Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"Hegel" redirects here. For other uses, see Hegel (disambiguation).

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Portrait by Jakob Schlesinger, 1831
Born	27 August 1770 Stuttgart, Duchy of Württemberg
Died	14 November 1831(1831-11-14) (aged 61) Berlin, Kingdom of Prussia
Education	Tübinger Stift (MA, 1790) University of Jena (PhD, 1801)
Notable work	Phenomenology of Spirit Science of Logic Elements of the Philosophy of Right Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences
Era	19th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	German idealism
Institutions	Jena (1801–1806) Heidelberg (1816–1818) Berlin (1818–1831)
Notable students	Bruno Bauer David Strauss Ludwig Feuerbach
Main interests	Logic Metaphysics Philosophy of art Philosophy of history Political philosophy Philosophy of religion History of philosophy
Notable ideas	Master–slave dialectic Aufheben ("sublation") Geist ("mind/spirit") Sittlichkeit ("ethical order")
Signature

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (/ˈheɪɡəl/; German: [ˈɡeːɔʁk ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈheːɡl̩]; 27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) was a German philosopher. He is considered one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy, with his influence extending to the entire range of contemporary philosophical issues, from epistemology, logic, and metaphysics to aesthetics, philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, political philosophy, and the history of philosophy.

Hegel was born in 1770 in Stuttgart, during the height of the Romantic period in Germany, and lived through and was influenced by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. He attended the Tübinger Stift seminary with Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Schelling, both of whom exerted a strong influence on him philosophically. His fame rests chiefly upon The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), The Science of Logic (1812–16), and his lectures at the University of Berlin on topics from his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1818–31).

Hegel's philosophical system is divided into three parts: logic, the philosophy of nature, and the philosophy of spirit. In his Phenomenology, he introduces his philosophical system and exhibits the historical process through which spirit acquires an adequate concept of truth. In his Logic, as well as the Encyclopedia, which he compiled as a textbook for his lectures, he further expands upon the different parts of his system. Many of the ideas in his system are further elaborated upon in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right and in posthumously published lecture notes on the philosophy of art, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of world history, and the history of philosophy.

Hegel influenced a wide variety of thinkers and writers. In the decade following his death, two distinct movements formed, the conservative Right Hegelians and the more radical Young Hegelians, who included David Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Bruno Bauer. Both of these schools of Hegelianism went on to influence a variety of other philosophical movements including Marxism, British Idealism, and existentialism. Hegel's philosophy continues to exert influence in modern times across many contemporary philosophical movements in both the analytic and continental traditions.

Life

Stuttgart, Tübingen, Bern, Frankfurt (1770-1800)

The birthplace of Hegel in Stuttgart, which now houses the Hegel Museum

Hegel was born on 27 August 1770 in Stuttgart, capital of the Duchy of Württemberg in southwestern Germany. Christened Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, he was known as Wilhelm to his close family. His father, Georg Ludwig, was secretary to the revenue office at the court of Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg. Hegel's mother, Maria Magdalena Louisa (née Fromm), was the daughter of a lawyer at the High Court of Justice at the Württemberg court. She died of bilious fever when Hegel was thirteen. Hegel and his father also caught the disease, but they narrowly survived. Hegel had a sister, Christiane Luise (1773–1832); and a brother, Georg Ludwig (1776–1812), who perished as an officer during Napoleon's 1812 Russian campaign. At the age of three, Hegel went to the German School. When he entered the Latin School two years later, he already knew the first declension, having been taught it by his mother. In 1776, he entered Stuttgart's Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium and during his adolescence read voraciously, copying lengthy extracts in his diary. Authors he read include the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and writers associated with the Enlightenment, such as Christian Garve and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. His studies at the Gymnasium concluded with his graduation speech, "The abortive state of art and scholarship in Turkey"

Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin, are believed to have shared the room on the second floor above the entrance doorway while studying at the institute.

At the age of eighteen, Hegel entered the Tübinger Stift, a Protestant seminary attached to the University of Tübingen, where he had as roommates the poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin and the future philosopher Friedrich Schelling. Sharing a dislike for what they regarded as the restrictive environment of the Seminary, the three became close friends and mutually influenced each other's ideas. All greatly admired Hellenic civilization and Hegel additionally steeped himself in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Lessing during this time. They watched the unfolding of the French Revolution with shared enthusiasm. Although the violence of the 1793 Reign of Terror dampened Hegel's hopes, he continued to identify with the moderate Girondin faction and never lost his commitment to the principles of 1789, which he expressed by drinking a toast to the storming of the Bastille every fourteenth of July. Schelling and Hölderlin immersed themselves in theoretical debates on Kantian philosophy, from which Hegel remained aloof. Hegel, at this time, envisaged his future as that of a Popularphilosoph, (a "man of letters") who serves to make the abstruse ideas of philosophers accessible to a wider public; his own felt need to engage critically with the central ideas of Kantianism would not come until 1800.

The poet Friedrich Hölderlin was one of Hegel's closest friends and roommates at Tübinger Stift.

Having received his theological certificate from the Tübingen Seminary, Hegel became Hofmeister (house tutor) to an aristocratic family in Bern (1793–1796). During this period, he composed the text which has become known as the Life of Jesus and a book-length manuscript titled "The Positivity of the Christian Religion". His relations with his employers becoming strained, Hegel accepted an offer mediated by Hölderlin to take up a similar position with a wine merchant's family in Frankfurt in 1797. There, Hölderlin exerted an important influence on Hegel's thought. Also in 1797, the unpublished and unsigned manuscript of "The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism" was written. It was written in Hegel's hand, but may have been authored by Hegel, Schelling, or Hölderlin. While in Frankfurt, Hegel composed the essay "Fragments on Religion and Love". In 1799, he wrote another essay entitled "The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate", unpublished during his lifetime.

