Georg wilhelm friedrich hegel biography

For Hegel, the Absolute, reality itself, is not something transcendent that cannot be known as for Kantnor is it something beyond conceptual formulation as for Schelling. Logic forms its very substance. Hegel calls his method speculative. For Kant, speculation meant the attempt of reason to go beyond the realm of the senses into what is unknowable—an inevitable and understandable tendency, but one that could only lead to failure.

For Hegel, the term is entirely positive, meaning the capacity of the mind to discover the hidden contradictions in thought as well as their resolution. History has been unkind towards what has generally been perceived as the excessive claims of Hegelian speculation and in current usage speculation is much closer to the meaning Kant gave it than to that of Hegel.

In his best known and first important work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel leads the reader through a sort of propaedeutic or prolegomena—an introduction to what he considers the genuine philosophical approach, culminating in absolute knowledge. First, there is the stage of ordinary sense-certainty leading to the scientific approach; this is the level of consciousness.

Second, there is the level of self-consciousness. At this stage, intersubjectivity the recognition of one self by another is seen as essential, which leads Hegel to historical considerations on social relations. The third and final stage is characterized by reason Vernunft as opposed to mere understanding Verstand. This level is characterized by the realization of universal self-consciousness, which itself goes through many stages and sub-stages.

It follows the same triadic patterns as the Phenomenology and predictably this pattern will also be found in all other writings, because for Hegel it is the structure of all being. Thus, what Hegel means by logic is very different from the conventional meaning of the term. It does not express the formal laws of thinking, such as the principles of identity and contradiction in a static manner, but intends to elucidate the unfolding of reality as thought.

Being in-itself, however, is totally empty, as it has no specification—it is just being. The contradiction between the two is thus only apparent and it can be transcended by reason Vernunftwhich realizes that both can be brought to a higher level encompassing them without contradiction. Aufhebung has the triple connotation of cancellation, keeping aside for later, and bringing to a higher level.

Thus, through the dialectical movement, every negation is in turn negated and what seemed lost reappears on a higher level of manifestation, leading all the way up to the Absolute Idea. The work of speculative thought is thus to reveal the contradiction inherent in an apparently simple concept such as being and then to show how this contradiction can be sublated.

By showing this to be the spontaneous process of manifestation of reality, Hegel actually rendered unnecessary any appeal to a higher force a transcendent God to explain creation. And by showing how in this process contradiction is overcome, he rendered unnecessary any separate explanation of evil. It is, in fact, far from clear how and why, for instance, being and non-being turn into becoming, other than that this movement is posited by Hegel, and the initial emptiness of being is a very debatable statement based on a purely intellectual vision of being.

If the Logic deals with Spirit as it is in-itself, the Philosophy of Nature deals with the self-alienation of Spirit in the natural world before it returns into itself, which is the topic of the Philosophy of Spirit. The Philosophy of Nature is not meant to be a history of nature Hegel dismisses the idea of evolutionbut rather a presentation of the structure of nature according to the triadic pattern.

Hegel also sometimes refers to nature as the realm of contingency, he speaks of the impotence of nature, and he even states that nature is a fall away from idea, which raises many questions about his overall perspective. Hegel's works have a reputation for their difficulty, and for the breadth of the topics they attempt to cover. 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 brutal Reign of Terror. History, however, progresses by learning from its mistakes: only georg wilhelm friedrich hegel biography and precisely because of this experience can one posit the existence of a constitutional state of free citizens, embodying both the benevolent organizing power of rational government and the revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality.

It is the stage where the Spirit returns into itself at the level of institutions. For Hegel, ethics and right culminate in the state as the concrete manifestation of the Spirit through human interaction. But first, on the level of law, Hegel deals with the notion of crime and punishment. Punishment is seen as the negation of the crime and Hegel even states that the criminal implicitly calls for his punishment as the logical outcome of his crime.

This law is then internalized in conscience on the level of morality. Third, it is fully manifested at the successive levels of family, society, and state. However, at least on the level of his vision, it is perfectly natural that Hegel would see the embodiment of the Absolute in the whole, i. Also, though there was an overlap between his views and the immediate interests of the Prussian State of his time, Hegel was not really a conservative supporter of that state and his philosophy soon fell out of favor.

In addition, Hegel did not really consider the Prussian State as the ultimate end of history, especially since the level of the state itself does not represent the culmination of his system. For Hegel, philosophy is the owl of Minerva, i. For Hegel the rational whole has greater claim than its parts; the group more reality than the individuals who compose it.

