Life and work
Hegel was born in Stuttgart on 27 August 1770. As a child he was a voracious reader of literature, newspapers, philosophical essays, and writings on various other topics.
Hegel's works have a reputation for their difficulty, and for the breadth of the topics they attempt to cover. Hegel introduced a system for understanding the history of philosophy and the world itself, often described as a progression in which each successive movement emerges as a solution to the contradictions inherent in the preceding movement. For example, the French Revolution for Hegel constitutes the introduction of real freedom into western societies for the first time in recorded history. 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 after 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.

Hegel's legacy

Hegel's philosophy is largely for experts and professionals. It is not intended to be easy reading because it is technical writing. Hegel presumed his readers would be well-versed in Western philosophy, up to and including Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Fichte and Schelling. Without this background, Hegel will be practically impossible to read.

One common joke about Hegel's legacy for subsequent thought is that ironically Hegel has managed to be both one of the most influential thinkers in modern philosophy while simultaneously being one of the most inaccessible. Because of this, Hegel's ultimate legacy will be debated for a very long time. He has been such a formative influence on such a wide range of thinkers that one can give him credit or assign him blame for almost any position.

One famous philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer for a very short time a fellow colleague of Hegel's at the University of Berlin said this about his philosophy: "The height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had been only previously known in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced, general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, as a monument to German stupidity."

One possible reason for the difficulty in reading Hegel's works rests with his innovations in the science of logic. In response to Immanuel Kant's challenge to the limits of Pure Reason, Hegel developed a radically new form of logic, which he called, speculation, and which is today popularly called, dialectics. The difficulty in reading Hegel was perceived in Hegel's own day, and persists into the 21st century. In order to read Hegel, one must become familiar with all preceding philosophers first, and then one must also learn a completely new version of logic.

Many who tried to do this, even great and famous writers, quit without mastering Hegel's specific, new logic. It has been argued that this includes Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alfred Ayer, Benedetto Croce, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Alexandre Kojève, Karl Barth, Jean-Paul Sartre and the great bulk of postmodern theoreticians.

Historians have spoken of Hegel's influence as represented by two opposing camps. The Right Hegelians, the direct disciples of Hegel at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now known as the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), advocated evangelical orthodoxy and the political conservatism of the post-Napoleon Restoration period.

The Left Hegelians, also known as the Young Hegelians, interpreted Hegel in a revolutionary sense, leading to an advocation of atheism in religion and liberal democracy in politics. Thinkers and writers traditionally associated with the Young Hegelians include Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, David Friedrich Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner, and most famously, the younger Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - all of whom knew and were familiar with the writings of each other. A group of the Young Hegelians known as Die Freien ("The Free") gathered frequently for debate in Hippel's Weinstube (a winebar) in Friedrichsstrasse, in Berlin in the 1830's and 1840's. In this environment, some of the most influential thinking of the last 160 years was nurtured - the radical critique and fierce debates of the Young Hegelians inspired and shaped influential ideas of atheism, humanism, communism, anarchism and egoism.

Except for Marx and Marxists, almost none of the so-called "Left Hegelians" actually described themselves as followers of Hegel, and several of them openly repudiated or insulted the legacy of Hegel's philosophy. Even Marx stated that to make Hegel's philosophy useful for his purposes, he had to "turn Hegel upside down." Nevertheless, this historical category is often deemed useful in modern academic philosophy. The critiques of Hegel offered from the "Left Hegelians" led the line of Hegel's thinking into radically new directions - and form an important part of the literature on and about Hegel.

Because of this we may suppose that the traditional division of Hegel's thought into Left-Hegelian and Right-Hegelian schools was inadequate. The moderate, the authentic Hegelian, was lost until after the fall of the USSR (around 1990) when Western scholars approached Hegel's writings with a fresh attitude.

Marxist readings of Hegel can yield many myths. Postmodern readings of Hegel (influenced by Nietzsche and Heidegger) can also yield many myths. Today's student is fortunate to have a new wave of Hegel scholars who read Hegel directly, without preconceptions. Scholars like Walter Jaeschke and Otto Poeggler in Germany, as well as Peter Hodgson and Howard Kainz in America, are notable in this regard.

In previous modern accounts of Hegelianism — to undergraduate classes, for example — Hegel's dialectic often appears broken up for convenience into three moments called "thesis" (in the French historical example, the revolution), "antithesis" (the terror which followed), and "synthesis" (the constitutional state of free citizens). Hegel used this classification only once, when discussing Kant: it was developed earlier by Fichte in his loosely analogous account of the relation between the individual subject and the world.

Knowing that the traditional description of Hegel's philosophy in terms of thesis-antithesis-synthesis was mistaken, a few scholars, like Raya Dunayevskaya have attempted to discard the triadic approach altogether. According to their argument, although Hegel refers to "the two elemental considerations: first, the idea of freedom as the absolute and final aim; secondly, the means for realising it, i.e. the subjective side of knowledge and will, with its life, movement, and activity" (thesis and antithesis) he doesn't use "synthesis" but instead speaks of the "Whole": "We then recognised the State as the moral Whole and the Reality of Freedom, and consequently as the objective unity of these two elements."