Jena, Bamberg, Nürnberg (1801-1816)

While at Jena, Hegel helped found a philosophical journal with his friend from Seminary, the young philosophical prodigy Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

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 (unsalaried lecturer) 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. Later in the year, Hegel's first book The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy was completed. He lectured on "Logic and Metaphysics" and gave lectures with Schelling on an "Introduction to the Idea and Limits of True Philosophy" and facilitated a "philosophical disputorium". In 1802, Schelling and Hegel founded the journal Kritische Journal der Philosophie (Critical Journal of Philosophy) to which they contributed until the collaboration ended when Schelling left for Würzburg in 1803. In 1805, the university promoted Hegel to the unsalaried position of Extraordinary Professor after he wrote a letter to the poet and minister of culture Johann Wolfgang Goethe protesting the promotion of his philosophical adversary Jakob Friedrich Fries ahead of him. Hegel attempted to enlist the help of the poet and translator Johann Heinrich Voß to obtain a post at the renascent University of Heidelberg, but he failed. To his chagrin, Fries was, in the same year, made Ordinary Professor (salaried). The following February marked the birth of Hegel's illegitimate son, Georg Ludwig Friedrich Fischer (1807–1831), as the result of an affair with Hegel's landlady Christiana Burkhardt née Fischer. With his finances drying up quickly, Hegel was under great pressure to deliver his book, the long-promised introduction to his philosophical system. 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. On the day before the battle, Napoleon entered the city of Jena. Hegel recounted his impressions in a letter to his friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer:

"Hegel and Napoleon in Jena" (illustration from Harper's Magazine, 1895), whose meeting became proverbial due to Hegel's notable use of Weltseele ("world-soul") in reference to Napoleon ("the world-soul on horseback", die Weltseele zu Pferde)

I saw the Emperor—this world-soul [Weltseele]—riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.

Terry Pinkard notes that Hegel's comment to Niethammer "is all the more striking since he had already composed the crucial section of the Phenomenology in which he remarked that the Revolution had now officially passed to another land (Germany) that would complete 'in thought' what the Revolution had only partially accomplished in practice". Although Napoleon had spared the University of Jena from much of the destruction of the surrounding city, few students returned after the battle and enrollment suffered, making Hegel's financial prospects even worse. Hegel traveled in the winter to Bamberg and stayed with Niethammer to oversee the proofs of the Phenomenology, which was being printed there. Although Hegel tried to obtain another professorship, even writing Goethe in an attempt to help secure a permanent position replacing a professor of Botany, he was unable to find a permanent position. With the birth of his illegitimate son Ludwig, whome he named after his brother, in February 1807, whom he felt an obligation to support, and with his own savings and the payment from the Phenomenology exhausted, Hegel reluctantly moved to Bamberg to become the editor of the local newspaper,Bamberger Zeitung, a position he obtained with the help of Niethammer. Ludwig Fischer and his mother stayed behind in Jena.

Hegel's friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer financially supported Hegel and used his political influence to help him obtain multiple positions.

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. Being the editor of a local newspaper, Hegel also became in important person in Bamberg social life, often visiting with the local offical Johann Hein­rich Liebeskind, and becoming involved in local gossip and pursued his passions for cards, fine eating, and the local Bamberg beer. However, Hegel bore contempt for what he saw as "old Bavaria", frequently referring to it as "Barbaria" and dreaded that "hometowns" like Bamberg would lose their autonomy under new the Bavarian state. After being investigated in September 1808 by the Bavarian state for potentially violating security measures by publishing French troop movements, Hegel wrote to Niethammer, now a high official in Munich, pleading for Niethammer's help in securing a teaching position. With the help of Niethammer, Hegel was appointed headmaster of a gymnasium in Nuremberg in November 1808, a post he held until 1816. While in Nuremberg, Hegel adapted his recently published Phenomenology of Spirit for use in the classroom. Part of his remit was to teach a class called "Introduction to Knowledge of the Universal Coherence of the Sciences", Hegel developed the idea of an encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences, falling into three parts: logic, philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit. In 1811, Hegel married Marie Helena Susanna von Tucher (1791–1855), the eldest daughter of a Senator. This period saw the publication of his second major work, the Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik; 3 vols., 1812, 1813 and 1816), and the birth of two sons, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm (1813–1901) and Immanuel Thomas Christian (1814–1891).

Heidelberg, Berlin (1816-1831)

Having received offers of a post from the Universities of Erlangen, Berlin and Heidelberg, Hegel chose Heidelberg, where he moved in 1816. Soon after, his illegitimate son Ludwig Fischer (now ten years old) joined the Hegel household in April 1817, having spent time in an orphanage after the death of his mother Christiana Burkhardt. 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. Here, Hegel published his Philosophy of Right (1821). 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. His fame spread and his lectures attracted students from all over Germany and beyond. In the remainder of his career, he made two trips to Weimar, where he met Goethe, and to Brussels, the Northern Netherlands, Leipzig, Vienna, Prague, and Paris.

Hegel's tombstone in Berlin

During the last ten years of his life, Hegel did not publish another book but thoroughly revised the Encyclopedia (second edition, 1827; third, 1830). In his political philosophy, he criticized Karl Ludwig von Haller's reactionary work, which claimed that laws were not necessary. A number of other works on the philosophy of history, religion, aesthetics and the history of philosophy were compiled from the lecture notes of his students and published posthumously. Hegel's posthumous works have had remarkable influence on subsequent works on religion, aesthetics, and history because of the comprehensive accounts of the subject matters considered within the lectures, with Heidegger for example in Poetry, Language, Thought characterizing Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics as the "most comprehensive reflection on the nature of art that the West possesses—comprehensive because it stems from metaphysics."

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. In 1831 Frederick William III decorated him with the Order of the Red Eagle, 3rd Class for his service to the Prussian state. In August 1831, a cholera epidemic reached Berlin and Hegel left the city, taking up lodgings in Kreuzberg. Now in a weak state of health, Hegel seldom went out. As the new semester began in October, Hegel returned to Berlin in the mistaken belief that the epidemic had largely subsided. By 14 November, Hegel was dead. The physicians pronounced the cause of death as cholera, but it is likely he died from another gastrointestinal disease. His last words are said to have been, "There was only one man who ever understood me, and even he didn't understand me." He was buried on 16 November. In accordance with his wishes, Hegel was buried in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery next to Fichte and Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger.

Hegel's illegitimate son, Ludwig Fischer, had died shortly before while serving with the Dutch army in Batavia and the news of his death never reached his father. Early the following year, Hegel's sister Christiane committed suicide by drowning. Hegel's remaining two sons—Karl, who became a historian; and Immanuel, who followed a theological path—lived long and safeguarded their father's manuscripts and letters, and produced editions of his works.

Influences

Immanuel Kant's Critical Philosophy was a major influence on Hegel.

When Hegel entered the Tübingen seminary in 1788, "he was a typi­cal product of the German Enlightenment – an enthusiastic reader of Rousseau and Lessing, acquainted with Kant (at least at second hand), but perhaps more deeply devoted to the classics than to any­ thing modern." During this early period of his life “the Greeks – especially Plato – came first." Although he later elevated Aristotle above Plato, Hegel never abandoned his love of ancient philosophy, the imprint of which is everywhere in his thought.

Aristotle was another major influence.