Georg wilhelm friedrich hegel biography: Hegel (–) belongs to the period

This has become the justification of authoritarian creeds from Fascism to Soviet Communism. A modified Hegelianism ruled under F. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet and T. This last edition was reprinted in the edition of Hegel's collected works published soon after his death, with inserted "additions" taken from the notebooks of students who had attended Hegel's lectures.

These additions, which are most frequent in the first and second parts of the Encyclopediahelp greatly in the understanding of Hegel's argument but do not have quite the authority of the main text. Such additions are less frequent at the end, since the editors considered that the Philosophy of Rightfirst published inand some of the sets of lectures, provide commentary of this sort.

The Encyclopedia starts with a discussion of "Logic" — a revision of Science of Logic — and proceeds to the sections "Philosophy of Nature" and "Philosophy of Mind. There are statements that say that the idea decides to allow nature to go forth freely from itself Sec. Hegel later claimed Sec. A fundamental comment on the dominating triadic division must be made before going further into the details of the system.

The revised "Science of Logic" that appeared in the Encyclopedia was concerned with the categories of thought, proceeding from the most inadequate and abstract to the most concrete and adequate, from being to the Absolute Idea. The inadequacies of the abstract categories show themselves through the contradictions they give rise to.

Being is more abstract than becoming; becoming, more abstract than being-for-self; these early categories, more abstract than the latter georg wilhelm friedrich hegel biographies of life, and so on. But Hegel was always concerned with the categories of thought and their relations to one another. When he wrote that the idea decided to allow nature to go forth freely from itself, was he saying that thought is the Divine Being that created nature?

The religious overtones that accompany Hegel's major transitions cannot be ignored, but those who wish to interpret him naturalistically — an interpretation his early writings and the Phenomenology may well justify — can take the view that the decision and the free going forth are meant to indicate that nature is not deducible from the categories of thought, that there is a contingency about it that no system of logic and no elaboration of concepts can eliminate.

In the third part of the EncyclopediaHegel described mind as it develops in the natural world, mind as it transforms the natural world in creating the works of civilization, and mind fully aware of itself in the complete self-consciousness of philosophical thought. The "Logic" culminates in the Absolute Idea, the most adequate category but still a category.

In the "Philosophy of Nature," where there is no Absolute, the culminating point consists of mortal individuals belonging to persisting animal species. The "Philosophy of Mind" culminates in Absolute Mind, the consciousness man gains of himself through understanding his own history in a civilization that he has imposed upon the contingencies of nature.

Like the Hegelian system as a whole, each of its three main sections — "Logic," "Philosophy of Nature," and "Philosophy of Mind" — is again divided into three. In the "Doctrine of Being" Hegel was concerned with the most abstract categories. Being itself, the most abstract of all, amounts to the same as nothing. Like Bertrand Russell in his theory of descriptions, Hegel held that nothing can be said to be unless some characteristic is attributed to it; hence, in Hegel's terminology being leads on to determinate being, which involves the notion of quality.

On the ground that a quality is something distinct from other qualities, Hegel argued that quality implies the category of a unit das Eins and that this in turn leads on to quantity. This part of the "Logic" was completed by transitions to degree and measure. Hegel's object in the "Doctrine of Being" was to show that these categories are not independent of one another but develop from one to the other in an ascending order of adequacy.

We know more about something when we know the proportions of its parts than when we know only how many parts it has, that it is, or that it is something or other. An important element in this part of the "Logic" is Hegel's criticism of infinite numerical series as the false infinite and his contrast between the false and the true infinite, which is not an incompletable progression of similar items but a completed, complex whole of supplementary parts.

The true infinite is not to be reached by attempting the impossible task of moving from one finite to the next but must comprise the finite. The "Doctrine of Essence" is concerned with such distinctions as that between a thing's nature and its appearances, forces and their manifestations, form and matter. Hegel exploited the difficulties "contradictions" that arise when these oppositions are so accentuated that we are left with featureless essences, on the one hand, and unattached appearances, on the other.

Typical of his treatment of these topics is his claim that "the explanation of an appearance in terms of a force is an empty tautology" Sec. A prominent feature in the "Doctrine of the Concept" is Hegel's critical treatment and reorganization of the traditional formal logic. Thus, he classified judgments in terms of his own division of "Logic" into being, essence, and concept.

