Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was part of a movement of thinkers in Germany in the decades following Kant who focused on idealism. Hegel was a systematic philosopher whose work attempted to provide a comprehensive and systematic philosophy from a logically consistent starting point.
He is well-known for his teleological account of history, which was later taken over by Marx and “inverted” into a materialist theory of an historical development culminating in communism. Although German philosophy of idealism lags behind Hegel, the movement commonly referred to as German idealism actually ended with Hegel’s death.
Born in Stuttgart in 1770, Hegel was a student in nearby Tübingen from 1788 to 1793, studying first philosophy, then theology. Hegel soon formed a friendship with Friedrich Hölderlin, who became a popular romantic poet, and Friedrich von Schelling, who became one of the leading figures in German philosophy along with Hegel in the nineteenth century. The close friendships held a great influence on Hegel’s philosophical works and the intellectual lives of the three were closely intertwined during their early years.
By the turn of the century, however, his interests had turned more towards the critical philosophy initiated by Immanuel Kant and developed by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, both of whom generated their ideas in the university of Jena. In 1801 Hegel moved to Jena to join his friend Schelling, and in the same year he published his first philosophical work, ‘The Difference Between the Systems of Philosophy of Fichte and Schelling’, in which he argued that Schelling succeeded where Fichte could not – the project of systematizing and thus completing Kant’s transcendental idealism. Many people believed that Hegel was just a follower of Schelling, based on their working together on the Critical Journal of Philosophy. However, the reputation soon changed.
Hegel’s first major work, the Phenomenology of Spirit (1806), showed a clear departure from his earlier, seemingly more Schelling approach. After Schelling left Jena in 1803, he interpreted a critical remark in the Phenomenology’s preface as being aimed at him, and their friendship abruptly ended.
The occupation of Jena by Napoleon’s troops interfered with the university’s activities, and Hegel left shortly thereafter. He worked as an editor of a newspaper in Bamberg for a short time, apparently very successfully, and then from 1808 to 1815, he was the headmaster and philosophy teacher at a gymnasium in Nuremberg. During his time at Nuremberg, he married and had a family, and he wrote and published his ‘Science of Logic.’
Hegel returned to his university career in 1816 and published the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in 1817, a comprehensive work in which an abbreviated version of his earlier Science of Logic (the Encyclopedia Logic or Lesser Logic) was followed by the application of its principles to the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit. In 1821 in Berlin, Hegel published his major work on political philosophy, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, based on lectures given at Heidelberg, but ultimately based on a section of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Spirit dealing with the objective spirit.
For the next ten years, until his death in 1831, Hegel enjoyed fame in Berlin and published subsequent versions of the encyclopedia. After his death, versions of his lectures on philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy were published. It came to be known as Hegelian philosophy and influences many philosophers through the years everywhere in the world.
