b. Aug. 27, 1770, Stuttgart, Württemberg [Germany]d. Nov. 14, 1831, Berlin
German philosopher who
developed a dialectical scheme that emphasized the progress of history and of
ideas from thesis to antithesis and thence to a synthesis.Hegel was the last of
the great philosophical system builders of modern times. His work, following
upon that of Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich Schelling,
thus marks the pinnacle of classical German philosophy. As an absolute Idealist
inspired by Christian insights and grounded in his mastery of a fantastic fund
of concrete knowledge, Hegel found a place for everything--logical, natural,
human, and divine--in a dialectical scheme that repeatedly swung from thesis to
antithesis and back again to a higher and richer synthesis. His influence has
been as fertile in the reactions that he precipitated--in Søren Kierkegaard,
the Danish Existentialist; in the Marxists, who turned to social action; in the
Vienna Positivists; and in G.E. Moore, a pioneering figure in British Analytic
philosophy--as in his positive impact. Copyright ©
1994-2000 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.___
from Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Early life
Hegel was the son of a
revenue officer. He had already learned the elements of Latin from his mother by
the time he entered the Stuttgart grammar school, where he remained for his
education until he was 18. As a schoolboy he made a collection of extracts,
alphabetically arranged, comprising annotations on classical authors, passages
from newspapers, and treatises on morals and mathematics from the standard works
of the period.In 1788 Hegel went as a student to Tübingen with a view to taking
orders, as his parents wished. Here he studied philosophy and classics for two
years and graduated in 1790. Though he then took the theological course, he was
impatient with the orthodoxy of his teachers; and the certificate given to him
when he left in 1793 states that, whereas he had devoted himself vigorously to
philosophy, his industry in theology was intermittent. He was also said to be
poor in oral exposition, a deficiency that was to dog him throughout his life.
Though his fellow students called him "the old man," he liked cheerful
company and a "sacrifice to Bacchus" and enjoyed the ladies as well.
His chief friends during that period were a pantheistic poet, J.C.F. Hölderlin,
his contemporary, and the nature philosopher Schelling, five years his junior.
Together they read the Greek tragedians and celebrated the glories of the French
Revolution.On leaving college, Hegel did not enter the ministry; instead,
wishing to have leisure for the study of philosophy and Greek literature, he
became a private tutor. For the next three years he lived in Berne, with time on
his hands and the run of a good library, where he read Edward Gibbon on the fall
of the Roman empire and De l'esprit des loix, by Charles Louis, baron de
Montesquieu, as well as the Greek and Roman classics. He also studied the
critical philosopher Immanuel Kant and was stimulated by his essay on religion
to write certain papers that became noteworthy only when, more than a century
later, they were published as a part of Hegels theologische Jugendschriften
(1907). Kant had maintained that, whereas orthodoxy requires a faith in
historical facts and in doctrines that reason alone cannot justify and imposes
on the faithful a moral system of arbitrary commands alleged to be revealed,
Jesus, on the contrary, had originally taught a rational morality, which was
reconcilable with the teaching of Kant's ethical works, and a religion that,
unlike Judaism, was adapted to the reason of all men. Hegel accepted this
teaching; but, being more of a historian than Kant was, he put it to the test of
history by writing two essays. The first of these was a life of Jesus in which
Hegel attempted to reinterpret the gospel on Kantian lines. The second essay was
an answer to the question of how Christianity had ever become the authoritarian
religion that it was, if in fact the teaching of Jesus was not authoritarian but
rationalistic.Hegel was lonely in Berne and was glad to move, at the end of
1796, to Frankfurt am Main, where Hölderlin had gotten him a tutorship. His
hopes of more companionship, however, were unfulfilled: Hölderlin was engrossed