The classification progresses from the mere factual attribution of a quality, through disjunctive and necessary judgments in which the predicate belongs essentially to the subject, to judgments of value that assert that a thing is good or bad just because it is that individual thing. Judgments gain in adequacy as they advance from mere factual attribution to attribution for reasons contained in the subject.

Hence, the more developed forms of judgment are indistinguishable from inferences. In his account of the syllogism Hegel placed inferences in which the terms are only contingently connected at the bottom of a scale leading up to the disjunctive syllogism, in which a genus is exhaustively specified. Although Hegel retained the terms and distinctions of the traditional formal logic, the use he made of them was highly original.

Instead of setting out the types of judgment and the figures and moods of the syllogism as equally valid forms, he regarded judgment as implicit inference and inference as ordered in a scale of ascending rationality. This conception of logic influenced such later writers as Christoff Sigwart and R. Lotze and was developed in both F. The argument of Hegel's "Logic" can be very briefly summarized.

The least that can be said about anything is that it is. More is said about it when it is qualified, numbered, or measured; still more is said about it when it is explained in terms of essences, grounds, or causes. Most is said about it when it is placed in the context of life, purpose, will, and value. At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a great deal of philosophizing about nature.

Electricity was held to have cosmic significance, and Schelling made much of the opposition between positive and negative georg wilhelm friedrich hegel biographies. Poets as dissimilar as William Blake and Goethe rejected what they regarded as the unduly quantitative physics of Isaac Newton. It is not surprising, therefore, that Hegel's dissertation ofDe Orbitis Planetarumwas critical of Newton and sought to provide an a priori justification of Johannes Kepler 's laws.

At the end of the dissertation Hegel mentioned some numerological accounts of the distances and number of the planets and expressed the opinion that if Plato was right in the Timaeusthere could be no planet between Mars and Jupiter. Hegel did not then know that Ceres, an asteroid between these two planets, had been discovered at the beginning of the year.

However, even after he had heard of this discovery and of the discovery of several other asteroids soon after, he continued to hope that philosophical reasons could be given for the positions of the heavenly bodies. In an addition to Section of the EncyclopediaHegel tried to show that these asteroids filled a gap that would otherwise have been unreasonable.

The addition ends with the words: "Specialists do not think about such matters. But a time will come when in this science there will be a demand for concepts of the Reason. It should be mentioned here that Hegel accepted and developed Kant's distinction between the reason and the understanding. According to Hegel, the understanding, although a necessary stage of thought, is less philosophical than the reason.

To think in terms of the understanding, as is done in mathematics, the natural sciences, and traditional metaphysics, is to think in terms of fixed and uncriticized categories, to think undialectically or in prephilosophical terms. The reason moves dialectically toward completeness in terms of fluid categories that constantly amend themselves.

Thus, when Hegel wanted astronomers to pay attention to "concepts of Reason," he wanted astronomy to take its place within a system of philosophy. This place must be a subordinate one, for Hegel wrote in the Introduction to the "Philosophy of Nature" Sec. The three main divisions of the "Philosophy of Nature" are concerned with mechanics, physics, and organic nature.

The astronomical theories expounded in the first part have already been touched upon. This part also contains a brief discussion of space and time. Following Kant, Hegel regarded them both as "forms of sensibility," or, more strikingly, as "the non-sensible sensible. The second part of the "Philosophy of Nature" moves through various triads from light, the elements, sound, heat, to electricity and chemical combination.

Hegel commented upon the philosophical significance of each form of matter. The comment on heat is characteristic:. Heat is the re-establishment of matter in its formlessness, its fluidity, the triumph of its abstract homogeneity over its specific determinations …. Formally, that is in relation to spatial determinations in general, heat therefore appears expansive, as cancelling the limitations which the specification of the indifferent occupation of space is.

That is, when heat spreads out from a heated thing, that thing is not confined to one place, as it would be if it were not heated. Or as Hegel put it in the next section, heat is the "real negation of what is specific and exclusive in body. In the last main triad of the "Philosophy of Nature," Hegel passed from geological nature through vegetable nature to the animal organism.

The most interesting part of this triad is the last, in which Hegel discussed animal species and their relationships. He seems to have thought that violent death is, in the animal world, "the natural fate of the individual" and that because of the contingency of nature animal life is "uncertain, anxious, and unhappy" Sec. But other members of the same species are not only hostile to the individual; they are also, like him, continuations of the species, and, hence, the individual feels a need to unite himself to the species Gattung and to continue it by copulation Begattung — the play on words is, of course, deliberate.

