Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born on August 27, 1770, the same year that both
Wordsworth and Beethoven were born and that Kant became Professor of Logic and
Metaphysics at the University of Koenigsberg. Hegel was born in the city of Stuttgart,
Wuerttemberg (Germany) to a family of good standing for many generations. Hegel had already
learned Latin by the time he entered the Eberhart-Ludwidgs Gymnasium, at the age of five. He
was studious and methodical and he possessed a powerful memory so it was little surprise that he
graduated class valedictorian in 1788. From Gymnasium he moved to the seminary at Tuebingen
University, where he remained until 1793, dropping out of his projected career in the ministry in
favor of philosophy. For the next six years, Hegel held tutorial positions that occupied his mind but did little to advance a career in philosophy; then, after his father's death and, enabled by a small inheritance, he was set up as an unsalaried lecturer at the University of Jena (1799). Later studies of notes and unpublished works demonstrates that the years after Tuebingen were a formative period for Hegel nevertheless. Greek pagan traditions occupied a strong contrast in his mind to Christianity, and only gradually released him to his own concept of divinity, a concept that played a crucial role in the remainder of his life. Within the next six years, at Jena, he completed a doctoral dissertation and became an assistant professor (1805). Along the way, Hegel had roomed with both Friedrich Schelling, who became a great philosopher in his own right, and Friedrich Hoelderlin, who became Germany's next great poet after Goethe. It was Schelling who helped him secure the position at Jena. But Hegel's professional life was not destined to be easy. While he published his magnum opus, Phenomenology of Mind, in the next year (1806), this was also the year that Napoleon marched through Germany and society (including the university) collapsed around him.
From 1806 until 1816, Hegel sustained himself as the headmaster of the Agidien Gymnasium in Nuremberg; meanwhile, he married and began to raise two sons. Philosophical labors continued in spite of it all. By 1812, Hegel published the first part of Science of Logic, completing the second part in 1816. Heidelberg University offered him a professorship; and in the short span of two years, he produced his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline and Basic Outline for the Philosophy of Law. Hegel's reputation has spread widely and, now, the University of Berlin (newly founded in 1810 with the intention of becoming Germany's showcase institution) offered him the chair of philosophy originally held by Fichte. Hegel remained at Berlin for the rest of his life, becoming president of the university in 1830 and succumbing to the Asiatic cholera in 1831.
While Hegel's philosophy may seem obscure and his books are among the toughest in the philosophical tradition to understand, he was noted in both Heidelberg and Berlin as an exceptional teacher and colleague. At Berlin, he was so popular with students that they did him the exceptional honor of a "song fest" and parade to his house. Far from being philosophically single-minded, he was thoroughly involved with both his family and the institutions that he served.
It would be impossible to over emphasize the impact of Hegel's philosophy. Hegel was to the 19th Century, perhaps, what Logical Positivism was to the 20th. Not only were there strong Hegelian movements in Germany but in England and America too. One of England's most famous moral philosophers, F. W. Bradley, was a Hegelian; and the great John Dewey, in America, wrote his dissertation on Hegel. Of course, Hegel is also famous for the reactions that his thinking spawned; one of the most famous of these was that of Karl Marx who reputedly "turned Hegel's system upside down."
The key to Hegel lies in his first two works --- his phenomenology of mind and his system of logic. Taking Kant's commitment to the phenomenal realm and to reason, Hegel assumes that all we can experience and know derives directly from Idea. Matter is antithetical to Idea. In logic, Hegel adopts Kant's "transcendental dialectic" (from the Critique of Pure Reason) which itself is remotely based on Plato's dialectic; and therewith, Hegel lays open a system of indefinitely continuing change. Idea (thesis) and Matter (antithesis) necessarily lead to Man (synthesis), not as end but as a continuing process. The system, in other words, is inherently historical and that is what makes Hegel's studies of history such a good, comprehensive introduction to his thought. The present text, Reason in History, is a translation of Hegel's "Lectures on the Philosophy of History." These were quite literally lecture notes, never published by Hegel himself, that were edited in the context of several good collections of student notes and first published in 1837.
Notes:
(1) Idea is the sole reality and origin of all there is in the world. Hegel
makes it clear that Idea and God are the same. The principal object of reason, then, is knowing
God. The so-called "science" of Idea is Logic, but Hegel's Logic is the dialectic of Plato
and, later, Kant. The dialectic represents constant, systematic change toward truth. Thus,
Idea is not stasis but, rather, is eternal change as progression. The pattern of change in
dialectic is thesis-antithesis-synthesis. That is, when the first realization of anything
appears as "thesis," the natural progression is for its "negative reality" to begin to realize itself;
this is its "antithesis." As change moves toward juxtaposition of positive and negative realities,
thesis and antithesis, the final stage of the progression is resolution of these into a realization of
"synthesis." This, of course, is no end; for the synthesis is merely a new realization or thesis, all
over again. As Idea realizes itself, it must eternally move through these stages. Since Idea is
essentially Idea-in-Itself, its antithesis is Idea-outside-of-Itself, that is, an entirely alienated,
externalized reality. This is Nature, physical space-time, the science of which is Geometry. But
what is the resolution of Idea and Nature? That which is conscious and that which is physical
resolve into that which is self-conscious; Idea becomes conscious of itself through Nature as
Spirit. The chief realization of Spirit is the human. But of greatest importance is the fact that the
progressive changes of Spirit over time is what we know as history. In history, then, we do not
just find the progressive story of Spirit's realizations through man, but in fact we find the
purposes of God and, optimistically, the gradual development of human freedom. Return
to text here
Sources: Stepelevich, Lawrence S. "Introduction" in Hegel. Preface and Introduction to the
Phenomenology of Mind (Macmillan, 1990), Friedrich, Carl J. "Introduction" in The
Philosophy of Hegel (Random House, 1954), and W. T. Jones. A History of Western
Philosophy, Vol. 4, Kant and the 19th Century (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975).
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