in an illicit love affair and shortly lost his reason. Hegel began to suffer
from melancholia and, to cure himself, worked harder than ever, especially at
Greek philosophy and modern history and politics. He read and made clippings
from English newspapers, wrote about the internal affairs of his native
Wurtemberg, and studied economics. Hegel was now able to free himself from the
domination of Kant's influence and to look with a fresh eye on the problem of
Christian origins.Copyright © 1994-2000 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.___
from Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Emancipation from Kantianism
It is impossible to
exaggerate the importance that this problem had for Hegel. It is true that his
early theological writings contain hard sayings about Christianity and the
churches; but the object of his attack was orthodoxy, not theology itself. All
that he wrote at this period throbs with a religious conviction of a kind that
is totally absent from Kant and Hegel's other 18th-century teachers. Above all,
he was inspired by a doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The spirit of man, his reason,
is the candle of the Lord, he held, and therefore cannot be subject to the
limitations that Kant had imposed upon it. This faith in reason, with its
religious basis, henceforth animated the whole of Hegel's work.His outlook had
also become that of a historian--which again distinguishes him from Kant, who
was much more influenced by the concepts of physical science. Every one of
Hegel's major works was a history; and, indeed, it was among historians and
classical scholars rather than among philosophers that his work mainly
fructified in the 19th century.When in 1798 Hegel turned back to look over the
essays that he had written in Berne two or three years earlier, he saw with a
historian's eye that, under Kant's influence, he had misrepresented the life and
teachings of Jesus and the history of the Christian Church. His newly won
insight then found expression in his essay "Der Geist des Christentums und
sein Schicksal" ("The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate"),
likewise unpublished until 1907. This is one of Hegel's most remarkable works.
Its style is often difficult and the connection of thought not always plain, but
it is written with passion, insight, and conviction.He begins by sketching the
essence of Judaism, which he paints in the darkest colours. The Jews were slaves
to the Mosaic Law, leading a life unlovely in comparison with that of the
ancient Greeks and content with the material satisfaction of a land flowing with
milk and honey. Jesus taught something entirely different. Men are not to be the
slaves of objective commands: the law is made for man. They are even to rise
above the tension in moral experience between inclination and reason's law of
duty, for the law is to be "fulfilled" in the love of God, wherein all
tension ceases and the believer does God's will wholeheartedly and
single-mindedly. A community of such believers is the Kingdom of God.This is the
kingdom that Jesus came to teach. It is founded on a belief in the unity of the
divine and the human. The life that flows in them both is one; and it is only
because man is spirit that he can grasp and comprehend the Spirit of God. Hegel
works out this conception in an exegesis of passages in the Gospel According to
John. The kingdom, however, can never be realized in this world: man is not
spirit alone but flesh also. "Church and state, worship and life, piety and
virtue, spiritual and worldly action can never dissolve into one."In this
essay the leading ideas of Hegel's system of philosophy are rooted. Kant had
argued that man can have knowledge only of a finite world of appearances and
that, whenever his reason attempts to go beyond this sphere and grapple with the
infinite or with ultimate reality, it becomes entangled in insoluble
contradictions. Hegel, however, found in love, conceived as a union of
opposites, a prefigurement of spirit as the unity in which contradictions, such
as infinite and finite, are embraced and synthesized. His choice of the word
Geist to express this his leading conception was deliberate: the word means
"spirit" as well as "mind" and thus has religious overtones.