Thus, Hegel seems to have held that animal sexual union is not merely a contingent affair. On the other hand, since the new individuals produced in this way only repeat the features of their parents and other ancestors, their constant reproduction is an instance of the false infinite, not of the true infinite in which completeness and perfection are achieved.

Under the heading "Subjective Mind" and the subheading "Anthropology," Hegel dealt with the soul as a natural entity in the physical world; the soul as a sensitive, feeling being; and the soul as a being that can express itself and act upon the world through its body. The upright body, the hand "as the absolute tool" Sec. Furthermore, the world has effects upon man's body that are internalized by him — Hegel here made a play on the word Erinnerungwhich means "recollection" but, if taken in the literal sense of its German etymology, can be taken to mean "internalization.

Hegel discussed the next moment of subjective mind under the heading of the "Phenomenology of Mind," going through the main phases distinguished in the earlier chapters of his book with that title — namely, sense experience, perception, understanding, desire, the self-consciousness that recognizes others containing the discussion of master and slavereason.

The third triad of subjective mind, which is headed "Psychology," contains descriptions of such intellectual functions as intention, representation, recollection, imagination, memory, and thought and descriptions of the practical drives, impulses, and seekings after satisfaction. This part ends with a brief section headed "Free Mind.

Hegel meant that human freedom is possible only on the dual basis of thought and impulse and consists of the rationalizing and systematizing of the impulses and passions. At the very end of his discussion of subjective mind Hegel wrote that the freedom which is the culmination of subjective mind is only a concept, "a principle of mind and heart destined to develop into the objective phase, into legal, moral, religious and scientific actuality" Sec.

The rest of the system is therefore concerned with the ways in which the human will, in which thought and impulse "mind and heart" are combined in freedom, becomes effective this is the idea behind the word actualitywhich translates Wirklichkeit in the public world, the world in which men act and in which their thoughts and deeds give rise to rules, institutions, and organizations.

These rules, institutions, and organizations are independent of each man and thus may be regarded as kinds of objects, though not as physical objects. Men build up in the natural world a world other than the natural world by working on nature and transforming it and by creating systems of property, economic organizations, class differentiations, and the like.

Knox translated it as "ethical life". The first part covers legal rights and duties as exemplified in property, contract, and punishment. The third part is itself a triad. The first stage of social morality is the family, "the natural or immediate phase" of objective mind Philosophy of RightSec. When members of the family have matured, they detach themselves from it and enter the world of independent men who compete in an economic arena free from tribal allegiances.

This phase of social life Hegel called "civil society. Indeed, it is the aspect of human society that the classical economists, whom Hegel admired, had analyzed and justified. But civil society cannot exist as a mere market, for markets need to be policed, whereas trades and industries themselves find common concerns that unite the individuals in corporations of various kinds.

There is thus a double necessity for the state — as the upholder of fair dealing and as the ultimate curb on the selfishness of corporations within civil society. In the EncyclopediaHegel wrote of "the unification of the family principle with that of Civil Society" and described it as a unification of the love that is essential to the family with the conscious universality that is the mark of civil society Sec.

In the Philosophy of Right Sec. In the same section of the Philosophy of RightHegel wrote that "the mind of a nation Athene for instance is the divine, knowing and willing itself," and in an addition to Section is the famous phrase "The march of God in the world, that is what the State is. In the sentence before that in which he had written that the state is divine, Hegel had said, with the family in mind, "The Penates are inward gods, gods of the underworld," so that it is not only to the state that he attributed divinity.

Furthermore, in the same addition as that in which he claimed that the state is "the march of God in the world," he said that the state "stands on earth and so in the sphere of caprice, chance and error, and bad behaviour may disfigure it in many respects. Although, like Aristotle, he regarded the state as the highest social achievement of man, he also held, again like Aristotle, that within the state there should be guarantees against arbitrariness and despotism.

He did not take a favorable view of "popular suffrage" on the grounds that "in large states it leads inevitably to electoral indifference" and that "election falls into the power of a few, of a caucus" Philosophy of RightSec. He strongly believed that all important interests should be represented and thought that there should be a constitutional monarchy with considerable powers advised by an upper and a lower house.

This brings us to the most controversial part of Hegel's account of objective mind, his philosophy of history. Whatever else is involved in his view that the state is man's highest social achievement, it undoubtedly implies that there is no superior body or group by which its claims may be assessed. States are necessarily independent beings.

