Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

• 1. Introduction

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  On the day before the Battle of Jena, in October 1806, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel watched Napoleon ride out of the city on horseback. He wrote to his friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer that he had seen the Emperor, this world-soul, who astride a horse reaches out over the world and masters it. Hegel was thirty-six, broke, and putting the finishing touches on a book that would baffle nearly everyone who read it. He was a German philosopher, born in 1770 and dead by 1831. He spent his life trying to heal what he saw as the broken dualisms of modern thought, and he built an entire system to do it. How did a man with a notoriously terrible lecturing style draw students from all over Germany? Why did his followers split into warring camps after his death, with one wing handing a method to Karl Marx? And what did he mean by that single haunting word, Geist, that runs through everything he wrote?

• 2. Stuttgart To Tubingen

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  Hegel was born on the 27th of August 1770 in Stuttgart, capital of the Duchy of Wurttemberg in the Holy Roman Empire. His father, Georg Ludwig Hegel, was secretary to the revenue office at the court of Karl Eugen, Duke of Wurttemberg. His mother, Maria Magdalena Louisa Hegel, taught him the first Latin declension before he ever entered the Latin School. She died of bilious fever when Hegel was thirteen, and Hegel and his father caught the same disease but narrowly survived. As a boy he read voraciously, copying long extracts into his diary from the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and from Enlightenment writers such as Christian Garve and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. His biographer Karl Rosenkranz described that education as belonging entirely to the Enlightenment in principle and entirely to classical antiquity in curriculum. At eighteen he entered the Tubinger Stift, a Protestant seminary attached to the University of Tubingen. His roommates were the poet Friedrich Holderlin and the future philosopher Friedrich Schelling. The three shared a dislike of the seminary and became close friends. Hegel most likely attended because the Stift was state-funded; he had a profound distaste for orthodox theology and never wanted to become a minister. The three watched the French Revolution unfold with shared enthusiasm. Even after the Reign of Terror of 1793 dampened his hopes, Hegel kept faith with the principles of 1789 and drank a toast to the storming of the Bastille every fourteenth of July.

• 3. The Wandering Tutor

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  After receiving his theological certificate, Hegel became a house tutor to an aristocratic family in Berne from 1793 to 1796. There he composed the text known as the Life of Jesus and a book-length manuscript on the positivity of the Christian religion. When relations with his employers grew strained, Holderlin arranged a similar post with a wine merchant's family in Frankfurt in 1797. In Frankfurt, Holderlin pressed a deep influence on his thinking. Hegel's Berne writings had been sharply critical of orthodox Christianity, but in Frankfurt, under the spell of early Romanticism, he reversed course and began exploring the mystical experience of love as the true essence of religion. The unsigned manuscript known as the Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism dates from 1797. It is written in Hegel's hand, though it may have been authored by Hegel, Schelling, or Holderlin. By 1799 he had written an essay titled The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate, unpublished in his lifetime. In it he tried to align the universality of Kantian moral philosophy with the universality of the teachings of Jesus. As he put it, love is the beauty of the heart, a spiritual beauty combining the Greek Soul and Kant's Moral Reason. He never returned to that Romantic formulation, but the wish to unify Greek and Christian thought stayed with him for the rest of his life.

• 4. Jena, Bamberg, Nuremberg

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  In 1801 Hegel came to Jena at the urging of Schelling, who held an Extraordinary Professorship there. He secured an unsalaried lecturing post after submitting a dissertation, De Orbitis Planetarum, in which he criticized arguments for a planet between Mars and Jupiter. The next year he and Schelling founded the Critical Journal of Philosophy, a collaboration that ended when Schelling left for Wurzburg in 1803. Hegel's finances were always precarious. He wrote to Goethe protesting the promotion of his philosophical adversary Jakob Friedrich Fries ahead of him, yet Fries was made salaried ordinary professor that same year. In early 1807 Hegel's landlady Christiana Burkhardt gave birth to his illegitimate son, Georg Ludwig Friedrich Fischer. With his savings exhausted, Hegel moved to Bamberg in 1807 to edit a pro-French newspaper, leaving Ludwig and his mother behind in Jena. As editor he praised Napoleon and slipped into local life, indulging his passions for cards, fine eating, and the local Bamberg beer. He had contempt for old Bavaria, which he called Barbaria. After the Bavarian state investigated him in September 1808 for publishing French troop movements, he pleaded with Niethammer for help. With Niethammer's aid he became headmaster of a Nuremberg gymnasium in November 1808, a post he held until 1816. In 1811 he married Marie Helena Susanna von Tucher, daughter of a Nuremberg senator, who bore him two sons, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm and Immanuel Thomas Christian.

