Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The real is rational: Spirit realises itself in history.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831, Germany (Württemberg, then Prussia)) : german idealism. For Hegel, truth is not an isolated sentence: it is a whole that builds itself by developing, by going through its own contradictions. Spirit (a consciousness, a society, humanity) only becomes itself at the end of a long road. On AskPhilosophy: 4 reconstructed arguments, 6 quotes checked word for word against the original texts, and 5 common beliefs examined; every text carries an authenticity badge (written by the author, posthumous, student notes, reported, apocryphal).
Why he matters
Almost all philosophy after him defines itself for or against him. Marx keeps his dialectic while "setting it on its feet"; Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer attack him; Kojève, Sartre, critical theory and many political thinkers start from his master-slave dialectic and his idea of recognition. We also owe him the idea that any thought is a child of its time.
His times
A student at Tübingen with Hölderlin and Schelling, he welcomed the French Revolution. He finished the Phenomenology in Jena in 1806, just as Napoleon defeated Prussia there. Long a private tutor, then a journalist and a school headmaster, he became a professor at Heidelberg, then in Berlin (1818), where he was the most famous philosopher in Germany. He died in 1831, officially of cholera.
Careful: his words or his students'?
Many of Hegel's famous sentences are not from his own hand. His Lectures (on history, art, religion) were published after his death from students' notebooks. The "additions" (Zusätze) in his textbooks were added by his editors, from lecture notes. On this site these texts carry the "lecture notes" badge, and we point it out every time.
His positions
click a row to see the evidenceHe called himself a Lutheran Christian and wrote that God is "the truth, and he alone". He even defends a form of the ontological proof. But his God is absolute Spirit, realising itself in the world and in history: many readers see pantheism (or "panentheism") in it, a label he rejected.
Philosophy starts from experience and must agree with it. But only thought can grasp necessity and the whole: a rationalism that integrates experience rather than opposing it.
He aims at absolute knowing. Doubt is not refused: it is part of the road, which the Phenomenology calls a "way of despair". But at the end, the truth is the whole, known in its development.
Neither a dualist like Descartes nor a materialist: spirit is not a thing but an activity whose essence is freedom. Matter has its centre outside itself; spirit is "at home with itself". An idealism that puts spirit above matter without making it a second substance.
Freedom is the very essence of spirit, but it is not merely doing what one likes: it is realised in institutions (family, society, state) in which the individual recognises himself. A "concrete" freedom that includes necessity instead of opposing it.
The good is neither a mere opinion nor a law fallen from the sky: it takes shape in a people's customs and institutions ("ethical life"), and history makes it progress. A historical moral realism, which some read as relativism.
Philosophy and religion have the same object, God and truth; philosophy thinks it in the form of the concept, religion in the form of representation. Reason does not destroy faith: it understands it.
World history has a meaning: the progress of the consciousness of freedom (Lectures, students' notes). But this is the meaning of history, not necessarily of an individual life, often "sacrificed".
Neither good nor bad by nature: humans are first driven by passions and interests, "the most powerful" force in history (Lectures, students' notes). They only become truly human through education, work and institutions.
The state is not a mere contract to protect property: being a member of the state is the individual's "highest duty". But the strength of the modern state is precisely to let each person's subjective freedom develop fully. Conservative and liberal readers have argued over this for two centuries.
An ethics of institutions ("ethical life", Sittlichkeit): one acts well by consciously taking part in the life of a rational family, society and state. He criticises Kant's duty as too abstract.