen Wissenschaften) 1817–1830Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) 1821Lectures on AestheticsLectures on the Philosophy of History (also translated as Lectures on the Philosophy of World History) 1837Lectures on Philosophy of Religion Lectures on the History of Philosophy
[edit] Secondary literature
Theodor W. Adorno, 1994. Hegel: Three Studies. MIT Press. Translated by Shierry M. Nicholsen, with an introduction by Nicholsen and Jeremy J. Shapiro,ISBN 0-262-51080-4. Essays on Hegel‘s concept of spirit/mind, Hegel‘s concept of experience, and why Hegel is difficult to read. Avineri, Shlomo, 1974. Hegel‘s Theory of the Modern State. Cambridge University Press. Best introduction to Hegel‘s political philosophy.Frederick C. Beiser, ed., 1993. The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-38711-6. The Cambridge Companions are a good way to start learning about a particular philosopher; this one is no exception.Frederick C. Beiser, 2005. Hegel. Routledge. One of the best introductions in all aspects of Hegel‘s philosophy, deep, informed and comprehensible. Desmond, William, 2003. Hegel‘s God: A Counterfeit Double?. Ashgate.ISBN 0-7546-0565-5 Laurence Dickey, 1987. Hegel: Religion, Economics, and the Politics of Spirit, 1770–1807. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-33035-1. A fascinating account of how "Hegel became Hegel", using the guiding hypothesis that Hegel "was basically a theologian manqué".John N. Findlay, 1958. Hegel: A Re-examination. Oxford University Press.ISBN 0-19-519879-4 Forster, Michael, 1989. Hegel and Skepticism. Harvard University Press.ISBN 0-674-38707-4 ------, 1998. Hegel‘s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit. University of Chicago Press.ISBN 0-226-25742-8. Best commentary in English on Hegel‘s most important work.Harris, H. S., Hegel: Phenomenology and System. A distillation of the author‘s magisterial two-volume Hegel‘s Ladder, now the standard commentary on the Phenomenology.Justus Hartnack, 1998. An Introduction to Hegel‘s Logic. Indianapolis: Hackett.ISBN 0-87220-424-3Martin Heidegger, 1988. Hegel‘s Phenomenology of Spirit. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.ISBN 0-253-32766-0Jean Hyppolite, 1979. Genesis and Structure of "Hegel‘s Phenomenology of Spirit." Northwestern University Press.ISBN 0-8101-0594-2 Kadvany, John, 2001,Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason. Duke University Press.ISBN 0-8223-2659-0 Kainz, Howard P., 1996, G. W. F. Hegel. Ohio University Press.ISBN 0-8214-1231-0. Kainz, Howard P.,1994, Hegel‘s Phenomenology of Spirit: Selections Translated and Annotated by Howard P. Kainz. The Pennsylvania State University Press.ISBN 0-271-01076-2.Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit.ISBN 0-8014-9203-3 Influential European reading of Hegel.Herbert Marcuse, 1941. Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. An introduction to the philosophy of Hegel, devoted to debunking the conception that Hegel‘s work included in nuce theFascisttotalitarianism ofNational Socialism; the negation of philosophy throughhistorical materialism. Muller, Jerry Z., 2002. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought. Anchor Books. Chpt. 6 devoted to Hegel and the market economy. O‘Regan, Cyril, 1994. The Heterodox Hegel. State University of New York Press, Albany.ISBN 0-7914-2006-X The most authoritative work to date on Hegel‘s philosophy of religion. Pinkard, Terry P., 2000. Hegel: a biography. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-49679-9. By a leading American Hegel scholar; debunks popular misconceptions about Hegel‘s thought.Robert B. Pippin, 1989. Hegel‘s Idealism: the Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-37923-7. Advocates a stronger continuity between Hegel and Kant‘s idealism. Russon, John, 2004. Reading Hegel‘s Phenomenology. Indiana University Press.ISBN 0-253-21692-3. Ritter, Joachim, 1984. Hegel and the French Revolution. MIT Press.Tom Rockmore, 1993. Before & After Hegel: A Historical Introduction to Hegel‘s Thought. Hackett.ISBN 0-87220-648-3. Stern, Robert, 2002, "Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit" Routledge.ISBN 0-415-21788-1 Stewart, Jon, ed., 1996. The Hegel Myths and Legends. Northwestern Univ. Press.Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel.ISBN 0-262-12070-4 Westphal, Kenneth R., 2003. Hegel‘s Epistemology: A Philosophical Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Indianapolis: Hackett.ISBN 0-87220-645-9Charles Taylor, 1975. Hegel. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-29199-2. A comprehensive study and singularly lucid exposition by the important Canadian philosopher of Hegel‘s thought and its impact on the central intellectual and spiritual issues of his and our time. Taylor concludes that "Hegel‘s central thesis is dead" (p. 546). Wallace, Robert M., 2005. Hegel‘s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 0-521-84484-3. Through a detailed analysis of Hegel‘s Science of Logic, Wallace shows how Hegel contributes to the broadly Platonic tradition of philosophy that includes Aristotle, Plotinus, and Kant. In the course of doing this, Wallace defends Hegel against major critiques, including the one presented by Charles Taylor in his Hegel.
[edit] External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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The new HegelWikiA superior biography of Hegel with graphicsHegel.net - resources available under the GNU FDLHegel.net - wiki article on HegelAlicia Farinati - Hegelian Works Several articles on Hegel. Available in English, Spanish and FrenchCommented link listHegel mailing lists in the internetExplanation of Hegel, mostly in GermanDiscussion of the Hegelian tradition, including the Left and Right schismThe Hegel Society of AmericaHegel in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophyhttp://www.gwfhegel.org/Hegel page in ‘The History Guide‘Is Hegel a Christian?Rethinking the Place of Philosophy with Hegel - Call for Papers for Cosmos and History
[edit] Hegel texts online
Works by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel atProject GutenbergPhilosophy of History IntroductionHegel‘s The Philosophy of RightHegel‘s The Philosophy of HistoryHegel by HyperText, reference archive onMarxists.org
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NAME Hegel, Georg
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
SHORT DESCRIPTION German philosopher
DATE OF BIRTHAugust 27,1770
PLACE OF BIRTHStuttgart,Germany
DATE OF DEATHNovember 14,1831
PLACE OF DEATHBerlin,Germany
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Wilhelm_Friedrich_Hegel"
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