• 5. The Chair At Berlin

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  Holding offers from Erlangen, Berlin, and Heidelberg, Hegel chose Heidelberg and moved there in 1816. In April 1817 his illegitimate son Ludwig, now ten, joined the household after the death of his mother had left him in an orphanage. That same year Hegel published the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline as a summary for his students, and in Heidelberg he first lectured on the philosophy of art. In 1818 he accepted the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, vacant since Johann Gottlieb Fichte's death in 1814. There he published the Elements of the Philosophy of Right in 1821 and devoted himself mainly to lecturing. Despite his terrible delivery, his fame spread and students came from all over Germany and beyond. He and his pupils were placed under surveillance by Prince Sayn-Wittgenstein, the reactionary interior minister of Prussia. Hegel was appointed University Rector in October 1829, and in 1831 Frederick William III decorated him with the Order of the Red Eagle, 3rd Class, for his service to the Prussian state. When a cholera epidemic reached Berlin in August 1831, Hegel fled to lodgings in Kreuzberg. He returned in October believing the danger had passed, and by the 14th of November he was dead. Physicians named cholera, though he likely died of another gastrointestinal disease. Heinrich Heine reported his last words: there was only one man who ever understood me, and even he didn't understand me. He was buried on the 16th of November in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery, beside Fichte and Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger. His son Ludwig had died shortly before while serving with the Dutch army in Batavia, and the news never reached his father.

• 6. Spirit Coming To Know Itself

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  The German word Geist carries a wide range of meanings, but in Hegel's most general sense it denotes the human mind and its products, in contrast to nature and to the logical idea. Hegel presented spirit as humankind coming to know itself through a historical process of rational development. His central aim was to correct what he called untenable dualisms in modern philosophy, above all the split between subject and object. The result was a comprehensive system often termed absolute idealism, designed to account for reality as a unified whole. As he declared, the true is the whole. Hegel's system divides into three parts: the science of logic, the philosophy of nature, and the philosophy of spirit. This tripartite structure was adopted from Proclus's Neoplatonic triad of remaining, procession, and return, and from the Christian Trinity. The logic, he held, coincides with metaphysics, providing the formal structure of reality itself through pure categories that are timelessly true. His characteristic procedure he called speculative rather than dialectical, a term he used only rarely. It assesses concepts by their own internal criteria, exposing their contradictions and one-sidedness, then resolving them in a higher unity that both cancels and preserves the earlier stage. He called this movement sublation, from the German aufheben, which carries three senses at once: to lift up, to abolish, and to preserve. According to Hegel, the essence of spirit is freedom, and his philosophy of spirit charts the stages of that freedom until it fulfills the Delphic command with which he begins: know thyself.

• 7. A Path Of Despair

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  The Phenomenology of Spirit appeared in 1807, the first time, at the age of thirty-six, that Hegel laid out his own distinctive approach. The book was poorly understood even by his contemporaries and drew mostly negative reviews. To this day it is infamous for its conceptual density, idiosyncratic terminology, and confusing transitions. Its most comprehensive commentary, H. S. Harris's two-volume Hegel's Ladder, runs more than three times the length of the text itself. Hegel himself called the journey a path of despair, in which self-consciousness finds itself in error over and again. One cannot learn to swim, he pointed out, without getting into the water. The fourth chapter contains his first presentation of the lord-bondsman dialectic, the section that has been most influential in general culture. What is at stake there is the practical recognition of the universality, the personhood, of each of two opposed self-consciousnesses. The lesson, which the figures themselves do not yet grasp, is that recognition can only be genuine when it is reciprocal. The recognition of someone you do not regard as fully human cannot count as genuine recognition. Against an individualist picture of society as atomized individuals, Hegel took a holistic view: human self-consciousness requires the recognition of others, and people's view of themselves is shaped by how others see them. Hegel described the book as both the introduction to his system and its first part, the science of the experience of consciousness. He seemed to abandon it during his Berlin years, yet at the time of his unexpected death he was in fact making plans to revise and republish it.

• 8. The Owl Of Minerva

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  Philosophy, Hegel wrote, is its own time comprehended in thoughts. He added that philosophy always comes too late to instruct the world on how it ought to be. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality has gone through its formative process and reached its completed state. When philosophy paints its gray in gray, a shape of life has grown old, and the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk. Many have read this as a confession of philosophy's impotence and a rationalization of the status quo. The scholar Allegra de Laurentiis counters that the German phrase translated as getting ready implies not only completion but preparedness, in keeping with Hegel's Aristotelian sense of actuality as being-at-work that can never be finished once and for all. In political philosophy Hegel famously asserted that world history is progress in the consciousness of freedom. He divided human history into three epochs: in the Oriental world one person was free, in the Greco-Roman world some people were free, and in the Germanic world all persons are free. His Elements of the Philosophy of Right defended a constitutional monarchy combining democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy in what Aristotle called a mixed form of government. Hegel's lasting influence was profound and divisive. After his death his followers split into rival Right and Left Hegelian camps. The Left, including Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, adapted his dialectical method for their materialist critiques of religion and society. His sister Christiane died by suicide by drowning early the following year, while his sons Karl, who became a historian, and Immanuel, who followed a theological path, lived long and safeguarded their father's manuscripts and letters.