Contradictions in thinking at the scientific level of Kant's
"understanding" are indeed inevitable, but thinking as an activity of
spirit or "reason" can rise above them to a synthesis in which the
contradictions are resolved. All of this, expressed in religious phraseology, is
contained in the manuscripts written toward the end of Hegel's stay in
Frankfurt. "In religion," he wrote, "finite life rises to
infinite life." Kant's philosophy had to stop short of religion. But there
is room for another philosophy, based on the concept of spirit, that will
distill into conceptual form the insights of religion. This was the philosophy
that Hegel now felt himself ready to expound.Copyright © 1994-2000 Encyclopædia
Britannica, Inc.____
from Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Career as lecturer at Jena
Fortunately, his
circumstances changed at this moment, and he was at last able to embark on the
academic career that had long been his ambition. His father's death in 1799 had
left him an inheritance, slender, indeed, but sufficient to enable him to
surrender a regular income and take the risk of becoming a Privatdozent. In
January of 1801 he arrived in Jena, where Schelling had been a professor since
1798. Jena, which had harboured the fantastic mysticism of the Schlegel brothers
and their colleagues and the Kantianism and ethical Idealism of Fichte, had
already seen its golden age, for these great scholars had all left. The
precocious Schelling, who was but 26 on Hegel's arrival, already had several
books to his credit. Apt to "philosophize in public," Schelling had
been fighting a lone battle in the university against the rather dull followers
of Kant. It was suggested that Hegel had been summoned as a new champion to aid
his friend. This impression received some confirmation from the dissertation by
which Hegel qualified as a university teacher, which betrays the influence of
Schelling's philosophy of nature, as well as from Hegel's first publication, an
essay entitled "Differenz des Fichte'schen und Schelling'schen Systems der
Philosophie" (1801), in which he gave preference to the latter.
Nevertheless, even in this essay and still more in its successors, Hegel's
difference from Schelling was clearly marked; they had a common interest in the
Greeks, they both wished to carry forward Kant's work, they were both
iconoclasts; but Schelling had too many romantic enthusiasms for Hegel's liking;
and all that Hegel took from him--and then only for a very short period--was a
terminology.Hegel's lectures, delivered in the winter of 1801-02, on logic and
metaphysics, were attended by about 11 students. Later, in 1804, with a class of
about 30, he lectured on his whole system, gradually working it out as he
taught. Notice after notice of his lectures promised a textbook of
philosophy--which, however, failed to appear. After the departure of Schelling
from Jena (1803), Hegel was left to work out his own views untrammelled. Besides
philosophical and political studies, he made extracts from books, attended
lectures on physiology, and dabbled in other sciences. As a result of
representations made by himself at Weimar, he was in February 1805 appointed
extraordinary professor at Jena; and in July 1806, on Goethe's intervention, he
drew his first stipend--100 thalers. Though some of his hearers became attached
to him, Hegel was not yet a popular lecturer.Hegel, like Goethe, felt no
patriotic shudder when Napoleon won his victory at Jena (1806): in Prussia he
saw only a corrupt and conceited bureaucracy. Writing to a friend on the day
before the battle, he spoke with admiration of the "world soul" and
the Emperor and with satisfaction at the probable overthrow of the Prussians.At
this time Hegel published his first great work, the Phänomenologie des Geistes
(1807; Eng. trans., The Phenomenology of Mind, 2nd ed., 1931). This, perhaps the
most brilliant and difficult of Hegel's books, describes how the human mind has
risen from mere consciousness, through self-consciousness, reason, spirit, and
religion, to absolute knowledge. Though man's native attitude toward existence
is reliance on the senses, a little reflection is sufficient to show that the
reality attributed to the external world is due as much to intellectual
conceptions as to the senses and that these conceptions elude a man when he
tries to fix them. If consciousness cannot detect a permanent object outside
itself, so self-consciousness cannot find a permanent subject in itself. Through
aloofness, skepticism, or imperfection, self-consciousness has isolated itself
from the world; it has closed its gates against the stream of life. The
perception of this is reason. Reason thus abandons its efforts to mold the world
and is content to let the aims of individuals work out their results
independently.The stage of Geist, however, reveals the consciousness no longer
as isolated, critical, and antagonistic but as the indwelling spirit of a
community. This is the lowest stage of concrete consciousness, the age of
unconscious morality. But, through increasing culture, the mind gradually
emancipates itself from conventions, which prepares the way for the rule of
