50 Facts About Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher.

Hegel is one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy.

Hegel's influence extends across the entire range of contemporary philosophical topics, from metaphysical issues in epistemology and ontology, to political philosophy, the philosophy of history, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy.

Hegel's fame rests chiefly upon The Phenomenology of Spirit, The Science of Logic, and his lectures at the University of Berlin on topics from his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences.

Hegel everywhere insists that reason and freedom are historical achievements, not natural givens.

Hegel's thought continues to exercise enormous influence across a wide variety of traditions in Western philosophy.

Hegel had a sister, Christiane Luise ; and a brother, Georg Ludwig, who perished as an officer during Napoleon's 1812 Russian campaign.

At the age of three, Hegel went to the German School.

At the age of eighteen, Hegel entered the Tubinger Stift, a Protestant seminary attached to the University of Tubingen, where he had as roommates the poet and philosopher Friedrich Holderlin and the future philosopher Friedrich Schelling.

In Berne, Hegel's writings had been sharply critical of orthodox Christianity, but in Frankfurt, under the influence of early Romanticism, he underwent a sort of reversal, exploring, in particular, the mystical experience of love as the true essence of religion.

In 1801, Hegel came to Jena at the encouragement of Schelling, who held the position of Extraordinary Professor at the University of Jena.

Hegel secured a position at the University of Jena as a Privatdozent after submitting the inaugural dissertation De Orbitis Planetarum, in which he briefly criticized mathematical arguments that assert that there must exist a planet between Mars and Jupiter.

Hegel was putting the finishing touches to it, The Phenomenology of Spirit, as Napoleon engaged Prussian troops on 14 October 1806 in the Battle of Jena on a plateau outside the city.

Hegel recounted his impressions in a letter to his friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer:.

Hegel traveled in the winter to Bamberg and stayed with Niethammer to oversee the proofs of the Phenomenology, which was being printed there.

In Bamberg, as editor of the Bamberger Zeitung, which was a pro-French newspaper, Hegel extolled the virtues of Napoleon and often editorialized the Prussian accounts of the war.

In 1817, Hegel published The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline as a summary of his philosophy for students attending his lectures at Heidelberg.

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.

Hegel devoted himself primarily to delivering lectures; his lectures on the philosophy of fine art, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of history, and the history of philosophy were published posthumously from students' notes.

Hegel was appointed University Rector of the university in October 1829, but his term ended in September 1830.

Hegel was deeply disturbed by the riots for reform in Berlin in that year.

Now in a weak state of health, Hegel seldom went out.

The conviction that philosophy must take the form of a system Hegel owed, most particularly, to his Tubingen roommates, Schelling and Holderlin.

Hegel read widely and was much influenced by Adam Smith and other theorists of the political economy.

The task of the logic is to articulate what Hegel calls "the identity of identity and non-identity" of nature and spirit.

Furthermore, the final sections of Hegel's Encyclopedia suggest that to give priority to any one of its three parts is to have an interpretation that is "one-sided," incomplete or otherwise inaccurate.

Hegel can be seen here as criticizing the individualist worldview of people and society as a collection of atomized individuals, instead taking a holistic view of human self-consciousness as originating in recognition from others, and our view of ourselves being shaped by the views of others.

Yet, although proceeding historically, Hegel resists the relativistic consequences of Herder's own thought.

Hegel composed it for use with students in the lecture hall, not as a substitute for its proper, book-length exposition.

In particular, Hegel rejects any form of metaphysics as speculation about the transcendent.

When deployed with the definitive article and sometimes modified by the term "logical," Hegel is referring to the intelligible structure of reality as articulated in the Subjective Logic.

Hegel characterizes actuality as being-at-work-staying-itself that can never be once-and-for-all completed or finished.

Hegel is not a "scientific" racist because he believes that race is not destiny: any group could, in principle, improve and transform its condition by migrating to friendlier climes.

Hegel discusses, among other things, the nature of attention, memory, imagination and judgement.

Hegel describes the state of his time, a constitutional monarchy, as rationally embodying three cooperative and mutually inclusive elements.

Hegel sees liberalism as a valuable and characteristic expression of the modern world.

In 1818 Hegel begins lecturing on the philosophy of art as an explicitly autonomous domain.

Hegel was still working out his ideas at this time, and everything from this period was abandoned as fragments or unfinished drafts.

Hegel was very much dissatisfied with the dogmatism and positivity of the Christian religion, to which he opposed the spontaneous religion of the Greeks.

Hegel's Encyclopedia includes a section on the Revealed Religion, but it is quite short.

Just how to most properly characterize Hegel's distinctive articulation of Christianity was a matter of intense debate even in his own life and, among his students, after his death.

Nevertheless, Hegel everywhere insists that his is the Christian God.

Whether or not Hegel is a historicist simply depends upon how one defines the term.

Hegel generally uses the term in all three senses, with particular emphasis on the second two, in which apparent contradictions are speculatively overcome.

In contrast to those positions, Hegel's idealism is entirely compatible with realism and non-mechanistic naturalism.

Karl Popper makes the claim in the second volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies that Hegel's system formed a thinly veiled justification for the absolute rule of Frederick William III and that Hegel's idea of the ultimate goal of history was to reach a state approximating that of 1830's Prussia.

Popper further proposed that Hegel's philosophy served as an inspiration for communist and fascist totalitarian governments of the 20th century, whose dialectics allow for any belief to be construed as rational simply if it could be said to exist.

Hegel denies that it corresponds to any procedure in Fichte or Schelling, much less Hegel.

Similarly, Stephen Houlgate argues that, in whatever limited sense Hegel might be said to have a "method," it is a strictly immanent method; that is, it emerges from thoughtful immersion in the subject-matter itself.

However, while openly acknowledging the influence, neither claims to explicate Hegel's views according to his own self-understanding.