Their relations are regulated to some "georg wilhelm friedrich hegel biography" by custom, and there is an international law that regulates dealings between subjects of different states and requires adherence to treaties, as if they were a sort of contract. When the vital interests of states clash, however, there is no alternative except war. War between states, Hegel had said in his "Die Verfassung Deutschlands" "Constitution of Germany," ; first published in Schriften zur Politik und Rechtsphilosophieedited by Georg Lasson, 2nd ed.

He held that states are individuals and that all individuals persist in their existence by ensuring that other individuals recognize them as they recognize the others. The very concept of a state therefore requires that there be a plurality of them, and this makes war a part of the system of states even though war is not their natural condition but an interruption of the normal state of peace.

Hegel argued that since war is a relation between states and not a relation of individual men to one another, the rights and interests of noncombatants should be maintained to the utmost. For the same reason he was in favor of professional armies and against conscription or any form of levy en masse. Each nation is limited by geographical and other accidental features and hence can build up only a particular culture and can have only a particular, not a universal, history.

Thus, nations, when they reach the level of statehood, make their contribution to the whole in the part they play in world history EncyclopediaSec. World history is not wholly an affair of chance or contingency; as the work of mind it could not be. Therefore, the history of the world has a rational structure, and any historical writing that ignored this "would be only an imbecile mental divagation, not as good as a fairy-tale" Sec.

This rational structure, according to Hegel, is the development of freedom. The triad that completes the Hegelian system is composed of art, revealed religion, and philosophy. It will be remembered that at the end of the Phenomenology Hegel proceeded from the religion of nature to the religion of art and then to the philosophical knowledge of the history of the world.

In the Encyclopedia art is given what seems to be a more independent status, but the details of the argument hardly bear out the general scheme, since the transitional sections describe a transition from objective mind to religion, as in the Phenomenology. Thus, in the concluding sections of the Encyclopedia art is regarded as an inadequate form of religion, religion as a more adequate form of art, philosophy as religion freed from picture thinking and wholly rationalized, and all three as manifestations of Absolute Mind.

Art is the embodiment of Absolute Mind in material things fashioned by the artist, who, in a sense, is thus "the master of the God" EncyclopediaSec. In classical art the embodiment takes place without any antithesis between the embodiment and the mind that is embodied. In the art of the sublime, which preceded classical art, the Absolute Mind is regarded as something that defies embodiment and remains forever beyond and behind the sensible forms that succeed only in symbolizing it.

The defect of artistic representation is that the sensible symbols may be taken to refer to another world beyond, which is as limited as this world is falsely taken to be. Thus, men worship idols or even bones, "which point to the unspiritual objectivity of that other world" ibid. God is therefore not something grander and more powerful than the natural world yet fundamentally like it, nor is he something beyond the world that must remain forever inaccessible to man.

God is manifested in the world, and this is the truth that revealed religion has expressed most adequately in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation.

Georg wilhelm friedrich hegel biography: German philosopher who developed

Without this doctrine God would still be regarded as beyond the world and, thus, as incomplete and finite. Even with this doctrine he is conceived of through the medium of particular historical events that introduce an element of contingency and irrelevance into our conception of him. In philosophy the artist's external vision and the mystic's internal vision are united in a mode of thought in which there is no further conflict.

The philosopher who achieves ultimate self-knowledge is freed from the conflicts that inevitably disturb the inferior levels of knowledge. By philosophizing to the end, he has made himself free ibid. It is now necessary to give more detailed attention to Hegel's dialectical method. There are interpreters of Hegel who say that Hegel denied the principle of contradiction in that he held that contradictories can both exist and that contradictory propositions can therefore both be true.

Others deny this interpretation, maintaining, instead that, according to Hegel, since contradiction is a mark of inadequacy and falsehood, contradictions are to be found in the lower categories but are absent from or resolved in the Absolute Idea. This view is summed up in Michael Oakeshott's reference to "the element of self-contradiction inherent in all abstraction" Experience and Its ModesCambridge,p.

Those who take the first view can quote some convincing passages from Hegel's Science of Logic. For example, there he wrote that "all things are in themselves contradictory," that "movement is existing contradiction itself," and that "only insofar as something has contradiction in itself does it move, have impulse or activity. If Hegel had rejected the principle of contradiction in the sense that that principle is understood by formal logicians, his case would indeed be serious, for it follows from the rejection of this principle that any proposition can be true and false and that there is thus no means of distinguishing truth from falsehood.