conscience. From the moral world the next step is religion. But the idea of
Godhead, too, has to pass through nature worship and art before it reaches a
full utterance in Christianity. Religion thus approaches the stage of absolute
knowledge, of "the spirit knowing itself as spirit." Here, according
to Hegel, is the field of philosophy.Copyright © 1994-2000 Encyclopædia
Britannica, Inc.___
from Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Gymnasium rector
In spite of the Phänomenologie,
however, Hegel's fortunes were now at their lowest ebb. He was, therefore, glad
to become editor of the Bamberger Zeitung (1807-08). This, however, was not a
suitable vocation, and he gladly accepted the rectorship of the
Aegidiengymnasium in Nürnberg, a post he held from December 1808 to August 1816
and one that offered him a small but assured income. There Hegel inspired
confidence in his pupils and maintained discipline without pedantic interference
in their associations and sports.In 1811 Hegel married Marie von Tucher (22
years his junior), of Nürnberg. The marriage was entirely happy. His wife bore
him two sons: Karl, who became eminent as a historian; and Immanuel, whose
interests were theological. The family circle was joined by Ludwig, a natural
son of Hegel's from Jena. At Nürnberg in 1812 appeared Die objektive Logik,
being the first part of his Wissenschaft der Logik ("Science of
Logic"), which in 1816 was completed by the second part, Die subjecktive
Logik.Copyright © 1994-2000 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc._
from Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich University professor
This work, in which his
system was first presented in what was essentially its ultimate shape, earned
him the offer of professorships at Erlangen, at Berlin, and at Heidelberg.At
HeidelbergHe accepted the chair at Heidelberg. For use at his lectures there, he
published his Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse
(1817; "Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline"), an
exposition of his system as a whole. Hegel's philosophy is an attempt to
comprehend the entire universe as a systematic whole. The system is grounded in
faith. In the Christian religion God has been revealed as truth and as spirit.
As spirit, man can receive this revelation. In religion the truth is veiled in
imagery; but in philosophy the veil is torn aside, so that man can know the
infinite and see all things in God. Hegel's system is thus a spiritual monism
but a monism in which differentiation is essential. Only through an experience
of difference can the identity of thought and the object of thought be
achieved--an identity in which thinking attains the through-and-through
intelligibility that is its goal. Thus, truth is known only because error has
been experienced and truth has triumphed; and God is infinite only because he
has assumed the limitations of finitude and triumphed over them. Similarly,
man's Fall was necessary if he was to attain moral goodness. Spirit, including
the Infinite Spirit, knows itself as spirit only by contrast with nature.
Hegel's system is monistic in having a single theme: what makes the universe
intelligible is to see it as the eternal cyclical process whereby Absolute
Spirit comes to knowledge of itself as spirit (1) through its own thinking; (2)
through nature; and (3) through finite spirits and their self-expression in
history and their self-discovery, in art, in religion, and in philosophy, as one
with Absolute Spirit itself.The compendium of Hegel's system, the
"Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences," is in three parts:
"Logic," "Nature," and "Mind." Hegel's method of
exposition is dialectical. It often happens that in a discussion two people who
at first present diametrically opposed points of view ultimately agree to reject
their own partial views and to accept a new and broader view that does justice
to the substance of each. Hegel believed that thinking always proceeds according
to this pattern: it begins by laying down a positive thesis that is at once
negated by its antithesis; then further thought produces the synthesis. But this
in turn generates an antithesis, and the same process continues once more. The
process, however, is circular: ultimately, thinking reaches a synthesis that is
identical with its starting point, except that all that was implicit there has
now been made explicit. Thus, thinking itself, as a process, has negativity as
one of its constituent moments, and the finite is, as God's self-manifestation,
part and parcel of the infinite itself. This is the sort of dialectical process
of which Hegel's system provides an account in three phases.Copyright ©
1994-2000 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.___
from Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich "Logic"
The system begins with an
account of God's thinking "before the creation of nature and finite
spirit"; i.e., with the categories or pure forms of thought, which are the
structure of all physical and intellectual life. Throughout, Hegel is dealing
