Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, the most ambitious and systematic of the idealists who followed Immanuel Kant. He tried to show that reality as a whole is a rational process unfolding through history, in which mind or spirit gradually comes to understand itself and human freedom grows. His books are notoriously difficult, but his ideas about dialectic, history and society shaped Marxism, existentialism and much of modern European thought, and he was the dominant philosopher in Germany at the time of his death.

Hegel was born on 27 August 1770 in Stuttgart, capital of the duchy of Württemberg, the son of a revenue official at the ducal court. He was a hard-working pupil at the local grammar school. In 1788 he entered the Protestant seminary at the University of Tübingen to train for the ministry. There he shared a room with the future poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the younger philosopher Friedrich Schelling. The three friends read Kant, Rousseau and the Greeks together and were thrilled by the French Revolution; according to a later story, they planted a liberty tree in its honour.

Instead of becoming a pastor, Hegel worked as a private tutor to wealthy families in Bern from 1793 and in Frankfurt from 1797. In these years he wrote essays, unpublished in his lifetime, on religion and society, criticising the rigid rules of established Christianity and looking back with longing to the shared public life of ancient Greece.

In 1801, helped by Schelling, who had become famous young, Hegel joined the University of Jena, then the centre of German philosophy, as an unpaid lecturer. He first worked alongside Schelling but gradually moved away from him. His first major book, the Phenomenology of Spirit, was finished in October 1806, just as Napoleon defeated the Prussian army at Jena during the Napoleonic Wars. Hegel saw the emperor riding through the town and wrote to a friend that he had seen the world-soul on horseback. The French occupation closed the university, and the book came out in 1807, the year his illegitimate son Ludwig was born to his landlady.

For the next decade Hegel earned a living outside the university, first editing a newspaper in Bamberg and then, from 1808 to 1816, serving as headmaster of a grammar school in Nuremberg. There he married Marie von Tucher, from a patrician family, in 1811, and wrote the Science of Logic, published between 1812 and 1816. He became professor at Heidelberg in 1816 and published the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, an outline of his whole system, in 1817.

Hegel started from a problem left by Immanuel Kant. Kant had argued that we know only things as they appear to us, never as they are in themselves. Hegel thought this division could not be maintained: the very act of drawing a limit to knowledge shows that the mind has already thought beyond it. Reality and thought are not two separate realms; the structure of reason is also the structure of the world. This position is called absolute idealism. It does not mean that the physical world is imaginary, but that the world is ultimately intelligible, and that it is fully understood only when spirit, Geist in German, the shared mind of humanity expressed in its culture, laws, art, religion and philosophy, recognises itself in it.

His method is known as dialectic. Hegel held that ideas and ways of life develop through their own contradictions. Any limited point of view, pushed to its conclusions, turns out to be one-sided and runs into its opposite; the tension is resolved by a richer position that both cancels and preserves what was true in both. Hegel's word for this, aufheben, means at once to abolish, to keep and to lift up. The popular formula of thesis, antithesis and synthesis is a simplification that Hegel himself did not use.

The Phenomenology traces this process through the history of consciousness, from simple sense perception to self-awareness, social life and finally absolute knowing. Its best-known episode is the struggle between master and slave. Each self wants to be recognised by another; the victor becomes master, the defeated becomes slave. Yet the master depends on the slave's work and recognition, while the slave, by labouring and shaping the world, gains a truer independence. The lesson, that people become fully selves only through mutual recognition, influenced later thinkers from Karl Marx to modern theorists of identity.

Hegel applied the same idea to history. In his lectures on the philosophy of history he described it as the progress of the consciousness of freedom: in the ancient East, he claimed, only one person, the ruler, was free; in Greece and Rome some were; in the modern Christian world all are recognised as free. His treatment of Africa and Asia in these lectures reflects the prejudices of his time and has been heavily criticised. He believed that philosophy understands an age only when it has matured, writing that the owl of Minerva, the symbol of wisdom, flies only at dusk.

In 1818 Hegel accepted the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia, succeeding Fichte. His Elements of the Philosophy of Right, published in 1820, set out his political theory. Freedom, for Hegel, is not simply doing as one likes; it is realised in social institutions that people can recognise as rational and their own. These are the family, civil society, the market economy with its classes and associations, and the state, a constitutional monarchy governed by law and a professional civil service. His preface claims that what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational, a phrase often read as praise of the Prussian state, though scholars disagree over how conservative it really was.

In Berlin he became a celebrity. His lectures on aesthetics, religion and the history of philosophy drew large audiences, and his students edited them for publication after his death. Arthur Schopenhauer, who despised him, scheduled his own lectures at the same hour and attracted almost no one. Hegel died in Berlin on 14 November 1831, officially of cholera during an epidemic, although his biographer Terry Pinkard and others think another stomach illness was more likely.

After his death his followers split. The Right Hegelians read his work as a defence of Christianity and the existing state; the Young or Left Hegelians, among them Ludwig Feuerbach and the young Karl Marx, turned his dialectic against religion and the political order. Marx and Friedrich Engels claimed to have turned Hegel's idealism right side up, making material and economic conditions rather than spirit the driving force of history. Søren Kierkegaard attacked his system for forgetting the individual. In the nineteenth century his influence reached British idealists and American pragmatists, and in the twentieth he became central to continental philosophy, while analytic philosophers long dismissed him before a revival of interest from the 1970s.

Hegel stands at the centre of nineteenth-century philosophy and of the intellectual history of Germany. Admirers see in him the thinker who showed that reason is historical and social; critics have charged him with obscurity and with justifying power. Few philosophers have been argued about so much.