It is important, therefore, to see whether Hegel did reject the principle of contradiction in this sense and whether its rejection is part of his dialectical method. That these questions are not easy to answer becomes apparent if we consult some of the commentators on the passages I have just quoted. McTaggart, in his Commentary on Hegel's Logicwas dissatisfied with the whole section and claimed that in it Hegel had allowed himself to be too much influenced by Schelling's view on polarity and opposition.

McTaggart said nothing, however, about Hegel's statement that there are existing contradictions. Mure, in his A Study of Hegel's Logicdid not evade this difficulty. Examining Hegel's text more closely than McTaggart had done, he pointed out that on the ground that "the contradictory cannot be imagined or thought" Hegel rejected the commonsense view that things cannot be self-contradictory but that thought can be.

Mure called attention, too, to Hegel's statement that self-contradiction is not a mere disease of thought but something it must pass through on its way to truth. Furthermore, according to Hegel, it is finite things that are self-contradictory, and they are contradictory not in relation to one another but by virtue of their relation to what is infinite: Hegel "is not suggesting that Big Ben can now read both 9 p.

Although this is an improvement on McTaggart, it left out of account Hegel's statement that for something to move, it must be both here and not here at the same time. What Hegel said about movement is not altogether unlike Mure's example of Big Ben. So the difficulty remains. In the "Logic" sections of the Encyclopediawhich was written later than the Science of Logiccontradiction is not a separate category at all.

Perhaps the reason for this difference is that Hegel had second thoughts and gave up the idea of contradiction in the nature of things. But although contradiction is no longer a category in the EncyclopediaHegel still sometimes wrote as if there were contradictions in the nature of things. For example, he stated that although such concepts as "square circle," "many-sided circle," and "straight curve" are self-contradictory, geometers nevertheless regard circles as polygons composed of very short sides and "the center and circumference of a circle as opposite and contradictory to one another" EncyclopediaSec.

Hegel also suggested that polarity in physics goes against the ordinary logic — but he used the georg wilhelm friedrich hegel biography opposition Entgegensetzung rather than contradiction Widerspruch. In Geschichte der neueren Philosophie Heidelberg,Vol. VIII, Part 2 Kuno Fischer tried to overcome the difficulty by distinguishing between two sorts of contradiction, "necessary contradiction" and "impossible contradiction.

When a circle is regarded as a many-sided polygon, however, the contradiction is not in adjecto but in subjectofor the circle is then being regarded as in the process of being formed or generated from these many sides. This, Fischer held, is the contradiction involved in all becoming the first concrete category of the "Logic," the synthesis of being and nothing.

Fischer's suggestion is therefore that there is not a vicious or stultifying contradiction involved in becoming or in movement, contradictory though they must in some sense be. But although this may be a correct exposition of Hegel's view, it is hardly a defense of it, since it merely repeats without explaining his claim that there are contradictions in the objective world.

By drawing this distinction, Fischer has nevertheless raised the question whether Hegel georg wilhelm friedrich hegel biography the word contradiction to be used in the way it is used in formal logic. The answer is clear enough. Hegel did not regard formal logic as a philosophical science, and he therefore rejected any idea that its categories should dominate philosophical thought.

Thus, the fact that the word contradiction is used in a certain way by formal logicians was not for him a reason for confining himself to that meaning. When Hegel was advocating the dialectical method, he had in mind a method in which oppositions, conflicts, tensions, and refutations were courted rather than avoided or evaded. Hegel was a student of the classical, laissez-faire economists who held that wealth would be maximized by the free play of competition.

In this view if traders and producers ceased to compete with one another, the whole level of economic life would be lowered. General prosperity could be reached only at the expense of labor and anxiety. So it is, Hegel believed, with the categories of our thought, the systems of philosophers, and the forms of life and society. There is no tranquillity to be had by withdrawal and isolation.

Our categories compete with one another, and out of their competition emerges something better than either of them could have accomplished alone. But it is not possible for the superior category to go into retirement, for without the spur of competition it would fall into decay. Furthermore, just as competition requires the competitors to continue in business — for if one destroys the others, there is monopoly and stagnation — so the competing categories cannot be swallowed up and lost in the Absolute Idea but must all play their part in maintaining its life and stability.

There is nothing fanciful in this comparison. For example, in this essay he developed the triad need — labor — enjoyment and described labor as "the destruction of the object … but in such a way that another is put in its place. The destruction of the natural object is the creation of an artificial one. Negation, indeed, is the vital notion in Hegel's account of the dialectic.

