Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (b. 1770–d. 1831) is considered to be one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy, and is also one of the most important figures in German idealism. His influence encompasses the whole gamut of contemporary philosophical issues, ranging from political philosophy to metaphysical issues in epistemology and ontology, philosophy of religion, philosophy of art, philosophy of history, and the history of philosophy. Born during the transitional period between the Enlightenment and the Romantic movements in the German regions of Europe, Hegel lived during the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars and was greatly influenced by them. Hegel went to the German School and then the Latin School, studied at Stuttgart’s Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium, and read authors like the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and writers associated with the Enlightenment, such as Christian Garve and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. In 1844, Hegel’s first biographer, Karl Rosenkranz described the young Hegel’s education by saying that it “belonged entirely to the Enlightenment with respect to principle, and entirely to classical antiquity with respect to curriculum.” His fame rests predominantly upon three of his achievements: The Phenomenology of Spirit, The Science of Logic, and finally the lectures he delivered at the University of Berlin on various topics from his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Throughout his work, he endeavored to address and rectify the problematic dualisms that existed in modern philosophy, essentially by referring to the resources of ancient philosophy, particularly Aristotle. Hegel vehemently argued that reason and freedom are not natural givens to men, but are historically achieved. His dialectical hypothetical procedure is based on the principle of immanence. Taking skepticism seriously, he contends that we cannot presume any truths that have not passed the test of experience; even the a priori categories of “the Logic” must attain their “verification” in the natural world and the historical accomplishments of mankind. Guided by the Delphic imperative to “know thyself,” Hegel presents free self-determination as the essence of mankind—a conclusion from his 1806–1807 Phenomenology that he argues is substantiated by the interdependence of logic, nature, and spirit in his later Encyclopedia. His claim is that Logic both conserves and incapacitates the dualism of whatever is mental and material, or in other words it covers both the difference and continuity of the fields of nature and culture. Hegel’s thought continues to exercise enormous influence across a wide variety of traditions in Western philosophy.