His concern with various forms of cultural unity (Judaic, Greek, medieval, and modern) during this early period would remain with him throughout his career. Hegel was particularly taken with the Christian religion and its doctrine of love as agape, which he viewed as "already 'grounded on universal Reason'". This interest, as well as his theological training, would continue to mark his thought, even as it developed in a more theoretical or metaphysical direction.

Although it is often unacknowledged in the philosophical literature, Hegel's thought (in particular, the tripartite structure of his system) also owe much to the hermetic tradition, in particular, the work of Jakob Böhme.

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

It was Kant’s Critical Philosophy that provided what Hegel took as the definitive modern articulation of the divisions that must be overcome. This led to his engagement with the philosophical programs of Fichte and Schelling, as well as his attention to Spinoza and the Pantheism controversy, the mark of which is to be found, in particular, in his Phenomenology of Spirit.

Philosophical system

See also: Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences

Hegel's philosophical system is divided into three parts: the science of logic, the philosophy of nature, and the philosophy of spirit (the latter two of which together constitute the real philosophy). Although this structure is evident in draft writings dating back as early as 1805, it was not completed in published form until the 1817 Encyclopedia (1st ed.)

The Phenomenology of Spirit

Main article: The Phenomenology of Spirit

Hegel describes The Phenomenology of Spirit, completed in 1806 and published in 1807, as both the “introduction” to his philosophical system and also as the “first part” of that system as the "science of the experience of consciousness." Yet it has long been controversial in both respects; indeed, Hegel’s own attitude changed throughout his life.

The Phenomenology of Spirit is infamously dense. Its most comprehensive commentary, H.S. Harris’s Hegel’s Ladder, is more than three times the length of the text itself. Terry Pinkard, however, attempts a single-sentence synopsis:

Hegel tried to show that there are no 'given' objects of direct awareness that determine the judgments we make about them; that 'consciousness' already involves 'self-consciousness,' and that self-consciousness itself is highly mediated and dependent on structures of mutual recognition among self-conscious agents; that attempts to establish 'successful' patterns of mutual recognition have foundered because of their inability to sustain allegiance to themselves when set under the microscope of reflective self-criticism; that what we therefore must take as authoritative for ourselves has to do with what has come to be required of us by virtue of the failures of past attempts at sustaining normative structures of mutual recognition and that to understand what is required of us at the present, we must understand how the past came to demand that of us; and that the attempt to understand such reflective, social activity in modern life requires us to rethink a Christian view of the nature of religion as the collective reflection of the modern community on what ultimately counts for it; and that only such a historically, socially construed philosophical account of that whole process can adequately introduce us to such a fully 'modern' standpoint and provide us with an elucidation of both itself and its own genesis.

In praise of Hegel's accomplishment, Walter Kaufmann writes that the guiding conviction of the Phenomenology is that a philosopher should not "confine him or herself to views that have been held but penetrate these to the human reality they reflect". In other words, it is not enough to consider propositions, or even the content of consciousness; "it is worthwhile to ask in every instance what kind of spirit would entertain such propositions, hold such views, and have such a consciousness. Every outlook in other words, is to be studied not merely as an academic possibility but as an existential reality".

Although Hegel seemed during his Berlin years to have abandoned the The Phenomenology of Spirit, at the time of his unexpected death, he was in fact making plans to revise and republish it. As he was no longer in need of money or credentials, H.S. Harris argues that "the only rational conclusion that can be drawn from his decision to republish the book…is that he still regarded the 'science of experience' as a valid project in itself" and one for which later system has no equivalent. There is, however, no scholarly consensus about the Phenomenology with respect to either of the systematic roles asserted by Hegel at the time of its publication.

Logic

Main article: Science of Logic

Hegel’s philosophy is based upon "the insight that fundamentally everything can be called into question except for logic. For logic always furnishes the presupposition of every line of questioning – of every possible epistemic challenge to any given claim. According to Hegel, only a fundamental logic can furnish the basis of philosophy.”

The Science of Logic is Hegel's attempt to meet this challenge by providing an entirely presuppositionless logic. Thus, as Hegel puts it, "logic coincides with metaphysics, with the science of things grasped in thoughts."

As Béatrice Longuenesse presents it,

Taking once again our inspiration from Kant, we could say that Hegel’s Logic is inseparably a metaphysical and a transcendental deduction of the categories of metaphysics: a justification of claims concerning their content as concepts (what is thereby being thought: "metaphysical deduction"), and a justification of claims concerning their relation to objects (or reality, or being: "transcendental deduction"). The main goal of this twofold "deduction" is to put an end definitively and radically to all representational illusions, according to which thought could be gauged by any measure other than itself. Thought, and particularly metaphysical thought, is not the mirror of nature. And yet it is neither arbitrary nor subjective (it is not relative to the particular standpoint of individual thinkers or empirically specified group of thinkers).

George di Giovanni likewise interprets the Logic in as (drawing upon, yet also in opposition to, Kant) immanently transcendental; its categories, according to Hegel, are built into life itself, and define what it is to be "an object in general."

If the Doctrines of Being and Essence, which together comprise the Objective Logic, are largely occupied with overcoming of the assumptions of traditional metaphysics, the third and final part of the Logic, The Science of Subjective Logic or the Doctrine of the Concept, is concerned to reintegrate those categories of objectivity into a thoroughly idealistic account of reality:

in the Doctrine of the Concept, thought reflects for the first time consciously and explicitly on thought itself, and all the preceding categories are understood to have their meaning and significance precisely in being comprehended by a self-aware thought. The Concept is thought ‘In its being-returned-into-itself [Zurückgekehrtsein in sich selbst] and its developed being-with-itself [Beisichsein] – the Concept in-and for-itself’ (Geraets, 133; EL § 83). The dialectic of Hegel’s Logic demonstrates how the pure thought-categories of being and essence pass over into the categories of the Concept; how the Concept reveals, again, the higher-level (or deeper-level) unity of being and essence.

This is to say that, in Hegel’s technical sense of the term, the concept (Begriff, sometimes also rendered “notion,” capitalized by some translators but not others) is not a psychological concept. When deployed with the definitive article (“the") and sometimes modified by the term "logical," Hegel is referring to the intelligible structure of reality as articulated in the Subjective Logic. (When used in the plural, however, Hegel’s sense is much closer to the ordinary dictionary sense of the term.)

The final category of the Logic is "the idea." As with "the concept", the sense of this term for Hegel is not psychological. Rather, following Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel's usage harks back to the Greek eidos, Plato's concept of form that is fully existent and universal: "Hegel's Idee (like Plato's idea) is the product of an attempt to fuse ontology, epistemology, evaluation, etc., into a single set of concepts." The idea, in other words, refers to the concept as it is present in natural and spiritual existence, or put differently, it refers to reality according to its varying degrees of rationality, that is, the naturally and historically contentful existence of the concept in time.