with pure essentialities, with spirit thinking its own essence; and these are
linked together in a dialectical process that advances from abstract to
concrete. If a man tries to think the notion of pure Being (the most abstract
category of all), he finds that it is simply emptiness; i.e., Nothing. Yet
Nothing is. The notion of pure Being and the notion of Nothing are opposites;
and yet each, as one tries to think it, passes over into the other. But the way
out of the contradiction is at once to reject both notions separately and to
affirm them both together; i.e., to assert the notion of becoming, since what
becomes both is and is not at once. The dialectical process advances through
categories of increasing complexity and culminates with the absolute idea, or
with the spirit as objective to itself.Copyright © 1994-2000 Encyclopædia
Britannica, Inc.___
from Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich "Nature"
Nature is the opposite of
spirit. The categories studied in "Logic" were all internally related
to one another; they grew out of one another. Nature, on the other hand, is a
sphere of external relations. Parts of space and moments of time exclude one
another; and everything in nature is in space and time and is thus finite. But
nature is created by spirit and bears the mark of its creator. Categories appear
in it as its essential structure, and it is the task of the philosophy of nature
to detect that structure and its dialectic; but nature, as the realm of
externality, cannot be rational through and through, though the rationality
prefigured in it becomes gradually explicit when man appears. In man nature
rises to self-consciousness."Mind"Here Hegel follows the development
of the human mind through the subconscious, consciousness, and the rational
will; then through human institutions and human history as the embodiment or
objectification of that will; and finally to art, religion, and philosophy, in
which finally man knows himself as spirit, as one with God and possessed of
absolute truth. Thus, it is now open to him to think his own essence; i.e., the
thoughts expounded in "Logic." He has finally returned to the starting
point of the system, but en route he has made explicit all that was implicit in
it and has discovered that "nothing but spirit is, and spirit is pure
activity."Hegel's system depends throughout on the results of scientific,
historical, theological, and philosophical inquiry. No reader can fail to be
impressed by the penetration and breadth of his mind nor by the immense range of
knowledge that, in his view, had to precede the work of philosophizing. A
civilization must be mature and, indeed, in its death throes before, in the
philosophic thinking that has implicitly been its substance, it becomes
conscious of itself and of its own significance. Thus, when philosophy comes on
the scene, some form of the world has grown old.Copyright © 1994-2000 Encyclopædia
Britannica, Inc._
from Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich At Berlin
In 1818 Hegel accepted
the renewed offer of the chair of philosophy at Berlin, which had been vacant
since Fichte's death. There his influence over his pupils was immense, and there
he published his Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, alternatively
entitled Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821; Eng. trans., The
Philosophy of Right, 1942). In Hegel's works on politics and history, the human
mind objectifies itself in its endeavour to find an object identical with
itself. The Philosophy of Right (or of Law) falls into three main divisions. The
first is concerned with law and rights as such: persons (i.e., men as men, quite
independently of their individual characters) are the subject of rights, and
what is required of them is mere obedience, no matter what the motives of
obedience may be. Right is thus an abstract universal and therefore does justice
only to the universal element in the human will. The individual, however, cannot
be satisfied unless the act that he does accords not merely with law but also
with his own conscientious convictions. Thus, the problem in the modern world is
to construct a social and political order that satisfies the claims of both. And
thus no political order can satisfy the demands of reason unless it is organized
so as to avoid, on the one hand, a centralization that would make men slaves or
ignore conscience and, on the other hand, an antinomianism that would allow
freedom of conviction to any individual and so produce a licentiousness that
would make social and political order impossible. The state that achieves this
synthesis rests on the family and on the guild. It is unlike any state existing
in Hegel's day; it is a form of limited monarchy, with parliamentary government,
trial by jury, and toleration for Jews and dissenters.After his publication of
The Philosophy of Right, Hegel seems to have devoted himself almost entirely to
his lectures. Between 1823 and 1827 his activity reached its maximum. His notes
were subjected to perpetual revisions and additions. It is possible to form an
idea of them from the shape in which they appear in his published writings.