In the Preface to the Phenomenology Hegel wrote, "The life of God and divine knowledge may, if we wish, be described as love disporting with itself; but this idea is degraded into mere edification and insipidity if it lacks the seriousness, the pain, the patience and the labour of the negative. Expressed in theological-economic terms Hegel's view is that God cannot be a mere consumer, for there is no consumption without labor, and labor has to face a recalcitrant nature that has to be understood and humored.

Thus, there is no God apart from nature. In moral terms there is no good without evil, and in logical terms there is no truth without error. These, according to Hegel, are central truths of dialectics. But surely, it will be said, this conflicts with such obvious facts as that there are some who consume without working, that in mathematics there are sequences of necessarily true propositions with no admixture of falsity, and that some things — for example, conscientious action — are good without qualification.

As to the first point, Hegel argued in the Phenomenology that the master who consumes what his slave produces for him destroys what he consumes, whereas the slave shapes the external world in such a way that mind is embodied in it. Hence, the slave is on the road to freedom, whereas the master, who does not work, destroys without creating. As to mathematics, Hegel was inclined to hold it in georg wilhelm friedrich hegel biography. There is no space here to consider the strange things he said about it, and it need only be remarked that he held that philosophical truth is utterly different from mathematical truth in that false philosophical views are taken up into true philosophy whereas false mathematics is not taken up into true mathematics.

As to the alleged unmixed goodness of conscientious action the Kantian "good will"Hegel held that the morality of conscience contained in itself the seeds of willfulness and arbitrariness, for the most atrocious deeds can be defended on the ground that the man who committed them genuinely thought them right. Obedience to one's own conscience, Hegel thought, is an advance over obedience to the commands of an external lord but is nevertheless an unstable basis for morality.

Several ways in which the negative element is important in Hegel's method have been discussed. There is the conceptual competition without which thought must decay. Then, there is the polar character of certain fundamental notions that makes the one unthinkable without its opposite. At the prephilosophical level Hegel gave above and below, right and left, father and son, as examples.

At the philosophical level his examples, were good and bad, master and slave, thought and nature. But not only do these opposites require each other; they also pass into each other. Christianity [ edit ]. Early Romantic writings [ edit ]. The Berlin lectures [ edit ]. Main article: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Issues of interpretation [ edit ].

Philosophy of history [ edit ]. Dialectics, speculation, idealism [ edit ]. Thesis—antithesis—synthesis [ edit ]. Reception [ edit ]. In France [ edit ]. American pragmatism [ edit ]. Publications and other writings [ edit ]. See also: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel bibliography. Berlin lecture series [ edit ]. Notes [ edit ]. Explanatory notes [ edit ].

The German for that would be der Sklave. Der Knechtby contrast, is a servant, a menial, a farmhand, a serf, et cetera. None of the English translators render it "slave. See Hegel's Reception in Francebelow, for discussion. Instead, he directly states that it is the position of the "unhappy consciousness," presented later in that same chapter, that is "the birthplace of spirit becoming self-consciousness.

Endnotes in the latter supply additional references. Experience is not only sense perception, Hegel insists, but also what is discovered and lived through. This is by no means a stipulative or technical sense of the word Erfahrungand there is no need to replace it with another synonym, such as Erleben. Hegel is only reviving the original sense of the term, according to which Erfahrung is anything that one learns through experiment, through trial and error, or through enquiry about what appears to be the case.

Hegel's term Erfahrung is therefore to be taken in its literal meaning: a journey or adventure fahrenwhich arrives at a result er-fahrenso that Erfahrung is quite literally das Ergebnis des Fahrts. In contrast to Plotinus and Proclus, Hegel rejects the possibility of any separate infinity. To what extent Hegel preferred this approach over that of his earlier book is a matter of ongoing debate.

The dialectic of Hegel's Logic demonstrates how the pure thought-categories of being and essence pass over into the categories of the concept; how the concept reveals, again, the higher-level or deeper-level unity of being and essence. Burt also used 'concept' in his translation of Erdmann's Outlines of Logic and Metaphysicsfor the very good reason that 'notion' carries the connotation of being a subjective representation.

Its meaning is also much too vague. It should be reserved for precisely such contexts as require a term without too precise a meaning. It can also refer to the third person of the Trinity, the holy spirit, and this religious connotation is never far from Hegel's mind when he uses the word Geist. Allen W. Wood, for instance, declares, "Speculative thought is dead; but Hegel's thought is not": "The fact is rather that Hegel's great positive achievements as a philosopher do not lie where he thought they did.