The Encyclopedia Logic is an abbreviated or condensed presentation of the same dialectic, which Hegel composed for use with students in the lecture hall. The opening section, entitled "Preliminary Conception," provides a historical examination of philosophical "positions on objectivity," which is quite a different sort of introduction to the logic than what Hegel earlier provided in the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Philosophy of the Real

Hegel uses the Owl of Minerva as a metaphor for how philosophy can understand historical conditions only after they occur

See also: Realphilosophie

In contrast to the first, logical part of Hegel’s system, the second, real-philosophical part – the Philosophy of Nature and of Spirit – is an ongoing historical project. It is, as Hegel puts it, "its own time comprehended in thoughts".

Hegel expands upon this definition in what is perhaps his most famous passage:

A further word on the subject of issuing instructions on how the world ought to be: philosophy, at any rate, always comes too late to perform this function. As the thought of the world, it appears only at a time when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its completed state [sich fertig gemacht]. This lesson of the concept is necessarily also apparent from history, namely that it is only when actuality [Wirklichkeit] has reached maturity that the ideal appears opposite the real and reconstructs this real world, which it has grasped in its substance, in the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its gray in gray, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the gray in gray of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.

Although this easily reads – and is frequently read – as an expression of the impotence of philosophy, political or otherwise, Allegra de Laurentiis reminds us of what all the English translators forget, namely that “sich fertig machen” is reflexive, and that the reflexive “implies both completion and preparedness” – that “sich fertig machen” is, in fact, a common expression simply meaning “to make oneself ready” – and, finally, that to render the term “completed” or “finished” is to run roughshod over Hegel’s Aristotelian concept of actuality, a being-at-work-staying-itself, that can never be once-and-for-all completed or finished. Hegel describes the relationship between the logical and the real-philosophical parts of his system in this way:

If philosophy does not stand above its time in content, it does so in form, because, as the thought and knowledge of that which is the substantial spirit of its time, it makes that spirit its object. Insofar as philosophy is in the spirit of its time, the latter is its determined content in the world, although as knowledge, philosophy is above it, since it places it in the relation of object. But this is in form alone, for philosophy really has no other content.

This is to say that what makes the philosophy of the real scientific in Hegel’s technical sense is the systematically coherent logical form it uncovers in its natural-historical material—and so also displays in its presentation.

The Philosophy of Nature

See also: Naturphilosophie

Trees, such as this Old growth European Beech forest, are treated by Hegel under the heading of Organics, The Plant (§§343–46) in the third part of his Philosophy of Nature.

The philosophy of nature organizes the material of the natural sciences systematically; as part of the philosophy of the real, in no way does it presume to "tell nature what it must be like." Per Kenneth R. Westphal:

Michael John Petry’s massive [1970] three volume edition of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature shows conclusively that Hegel was both broadly and deeply versed in the natural sciences of his day, as well as any nonspecialist possibly could be and far more than his vociferous critics ever were, that Hegel made very few outright errors about contemporaneous science and that those errors usually stem from credible sources.

Introducing Hegel’s philosophy of nature for a 21st-century audience, Dieter Wandschneider observes that "contemporary philosophy of science" has lost sight of "the ontological issue at stake, namely, the question of an intrinsically lawful nature": "Consider, for example, the problem of what constitutes a law of nature. This problem is central to our understanding of nature. Yet philosophy of science has not provided a definitive response to it up to now. Nor can we expect to have such an answer from that quarter in future." It is back to Hegel that Wandschneider would direct philosophers of science for guidance in the philosophy of nature.

The Philosophy of Spirit

Priestess of Delphi (1891) by John Collier, showing the Pythia sitting on a tripod with vapor rising from a crack in the earth beneath her

The German Geist has a wide range of meanings. In its most general Hegelian sense, however, "Geist denotes the human mind and its products, in contrast to nature and also the logical idea." (Some older translations render it as "mind", rather than "spirit.")

As is especially evident in the Anthropology, Hegel's concept of spirit is an appropriation and transformation of the self-referential Aristotelian concept of energeia.

According to Hegel, "the essence of spirit is freedom". The Encyclopedia Philosophy of Spirit charts the progressively determinate stages of this freedom until spirit fulfills the Delphic imperative with which Hegel begins: "Know thyself."

As becomes clear, Hegel's concept of freedom is not (or not merely) the capacity for arbitrary choice, but has as its "core notion" that "something, especially a person, is free if and only if, it is independent and self-determining, not determined by or dependent upon something other than itself." It is, in other words, (at least predominantly, dialectically) an account of what Isaiah Berlin would later term positive liberty.

Subjective Spirit

Standing at the transition from nature to spirit, the role of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit is to analyze "the elements necessary for or presupposed by such relations [of objective spirit], namely, the structures characteristic of and necessary to the individual rational agent" by elaborating "the fundamental nature of the biological/spiritual human individual along with the cognitive and the practical prerequisites of human social interaction."

Of its three parts, Anthropology "deals with 'soul', which is Spirit still mired in nature: all that within us which precedes our self-conscious mind or intellect"; in Phenomenology, Hegel examines the relation between consciousness and its object and the emergence of intersubjective rationality; finally, Psychology, "deals with a great deal that would be categorized as epistemology (or 'theory of knowledge') today. Hegel discusses, among other things, the nature of attention, memory, imagination and judgement".

Throughout this section, but especially in the Anthropology, Hegel appropriates and develops Aristotle's hylomorphic approach to what in modern times is theorized as the mind-body problem: "The solution to the mind–body problem [according to this theory] hinges upon recognizing that mind does not act upon the body as cause of effects but rather acts upon itself as an embodied living subjectivity. As such, mind develops itself, progressively attaining more and more of a self-determined character."

Its final section, Free Spirit, develops the concept of “free will,” which is foundational for Hegel’s philosophy of right.

Objective Spirit

Main article: Elements of the Philosophy of Right

See also: Lectures on the Philosophy of History

In the broadest terms, Hegel’s philosophy of objective spirit “is his social philosophy, his philosophy of how the human spirit objectifies itself in its social and historical activities and productions." Or, put differently, it is an account of the institutionalization of freedom.

This part of Hegel’s philosophy is presented first in his 1817 Encyclopedia (revised 1827 and 1830) and then at greater length in the 1821 Elements of the Philosophy of Right (like the Encyclopedia, intended as a textbook), upon which he also frequently lectured. Its final part, the philosophy of world history, was additionally elaborated in Hegel’s lectures on the subject.

Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right has been controversial from the date of its original publication. It is not, however, a straightforward defense of the Prussian state, as some have alleged, but is rather a defense of "Prussia as it was to have become under [proposed] reform administrations".

The German Recht in Hegel's title does not have an English equivalent (though it does correspond to the Latin ius and the French droit). As a first approximation, Michael Inwood distinguishes three senses:

1. a right, claim or title
2. justice (as in, e.g., 'to administer justice'…but not justice as a virtue…)
3. 'the law' as a principle, or 'the laws' collectively.

Frederick Beiser observes that Hegel’s theory is "his attempt to rehabilitate the natural law tradition while taking into account the criticisms of the historical school" and adds that (contrary to "non-metaphysical" interpretations of Hegel’s philosophy) "without a sound interpretation of Hegel's theory of natural law, we have very little understanding of the very foundation of his social and political thought." Consistent with this, Adriaan T. Peperzak documents Hegel’s arguments against social contract theory and stresses the metaphysical foundations of Hegel’s philosophy of right.

Title page of the 1821 original work.

Observing that "analyzing the structure of Hegel's argument in the Philosophy of Right shows that achieving political autonomy is fundamental to Hegel's analysis of the state and government," Kenneth R. Westphal provides this brief outline:

Hegel divides his exposition into several distinct parts. His introduction sketches an ac­count of the will, freedom, and the nature of right. Part One, "Abstract Right," treats principles governing property, its transfer, and wrongs against property. Part Two, "Morality," treats the rights of moral subjects, responsibility for one's actions, and a priori theories of right. Part Three, "Ethical Life" (Sittlichkeit), analyzes the principles and institutions governing central aspects of rational social life, including the family, civil society, and the state as a whole, includ­ing the government.

According to Hegel’s presentation, the rational state of his time is a constitutional monarchy, the constitution of which "mirrors and at the same time sublates the difference between democracy (rule of the many, who are involved in legislation), aristocracy (rule of the few, who apply, concretize, and execute the laws), and monarchy (rule of the one, who heads and encompasses all power)…[and] Hegel insists on the cooperative and mutually inclusive character of the three powers (§286R)."

The relation of Hegel's philosophy of right to modern liberalism is complex:

he sees its standpoint as expressing something distinctive and valuable about the modem world. But he does regard its standpoint as limited, and for this reason potentially destructive of the very values it most wants to promote. He regards this standpoint as salvageable only when placed in the context of a larger vision, which measures the subjective goals of individuals by a larger objective and collective good, and assigns to moral values a determinate, limited place in the total scheme of things.

The final part of the Philosophy of Objective Spirit is entitled “World History.” In brief:

In agreement with the cultural optimism widely spread in the first half of his century, Hegel argues that this immanent principle [the Stoic logos] produces with logical inevitability an expansion of the species’ capacities for self determination ('freedom') and a deepening of its self understanding ('self-knowing'). Summing up his conception, Hegel writes: ‘World history is progress in the consciousness of freedom — a progress that we must comprehend conceptually.’

It is this internal teleology of spirit that underpins Hegel's famous doctrine of the "cunning of reason," which "sets the passions [of human agents] to work in its service, so that the agents by which it gives itself existence must pay the penalty and suffer the loss." Put another way, "finite individuals act for their own finite ends, but in doing so they unwittingly bring about the realization of the universal. If there is an inherent order in existence, and in all things in existence, that order will tend to triumph regardless of the actions or wishes of finite beings. The community of spirit does not become adequate to its free self-concept in the world without impersonal sacrifice of individuals.

(See also: Legacy, below, for further discussion of the complex legacy of Hegel’s social and political philosophy)

Absolute Spirit

Hegel with his Berlin students
Sketch by Franz Kugler

Hegel's use of the term "absolute" is easily misunderstood. Inwood, however, clarifies: derived from the Latin absolutus, it means "not dependent on, conditional on, relative to or restricted by anything else; self-contained, perfect, complete". For Hegel, this means that absolute knowing can only denote "an 'absolute relation' in which the ground of experience and the experiencing agent are one and the same: the object known is explicitly the subject who knows." That is, the only "thing" (which is really an activity) that is truly absolute is that which is entirely self-conditioned, and according to Hegel, this only occurs when spirit takes itself up as its own object. The final section of his Philosophy of Spirit presents the three modes of such absolute knowing: art, religion, and philosophy.

As Walter Jaeschke puts it,

It is only in this sphere that spirit brings forth a shape – an image of itself, as it were – and relates itself to this shape in the forms of intuition, representation and comprehending thinking. It is here that spirit relates itself to itself and is absolute precisely in its self-relation. It cognizes itself as what it is and it is with itself (bei sich) and free in this cognition. Only with this cognition is the concept of spirit – as the concept of a thinking relation to self – complete.

It is with reference to these modalities of consciousness – intuition, representation, and comprehending thinking – that Hegel distinguishes the three modes of absolute knowing. Frederick Beiser summarizes: "art, religion and philosophy all have the same object, the absolute or truth itself; but they consist in different forms of knowledge of it. Art presents the absolute in the form of immediate intuition (Anschauung); religion presents it in the form of representation (Vorstellung); and philosophy presents it in the form of concepts (Begriffe)."

Rüdiger Bubner additionally clarifies that there is "no hierarchical order governing these standpoints; only an increase in transparency permits distinctions to be drawn between them." Or, rather, what hierarchy there is, is philosophically systematic, not evaluative.

Although Hegel’s discussion of absolute spirit in the Encyclopedia is quite brief, he develops his account at length in lectures on the philosophy of fine art, the philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy.

Philosophy of Art

The ancient Athenian, according to Hegel, apprehends the meaning of Athena Parthenos directly, without reflective judgment, as his own rational essence. (The Varvakeion Athena, National Archaeological Museum of Athens.

Main article: Lectures on Aesthetics

In the Phenomenology, and even in the 1817 edition of the Encyclopedia, Hegel discusses art only as it figures in what he terms the "Art-Religion" of the ancient Greeks. In the 1820's, however, Hegel begins lecturing on the philosophy of art as an explicitly autonomous domain.

Although H.G. Hotho titled his edition of the Lectures Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Hegel directly states that his topic is not "the spacious realm of the beautiful," but "art, or, rather, fine art." He doubles down on this in the next paragraph by explicitly distinguishing his project from the broader philosophical projects pursued under the heading of "aesthetics" by Christian Wolff and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten.