Those on Aesthetics, on the Philosophy of Religion, on the Philosophy of
History, and on the History of Philosophy have been published by his editors,
mainly from the notes of his students, whereas those on logic, psychology, and
the philosophy of nature have been appended in the form of illustrative and
explanatory notes to the corresponding sections of his Encyklopädie. During
these years hundreds of hearers from all parts of Germany and beyond came under
his influence; and his fame was carried abroad by eager or intelligent
disciples.Three courses of lectures are especially the product of his Berlin
period: those on aesthetics, on the philosophy of religion, and on the
philosophy of history. In the years preceding the revolution of 1830, public
interest, excluded from political life, turned to theatres, concert rooms, and
picture galleries. At these Hegel became a frequent and appreciative visitor,
and he made extracts from the art notes in the newspapers. During his holiday
excursions, his interest in the fine arts more than once took him out of his way
to see some old painting. This familiarity with the facts of art, though neither
deep nor historical, gave a freshness to his lectures on aesthetics, which, as
put together from the notes taken in different years from 1820 to 1829, are
among his most successful efforts.The lectures on the philosophy of religion are
another application of his method, and shortly before his death he had prepared
for the press a course of lectures on the proofs for the existence of God. On
the one hand, he turned his weapons against the Rationalistic school, which
reduced religion to the modicum compatible with an ordinary worldly mind. On the
other hand, he criticized the school of Schleiermacher, who elevated feeling to
a place in religion above systematic theology. In his middle way, Hegel
attempted to show that the dogmatic creed is the rational development of what
was implicit in religious feeling. To do so, of course, philosophy must be made
the interpreter and the superior discipline.In his philosophy of history, Hegel
presupposed that the whole of human history is a process through which mankind
has been making spiritual and moral progress and advancing to self-knowledge.
History has a plot, and the philosopher's task is to discern it. Some historians
have found its key in the operation of natural laws of various kinds. Hegel's
attitude, however, rested on the faith that history is the enactment of God's
purpose and that man had now advanced far enough to descry what that purpose is:
it is the gradual realization of human freedom.The first step was to make the
transition from a natural life of savagery to a state of order and law. States
had to be founded by force and violence; there is no other way to make men
law-abiding before they have advanced far enough mentally to accept the
rationality of an ordered life. There will be a stage at which some men have
accepted the law and become free, while others remain slaves. In the modern
world man has come to appreciate that all men, as minds, are free in essence,
and his task is thus to frame institutions under which they will be free in
fact.Hegel did not believe, despite the charge of some critics, that history had
ended in his lifetime. In particular, he maintained against Kant that to
eliminate war is impossible. Each nation-state is an individual; and, as Hobbes
had said of relations between individuals in the state of nature, pacts without
the sword are but words. Clearly, Hegel's reverence for fact prevented him from
accepting Kant's Idealism.The lectures on the history of philosophy are
especially remarkable for their treatment of Greek philosophy. Working without
modern indexes and annotated editions, Hegel's grasp of Plato and Aristotle is
astounding, and it is only just to recognize that it was from Hegel that the
scholarship lavished on Greek philosophy in the century after his death received
its original impetus.At this time a Hegelian school began to gather. The flock
included intelligent pupils, empty-headed imitators, and romantics who turned
philosophy into lyric measures. Opposition and criticism only served to define
more precisely the adherents of the new doctrine. Though he had soon resigned
all direct official connection with the schools of Brandenburg, Hegel's real
influence in Prussia was considerable. In 1830 he was rector of the university.
