Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

Chief representative of classical German philosophy; objective idealist philosopher; master of dialectics.

Hegel was born on August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart, capital of the Duchy of Württemberg in southwestern Germany, into a tax clerk’s family. After graduating from high school, in October 1788, Hegel entered the Tübinger Stift (a Protestant seminary attached to the University of Tübingen) to study philosophy and theology, and graduated in 1790. After graduating from university, Hegel worked as a tutor, and in 1801 he arrived in Jena as a Privatdozent at the University of Jena. In February 1805, the University of Jena promoted Hegel to the position of extraordinary professor. In 1807, Hegel published his first book, Phenomenology of Spirit, which describes how the human spirit, starting from pure consciousness, achieves absolute knowledge through the development stages of self-consciousness, reason, spirit and religion, that is, from subjective spirit (consciousness, self-consciousness, reason) to objective spirit (spirit) and then to absolute spirit (religion), and finally to absolute knowledge. In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel tried to unify the history of individual consciousness, human consciousness and ideology, and he proved the basic principle of objective idealism with negative idealist dialectics, that is, the absolute identity of subject and object, and constructed an all-embracing philosophical system.

Between 1816 and 1816, Hegel served as the headmaster of a high school in Nuremberg. During this period, Hegel completed his important philosophical work titled The Science of Logic (also known as Greater Logic)  which is divided into two volumes: the first volume, Objective Logic, was published in 1812 and the second volume, Subjective Logic, was published in 1816. In The Science of Logic, Hegel systematically expounded his idea of idealist dialectics for the first time. Between 1816 and 1817, having received several offers for a teaching post from the universities of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, Hegel chose University of Heidelberg and was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. In 1817, Hegel published his most important book to advocate his objective idealism, The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline consists of three main parts: Science of Logic, Science of Nature, and Science of Spirit, and this is the first complete and systematic exposition of its philosophical system. By showing the inner connection among these three parts, Hegel described the spirit of the universe as an organic whole and a process of constant change and development realized by dialectics, which is abundant with the idea of idealist dialectics. In 1818, Hegel accepted the renewed offer of the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, which had remained vacant since Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s death in 1814.  Here, Hegel published his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821). In the “Preface” of the book, Hegel put forth the famous proposition that “What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable”, and he expressed his idea of political revolution in the obscure language of philosophy, which reflected the ambivalence of the German bourgeoisie that both wanted and feared revolution. Since then, Hegel has devoted himself to teaching, giving lectures in logic, philosophy of nature, philosophy of law, philosophy of history, aesthetics, philosophy of religion and history of philosophy. Hegel became rector of the University of Berlin in 1830 and was awarded the Order of Read Eagle by Frederick William III in 1831. Hegel died of a cholera infection on November 14, 1831.

Hegel inherited and developed the tradition of classical German idealist philosophy. Like Kant, Fichte and Schelling, Hegel regarded man as a pure spiritual substance, i.e. as the so-called “self-conscious” being, and objectified self-consciousness into the substance of all things in the universe, regarded it as the subject which dynamically creates all things in the universe (i.e., the so-called “absolute Idea”), thus expounded the question of identity of thinking and being from the angle of objective idealism and upheld the standpoint of idealist gnosticism. Hegel was idealist dialectical gnostic, and the basis of his philosophical ideological-theoretical system was the objective idealist doctrine of “absolute Idea”. His method of argumentation was dialectics, which also displayed a contradiction between his revolutionary dialectics and his conservative idealist system. In Hegelian philosophy, his essentially revolutionary dialectical method of thinking was stifled by his system of objective idealism.

Hegel was the perfecter of classical German philosophy, and his philosophical thought had a great influence on Marxist philosophy, especially the rational kernel of his dialectics was an immediate theoretical source of Marxist philosophy. Engels highly praised Hegel’s philosophy, and in his book Anti-Dühring, Engels pointed out that “This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system—and herein is its great merit—for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process, i.e., as in constant motion, change transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development.”

In Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Engels deeply analyzed the outstanding contradiction between system and method in Hegelian philosophy, pointed out that “the whole dogmatic content of the Hegelian system is declared to be absolute truth, in contradiction to his dialectical method, which dissolves all dogmatism. Thus, the revolutionary side is smothered beneath the overgrowth of the conservative side.”