Hegel's philosophy of art "seeks the standard of beauty neither in antecedently given objects nor in the function of structures of aesthetic reception. Instead it recognizes the autonomy of art, making possible an account of the special individuality distinguishing works of aesthetic worth."

Although some critics – most canonically, Benedetto Croce, in 1907 – have attributed to Hegel some form of the thesis that art is "dead," he never said any such thing, nor can such a view be plausibly attributed to him. Indeed, one sober-minded commentator places that debate in perspective with the observation that Hegel’s claim that "art no longer serves our highest aims" is "radical not for the suggestion that art now fails to do so but for the suggestion that it ever did."

According to Hegel, "artistic beauty reveals absolute truth through perception (Werke, XI 151/[LFA] 111). He holds that the best art conveys metaphysical knowl­edge by revealing, through sense perception, what is unconditionally true,” that is, "what his metaphysical theory affirms to be unconditional or absolute." While Hegel "ennobles art insofar as it conveys metaphysical knowledge," "he tempers his assessment in view of his belief that art's sensory media can never adequately convey what completely transcends the contingency of sensation."

That is to say, we are not fully satisfied with art; yet, neither can we, finitely embodied individuals, be fully satisfied – fully know or be with [bei sich sein] ourselves – in the pure universality of logical thought. Hence, according to Hegel, the ongoing need for art as a mode of absolute spirit.

Christianity

Sermon on the Mount, by Carl Bloch, 1877

Early Romantic Writings

Hegel’s earliest writings on Christianity date between 1783 and 1800. He 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. In The Spirit of Christianity, he proposes a sort of resolution by aligning the universality of Kantian moral philosophy with the universality of the teachings of Jesus; in paraphrase: "The moral principle of the Gospel is charity, or love, and love is the beauty of the heart, a spiritual beauty which combines the Greek Soul and Kant's Moral Reason." Although he did not return to this Romantic formulation, the unification of Athens and Jerusalem would remain a preoccupation throughout his life.

Christianity in The Phenomenology of Spirit

Religion is also a major theme throughout the 1907 Phenomenology of Spirit well before it emerges as the explicit topic the penultimate Religion chapter. We see this most directly in the metaphysical “unhappiness” of the Augustinian consciousness in chapter IV and in Hegel’s depiction of the struggle of the Church of the Faithful with Enlightenment philosophes in chapter VI.

Hegel's proper account of Christianity, however, is to be found in the final section of the Phenomenology just prior to the closing chapter, Absolute Knowing. It is presented under the heading The Revelatory Religion [die offenbare Religion]. By means of philosophical exposition of Christian doctrines such as Incarnation and Resurrection, Hegel claims to demonstrate or to make "manifest" the conceptual truth of Christianity, and so to overcome was has only been positively revealed [geöffenbarte] by explication of its underlying, revelatory truth.

The heart of Hegel's interpretation of Christianity can be seen in his interpretation of the Trinity. God the Father must give Himself existence as finitely human Son, the death of whom discloses His essential being as Spirit—and, crucially, according to Hegel, his [Hegel's] own philosophical concept of spirit makes transparent what is only obscurely represented in the Christian concept of the Trinity. And so it makes manifest the philosophical truth of religion, which now is known.

In an essay on the Phenomenology contrasting Kant's rational faith with Hegel's rational religion, George di Giovanni concludes,

just because religion no longer has to carry the explanatory burden that it bore before, it is let free to fulfill its function of expressing and nurturing spirit in its most individual forms.... There is room for faith as well, provided it is clear that it no longer sets itself up in opposition to the concept but assumes more particularized forms. It is faith in the sense of the trust we place in individuals close to us, or in the time and place in which we happen to live.

In other words, according to Hegel's philosophical interpretation, Christianity does not require faith in any doctrine that is not fully justified by reason. What is left, then, is the religious community, free to minister to individual needs, to forgive one another's inevitable failings, and to celebrate the absolute freedom of spirit.

Christianity in the Berlin Lectures

Main article: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion

Hegel's Encyclopedia includes a section on the Revealed Religion, but it is quite short. It is in his Berlin Lectures that we get his next presentation of Christianity, which he variously refers to as the "consummate," "absolute," or "revelatory" religion (all equivalent terms in this context). Transcripts of three of Hegel's four courses have been preserved, and they show him to be continually adjusting his emphases and exposition. The interpretation of Christianity that he advances, however, is still very much that which he presented in the Phenomenology—only now he is able to expound at greater length and with greater clarity upon what he had covered earlier in such a condensed fashion.

Issues of Interpretation

Walter Jaeschke questions whether Luther would have recognized Hegel's claim to Protestantism. For, although Hegel embraces the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers with his concept of spirit, he rejects the core Lutheran doctrines of sola gratia and sola scriptura, and affirms instead as the "fundamental principle" of Protestantism "the obstinacy that does honor to mankind, to refuse to recognize in conviction anything not ratified by thought."

Discussing the "Hegel Renaissance" in late 20th-century Anglo-American philosophy, Frederick Beiser expresses surprise – given today’s highly secular academic culture – at such a surge of interest in Hegel; for, as he writes:

We have to take Hegel at his word when he tells us in his lectures on the philosophy of religion that God is the alpha and omega, the end and centerpoint of philosophy. Of course, Hegel’s God is not the theistic God of orthodox Christianity, and still less the deistic God of the eighteenth-century philosophers. Nevertheless, whatever the precise nature of his God, he still answered to the general concept of the infinite or absolute, and still complied with St. Anselm's classical definition of God as "id quo nihil maius cogitari possit" (that of which nothing greater can be conceived).

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. So it is likely to remain. Neither theistic, nor deistic, Hegel's god can only be articulated in the philosophical terms of the concept of spirit or Hegel's own distinctive logical vocabulary. Nevertheless, Hegel everywhere insists that his is the Christian God.

Legacy

"Right" vs. "Left" Hegelianism

Some historians present of Hegel's influence as divided into two opposing camps. The Right Hegelians, the allegedly direct disciples of Hegel at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, advocated a Protestant 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. Recent studies, however, have questioned this paradigm. No Hegelians of the period ever referred to themselves as "Right Hegelians", which was a term of insult originated by David Strauss, a self-styled Left Hegelian.

The Right Hegelians, in any case, "were quickly forgotten," and "today mainly known only to specialists"; the Left Hegelians, by contrast, "included some of the most important thinkers of the period", and "through their emphasis on practice, some of these thinkers have remained exceedingly influential," primarily though the Marxist tradition.