In 1831 he received a decoration from Frederick William III. One of his last
literary undertakings was the establishment of the Berlin Jahrbücher für
wissenschaftliche Kritik ("Yearbook for Philosophical Criticism").The
revolution of 1830 was a great blow to Hegel, and the prospect of mob rule
almost made him ill. His last literary work, the first part of which appeared in
the Preussische Staatszeitung while the rest was censored, was an essay on the
English Reform Bill of 1832, considering its probable effects on the character
of the new members of Parliament and the measures that they might introduce. In
the latter connection he enlarged on several points in which England had done
less than many continental states for the abolition of monopolies and abuses.In
1831 cholera entered Germany. Hegel and his family retired for the summer to the
suburbs, and there he finished the revision of the first part of his Science of
Logic. Home again for the winter session, on November 14, after one day's
illness, he died of cholera and was buried, as he had wished, between Fichte and
Karl Solger, author of an ironic dialectic.Copyright © 1994-2000 Encyclopædia
Britannica, Inc._
from Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich
Personage and influence In his classroom Hegel
was more impressive than fascinating. His students saw a plain, old-fashioned
face, without life or lustre--a figure that had never looked young and was now
prematurely aged. Sitting with his snuffbox before him and his head bent down,
he looked ill at ease and kept turning the folios of his notes. His utterance
was interrupted by frequent coughing; every sentence came out with a struggle.
The style was no less irregular: sometimes in plain narrative the lecturer would
be specially awkward, while in abstruse passages he seemed especially at home,
rose into a natural eloquence, and carried away the hearer by the grandeur of
his diction.The early theological writings and the Phenomenology of Mind are
packed with brilliant metaphors. In his later works, produced as textbooks for
his lectures, the "Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences" and
the Philosophy of Right, he compresses his material into relatively short,
numbered paragraphs. It is only necessary to translate them to appreciate their
conciseness and precision. The common idea that Hegel's is a philosophy of
exceptional difficulty is quite mistaken. Once his terminology is understood and
his main principles grasped, he presents far less difficulty than Kant, for
example. One reason for this is a certain air of dogmatism: Kant's statements
are often hedged around with qualifications; but Hegel had, as it were, seen a
vision of absolute truth, and he expounds it with confidence.Hegel's system is
avowedly an attempt to unify opposites--spirit and nature, universal and
particular, ideal and real--and to be a synthesis in which all the partial and
contradictory philosophies of his predecessors are alike contained and
transcended. It is thus both Idealism and Realism at once; hence, it is not
surprising that his successors, emphasizing now one and now another strain in
his thought, have interpreted him variously. Conservatives and revolutionaries,
believers and atheists alike have professed to draw inspiration from him. In one
form or another his teaching dominated German universities for some years after
his death and spread to France and to Italy. The vicissitudes of Hegelian
thought to the present day are detailed below in Hegelianism. In the mid-20th
century, interest in the early theological writings and in the Phänomenologie
was increased by the spread of Existentialism. At the same time, the growing
importance of Communism encouraged political thinkers to study Hegel's political
works, as well as his "Logic," because of their influence on Karl
Marx. And, by the time of his bicentennial in 1970, a Hegelian renascence was in
the making.(T.M.K.)Copyright © 1994-2000 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.___
from Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Works
A collected edition of
Hegel's published works, together with a great deal of material culled from his
lectures, was published by his pupils within a few years of his death in 1831.
This edition, with some rearrangement, was reissued by Hermann Glockner in 26
volumes, including a comprehensive index (1927-40). In 1905 the Philosophische
Bibliothek (Leipzig, later Hamburg) began publication of a new edition with a
carefully revised text edited by Georg Lasson and later by Johannes Hoffmeister;
volumes appeared for more than 50 years, but it was not completed. It has been
enhanced by a comprehensive edition sponsored by the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is to contain about 50 volumes. The first volume
appeared in 1968. English translations of most of Hegel's works were published
in the late 19th and early 20th century, but, apart from those by William
Wallace (Logic and Mind--i.e., the first and third parts of the Encyclopaedia),
they are not always satisfactory and they have no notes. With a view to
remedying this deficiency, new English translations have appeared of some works,
including Philosophy of Right (1942, often reprinted) and Science of Logic
(1969), as well as translations of writings not translated previously, such as
Early Theological Writings (1948; rev. ed., 1971), and Philosophy of Nature, 3
vol. (1970), the second part of the Encyclopaedia. With the exception of Science
of Logic and the Oxford translation of Philosophy of Nature, all these
translations are annotated.Copyright © 1994-2000 Encyclopædia Britannica,
Inc.______