Furthermore, in Hegel's language, the "dialectical" aspect or "moment" of thought and reality, by which things or thoughts turn into their opposites or have their inner contradictions brought to the surface, is only preliminary to the "speculative" (and not "synthesizing") aspect or "moment", which grasps the unity of these opposites or contradiction. Thus for Hegel, reason is ultimately "speculative", not "dialectical".

Actually, according to Dr. Howard Kainz, Hegel's philosophy contains thousands of triads. However, instead of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, Hegel used different terms to speak about triads, including immediate-mediate-concrete as well as abstract-negative-concrete. Hegel's works do speak frequently about a synthetic logic, although it is true that the old-fashioned description of his philosophy in terms of thesis-antithesis-synthesis was always inaccurate.

Hegel used his system of dialectics to explain the whole of the history of philosophy, science, art, politics and religion, but many modern critics point out that Hegel often seems to gloss over the realities of history in order to fit it into his dialectical mold. Karl Popper, a critic of Hegel in The Open Society and Its Enemies, suggests that the Hegel's system forms a thinly veiled justification for the rule of Frederick William III, and that Hegel's idea of the ultimate goal of history is to reach a state approximating that of 1830s Prussia. This view of Hegel as an apologist of state power and precursor of 20th century totalitarianism was criticized thoroughly by Herbert Marcuse in his Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, on the grounds that Hegel was not an apologist for any state or form of authority simply because it existed: for Hegel the state must always be rational. Other scholars, e.g. Walter Kaufmann, have amply criticized Popper's theories about Hegel.

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Arthur Schopenhauer despised Hegel on account of the latter's alleged historicism (among other reasons), and decried Hegel's work as obscurantist "pseudo-philosophy". Many other newer philosophers who prefer to follow the tradition of British Philosophy have made similar statements. But even in Britain, Hegel exercised a major influence on the philosophical school called "British Idealism," which included Francis Herbert Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet, in England, and Josiah Royce at Harvard.

In the latter half of the 20th century, Hegel's philosophy underwent a major renaissance. This was due partly to the rediscovery and reevaluation of him as a possible philosophical progenitor of Marxism by philosophically oriented Marxists, partly through a resurgence of the historical perspective that Hegel brought to everything, and partly through increasing recognition of the importance of his dialectical method. The book that did the most to reintroduce Hegel into the Marxist canon was perhaps Georg Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness. This sparked a renewed interest in Hegel reflected in the work of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Raya Dunayevskaya, Alexandre Kojève and Gotthard Günther among others. The Hegel renaissance also highlighted the significance of Hegel's early works, i.e. those published prior to the Phenomenology of Spirit. More recently two prominent American philosophers, John McDowell and Robert Brandom (sometimes, half-seriously, referred to as the Pittsburgh Hegelians), have exhibited a marked Hegelian influence.

Beginning in the 1960's, Anglo-American Hegel scholarship has attempted to challenge the traditional interpretation of Hegel as offering a metaphysical system. This view, often referred to as the 'non-metaphysical option', has had a decided influence on most major English language studies of Hegel in the past 40 years. The works of U.S. neoconservative Francis Fukuyama's controversial book The End of History and the Last Man was heavily influenced by a famous Hegel interpreter from the Marxist school, Alexandre Kojève. Among modern scientists, the physicist David Bohm, the mathematician William Lawvere, the logician Kurt Godel and the biologist Ernst Mayr have been deeply interested in or influenced by Hegel's philosophical work. The contemporary theologian Hans Küng has advanced contemporary scholarship in Hegel studies.

The very latest scholarship in Hegel studies reveals many sides of Hegel that were not typically seen in the West before 1990. For example, the essence of Hegel's philosophy is the idea of Freedom. With the idea of Freedom Hegel attempts to explain world history, fine art, political science, the free thinking that is science, the attainments of spirituality and the resolution to problems of metaphysics.


Famous Hegel quotations
"Logic is to be understood as the System of Pure Reason, as the realm of Pure Thought. This realm is Truth as it is without veil, and in its own Absolute nature. It can therefore be said that this Content is the exposition of God as God is in God's eternal essence before the creation of Nature and a finite mind." The Science of Logic

"The science of logic which constitutes Metaphysics proper or purely speculative philosophy, has hitherto still been much neglected." The Science of Logic

"It is remarkable when a nation loses its Metaphysics, when the Spirit which contemplates its own Pure Essence is no longer a present reality in the life of a nation." The Science of Logic

"What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational." (Was vernünftig ist, das ist Wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig.) The Philosophy of Right

On first seeing Napoleon: "I saw the World Spirit seated on a horse." Lectures on the Philosophy of World History

"We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in this world has been accomplished without passion." Lectures on the Philosophy of World History

"To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality."(Abstraktionen in der Wirklichkeit geltend machen, heißt Wirklichkeit zerstören.)

"As far as the individual is concerned, each individual is in any case a child of his time; thus, philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts." (Was das Individuum betrifft, so ist ohnehin jedes ein Sohn seiner Zeit; so ist auch Philosophie ihre Zeit in Gedanken erfaßt.) The Philosophy of Right

"The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk." The Philosophy of Right

"The true is the whole." (Das Wahre ist das Ganze.) The Phenomenology of Spirit section 20.

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