Marxism

Karl Marx

Among the first to take a critical view of Hegel's system was the 19th-century German group known as the Young Hegelians, which included Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, and their followers. The primary thrust of their criticism is concisely expressed in the eleventh of Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach" from his 1845 German Ideology: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Although the influence of Hegel is sometimes depicted as mostly limited to the youthful Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, the evidence of Hegel's influence on the structure of Capital is clearly displayed in draft notebooks from 1857–58 published as the Grundrisse.

In the 20th century, this interpretation was further developed in the work of Frankfurt School critical theorists. This was due to (a) the rediscovery and re-evaluation of Hegel as a possible philosophical progenitor of Marxism by philosophically oriented Marxists; (b) a resurgence of Hegel's historical perspective; and (c) an increasing recognition of the importance of his dialectical method. György Lukács' History and Class Consciousness (1923), in particular, helped to reintroduce Hegel into the Marxist canon. This sparked a renewed interest in Hegel reflected in the work of Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Raya Dunayevskaya, Alexandre Kojève, and Gotthard Günther among others.

Allegations of Authoritarianism

Karl Popper makes the claim in the second volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) 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. Kaufmann and Shlomo Avineri have criticized Popper's theories about Hegel.

According to Benedetto Croce, the Italian Fascist Giovanni Gentile "holds the honor of having been the most rigorous neo-Hegelian in the entire history of Western philosophy and the dishonor of having been the official philosopher of Fascism in Italy".

Isaiah Berlin listed Hegel as one of the six architects of modern authoritarianism who undermined liberal democracy, along with Rousseau, Claude Adrien Helvétius, Fichte, Saint-Simon, and Joseph de Maistre.

Thesis–Antithesis–Synthesis

Further information: Hegelian dialectic

This terminology, largely developed earlier by Fichte, was spread by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus in accounts of Hegel's philosophy. Yet, it is now widely agreed that explaining Hegel's philosophy in terms of thesis–antithesis–synthesis is inaccurate.

According to Walter Kaufmann:

Fichte introduced into German philosophy the three-step of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, using these three terms. Schelling took up this terminology. Hegel did not. He never once used these three terms together to designate three stages in an argument or account in any of his books. And they do not help us understand his Phenomenology, his Logic, or his philosophy of history; they impede any open-minded comprehension of what he does by forcing it into a scheme which was available to him and which he deliberately spurned [...] The mechanical formalism [...] Hegel derides expressly and at some length in the preface to the Phenomenology.

Nevertheless, this interpretation survives in a number of introductory works.

American Pragmatism

Richard J. Bernstein, known for his work on Hegel and American Pragmatism.

As documented by Richard J. Bernstein, the influence of Hegel on American Pragmatism can be divided into three moments: "the latter part of the nineteenth century, the mid-twentieth century, and the present time." The first is to be found in early issues of The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (founded 1867). The second is evident in the acknowledged influence upon major figures including John Dewey, Charles Pierce, and William James.

As Dewey describes the attraction, "There were, however, also 'subjective' reasons for the appeal that Hegel's thought made to me; it supplied a demand for unification that was doubtless an intense emotional craving, and yet was a hunger that only an intellectualized subject-matter could satisfy."

Two American philosophers, John McDowell and Robert Brandom (sometimes referred to as the "Pittsburgh Hegelians"), constitute, per Bernstein, the third moment of Hegel’s influence on pragmatism. However, while openly acknowledging the influence, neither claims to explicate Hegel's views according to his own self-understanding. In addition, each is avowedly influenced by Wilfred Sellars. Their readings are one of several "non-metaphysical" readings of Hegel.

Non-Metaphysical Interpretations

Beginning in the 1960s, Anglo-American Hegel scholarship has challenged the traditional interpretation of Hegel as offering a metaphysical system: this has also been the approach of Z. A. Pelczynski and Shlomo Avineri. This view, sometimes referred to as the "non-metaphysical option", has influenced many major English-language studies of Hegel.

The bust of G.F.W. Hegel by Gustav Blöser (1872) at Hegelplatz (Dorotheenstraße) in Berlin-Mitte, Berlin (Germany).

Writing in 2005 for an Anglophone audience, Frederick Beiser states that the status of Hegel's metaphysics is "probably the most disputed question in Hegel scholarship." Some scholars favor a religious interpretation of Hegel's metaphysics as an attempt to justify Christian beliefs through reason. Against this, Beiser repeatedly stresses the Aristotelian character of Hegel's metaphysical commitments.

Other scholars have advanced a non-metaphysical approach to Hegel that interprets his philosophy as a theory of categories, a neo-Kantian epistemology, hermeneutics, or even as anti-Christian humanism.

If Hegel's philosophy is metaphysics, Beiser states that these philosophers believe it is "doomed to obsolescence" as a "bankrupt enterprise" now that Kant has shown the impossibility of determining unconditioned knowledge through pure reason in his Critique.

Yet, since then, the most prominent non-metaphysical interpreter, Robert B. Pippin, has recanted his earlier position, most notably with the 2019 publication of Hegel's Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in “The Science of Logic”. Even before this, introducing a collection of essays from the 2014 conference of the Hegel Society of America, Allegra de Laurentiis reports that everyone presenting on the topic of “Hegel Without Metaphysics?” affirmed the metaphysical dimension of Hegel's thought.

As Hegel himself wrote, even before the publication of the Logic:

Think? Abstractly? — Sauve qui peut! Let those who can save themselves! Even now I can hear a traitor, bought by the enemy, exclaim these words, denouncing this essay because it will plainly deal with metaphysics. For metaphysics is a word, no less than abstract, and almost thinking as well, from which everybody more or less runs away as from a man who has caught the plague.

— Who Thinks Abstractly? (c. 1808), Hegel, translated by Walter Kaufmann, 1966

What remains in dispute, however, is how to properly characterize Hegel's (avowedly post-Kantian) metaphysical commitments. As Hegel himself remarks in passing, "humans are thinking beings, and born metaphysicians. All that matters here is whether the metaphysics that is employed is of the right kind".

Publications and Other Writings

See also: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel bibliography

Brackets indicate title supplied by editor; published articles are in quotes; book titles are italicized.