It is here that spirit relates itself to itself and is absolute precisely in its self-relation. It cognizes itself as what it is and it is with itself bei sich and free in this cognition. Only with this cognition is the concept of spirit — as the concept of a thinking relation to self — complete. These two modes of absolute spirit, although conceptually distinct, historically overlap or intersect in ancient Greece.

Knox under the title Early Theological Writings The "positivity" of Christianity refers to features of the religion that either obscure, or have mistakenly taken the place of, its essential moral message. Whether or to what extent such identifications are important for the success of Hegel's project is a topic of ongoing scholarly debate.

Hegel clearly intended a distinction as well as a relation between these terms see lectures, p. In the Phenomenology of Spirit he described Christianity as Die offenbare Religionwhereas in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences he titled it Die geoffenbarte Religion ; thus the usage in the philosophy-of-religion lectures indicates a return to the earlier and more suggestive title.

In some contexts we translate offenbar as "manifest," but for the title we prefer a term that also suggests the connection with geoffenbart and maintains whatever distinction Hegel may have intended between offenbaren and manifestieren. Thus I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith ; and the dogmatism of metaphysics, i. Hodgson's three-volume translation of the critical edition of the Lectures University of California Press.

His own use is closer to the ancient and Kantian meaning of dialectica than to the post-Marxian use; most often, it is reserved for the negative moment, whereas he prefers "speculative" characterize the complete and true nature of thought. But they can be found elsewhere. In the first place, understanding is the process of conceptual analysis — of getting concepts and their use appropriately defined.

In the second place, Carnap and Rylein their discussion of category terms, identify the way in which the negation of a term refers to its contrary, not its contradictory; the opposites share a common perspective. In many of Plato's dialogues, as well, a thorough examination of a definition leads to the opposite of what was originally intended.

In the third place, theory construction responds to paradoxes and anomalies by developing explanations or grounds that can do justice to all the aspects involved. Herbert Marcuse 's Reason and Revolutionhowever, is one classic introductory text. Citations [ edit ]. Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Longman Pronunciation Dictionary 3rd ed.

ISBN Duden in German. Retrieved 18 October Retrieved 16 September Retrieved 8 December Sources [ edit ]. Primary [ edit ]. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Michael John Petry ed. Hegel's Philosophy of Nature. Translated by Petry, Michael John. Early Theological Writings. Translated by Knox, T. Chicago University Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich a.

Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Oxford University Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich b. Nisbet ed. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction. Translated by Nisbet, H. Cambridge University Press. Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. Reidel Pub. Harris and W. Cerf ed. Translated by Harris, H. SUNY Press. Hodgson, P. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.

Translated by Hodgson, P. Fitzer and H. University of California Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich c. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler ed. The Letters. Indiana University Press. Faith and Knowledge. In Ernst Behler ed. Translated by Taubeneck, Steven A. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Suchting, W. Translated by Suchting, W. Haldane, E.

Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Translated by Haldane, E. University of Nebraska Press. In Frederick C. Beiser ed. Inwood ed. The Philosophy of Mind. Translated by Inwood, Michael J. George di Giovanni ed. The Science of Logic. Translated by di Giovanni, George. Translated by Stewart, J. Michael; Hodgson, Peter C. Ruben Alvarado ed.

Georg wilhelm friedrich hegel biography: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (27

Translated by Alvarado, Aalten. Wordbridge Publishing. Terry Pinkard ed. The Phenomnology of Spirit. Translated by Pinkard, Terry. Secondary [ edit ]. Baugh, Bruce French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism. Beiser, Frederick C. Harvard University Press. The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. The German Historicist Tradition. Bernstein, Richard J. The Pragmatic Turn.

Polity Press. The Vicissitudes of Nature. Brandom, Robert B. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. In Stephen Houlgate ed. Hegel and the Arts. Northwestern University Press. Burbidge, John Burbidge, John a. In Katerina Deligiorgi ed. In Hegel: New Directions. McGill-Queen's University Press. Burbidge, John b. Broadview Press. Butler, Judith Columbia University Press.

Historische Entwicklung der spekulativen Philosophie von Kant bis Hegel. Leipzig: Arnold. Collins, Ardis B. In Allegra de Laurentiis and Jeffrey Edwards ed. The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel. Bloomsbury Academic. Croce, Benedetto Review of Metaphysics. In Kenneth R. Westphal ed. In Peter Liddel and Andrew Fear ed. Historiae Mundi: Studies in Universal History.

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