Bern, 1793–96

• 1793–94: [Fragments on Folk Religion and Christianity]
• 1795–96: [The Positivity of the Christian Religion]
• 1796–97: [The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism] (authorship disputed)

Frankfurt am Main, 1797–1800

• 1797–98: [Drafts on Religion and Love]
• 1798: Confidential Letters on the prior constitutional relations of the Wadtlandes (Pays de Vaud) to the City of Bern. A complete Disclosure of the previous Oligarchy of the Bern Estates. Translated from the French of a deceased Swiss [Jean Jacques Cart], with Commentary. Frankfurt am Main, Jäger. (Hegel’s translation is published anonymously)
• 1798–1800: [The Spirit of Christianty and its Fate]
• 1800–02: The Constitution of Germany (draft)

Jena, 1801–07

• 1801: De orbitis planetarum; ‘The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy’
• 1802: ‘On the Essence of Philosophical Critique in general and its relation to the present state of Philosophy in particular’ (Introduction to the Critical Journal of Philosophy, edited by Schelling and Hegel)
• 1802: ‘How Commonsense takes Philosophy, Illustrated by the Works of Mr. Krug’
• 1802 ‘The Relation of Scepticism to Philosophy. Presentation of its various Modifications and Comparison of the latest with the ancient’
• 1802: ‘Faith and Knowledge, or the Reflective Philosophy of Subjectivity in the Completeness of its forms as Kantian, Jacobian and Fichtean Philosophy’
• 1803: ‘On the Scientific Approaches to Natural Law, its Role within Practical Philosophy and its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law’
• 1807: The Phenomenology of Spirit

Bamberg, 1807–08

• 1807: ‘Preface: On Scientific Cognition’ (Preface to his Philosophical System, published with the Phenomenology)

Nürnberg, 1808–16

• 1808–16: [Philosophical Propaedeutic]

Heidelberg, 1816–18

• 1812–13: Science of Logic, Part 1 (Books 1, 2)
• 1816: Science of Logic, Part 2 (Book 3)
• 1817: ‘Review of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Works, Volume Three’
• 1817: ‘Assessment of the Proceedings of Estates Assembly of the Duchy of Württemberg in 1815 and 1816’
• 1817: Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, 1st edition

Berlin, 1818–31

• 1820: The Philosophy of Right, or Natural Law and Political Science in Outline
• 1827: Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, 2nd rev. edn.
• 1831: Science of Logic, 2nd edn, with extensive revisions to Book 1 (published in 1832)
• 1831: Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, 3rd rev. edn

Berlin Lecture Series

• Logic 1818–31: annually
• Philosophy of Nature: 1819–20, 1821–22, 1823–24, 1825–26, 1828, 1830
• Philosophy of Subjective Spirit: 1820, 1822, 1825, 1827–28, 1829–30
• Philosophy of Right: 1818–19, 1819–20, 1821–22, 1822–23, 1824–25, 1831
• Philosophy of World History: 1822–23, 1824–25, 1826–27, 1828–29, 1830–21
• Philosophy of Art: 1820–21, 1823, 1826, 1828–29
• Philosophy of Religion: 1821, 1824, 1827, 1831
• History of Philosophy: 1819, 1820–21, 1823–24, 1825–26, 1827–28, 1829–30, 1831

References

Primary Sources

See also: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel bibliography

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• Kroner, Richard (1971). "Introduction". Early Theological Writings. University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Longuenesse, Béatrice (2007). Hegel's Critique of Metaphysics. Cambridge University Press.
• Magee, Glenn Alexander (2001). Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition. Cornell University Press.
• Magee, Glenn Alexander (2011). The Hegel Dictionary. Continuum.
• Marx, Karl (1978). "Theses On Feuerback". In Robert C. Tucker (ed.). Marx-Engles Reader (2nd ed.). Norton.
• Marx, Karl (1993). Grundrisse. ‎ Penguin Classics.
• Peperzak, Adriaan T. (2001). Modern Freedom: Hegel's Legal, Moral, and Political Philosophy. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• Pinkard, Terry (2000). Hegel – A Biography. Cambridge University Press.
• Pippin, Robert (2008). "The Absence of Aesthetics in Hegel's Aesthetics". In Frederick C. Beiser (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.
• Popper, Karl (2011). The Open Society And Its Enemies. Routledge.
• Robinson, Paul (1990). The Freudian Left: Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim, Herbert Marcuse. Cornell University Press.
• Rockmore, Tom (2013). "Feuerbach, Bauer, Marx, and Marxisms". In Allegra de Laurentiis and Jeffrey Edwards (ed.). The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel. Bloomsbury Academic.
• Rutter, Benjamin (2010). Hegel on the Modern Arts. Cambridge University Press.
• Stahl, Titus (2021), Georg [György] Lukács, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 ed.)
• Wandschneider, Dieter (2013). "Philosophy of Nature". In Allegra de Laurentiis and Jeffrey Edwards (ed.). The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel. Bloomsbury Academic.
• Wells, John C. (2008). Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (3rd ed.). Routledge.
• Westphal, Kenneth (2013). "Objective Spirit: Right, Morality, Ethical Life and World History". In Allegra de Laurentiis and Jeffrey Edwards (ed.). The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel. Bloomsbury Academic.
• Westphal, Kenneth (2008). "Philosophizing about Nature: Hegel's Philosophical Project". In Frederick C. Beiser (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.
• Westphal, Kenneth (1993). "The basic context and structure of Hegel's Philosophy of Right". In Frederick C. Beiser (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Cambridge University Press.
• Wicks, Robert (1993). "Hegel's Aesthetics: An Overview". In Frederick C. Beiser (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Cambridge University Press.
• Wood, Allen W. (1991). "Editor's Introduction". In H.B. Nisbet (ed.). Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Cambridge University Press.
• "Hegel". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
• "He-gel: Rechtschreibung, Bedeutung, Definitionn". Duden.

Further reading

• Beiser, Frederick C. (ed.), 1993. The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-38711-6.
• Beiser, Frederick C., 2005. Hegel. New York: Routledge.
• Findlay, J. N., 1958. Hegel: A Re-examination. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-519879-4
• Harris, H. S., 1995. Hegel: Phenomenology and System. Indianapolis: Hackett.
• Inwood, M. J., 1983. Hegel—The Arguments of the Philosophers. London & New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul
• Kainz, Howard P., 1996. G. W. F. Hegel. Athens: Ohio University Press. ISBN 0-8214-1231-0.
• Losurdo, Domenico, 2004. Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns. Duke University Press Books
• Maker, William, 1994. Philosophy Without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel. State University of New York Press. ISBN 0-7914-2100-7.
• Mueller, Gustav Emil, 1968. Hegel: the man, his vision, and work. New York: Pageant Press.
• Pinkard, Terry, 1988. Hegel's Dialectic: The Explanation of Possibility. Temple University Press
• Pinkard, Terry, 1994. Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Pippin, Robert B., 1989. Hegel's Idealism: the Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-37923-7.
• Plant, Raymond, 1983. Hegel: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell
• Redding, Paul (13 February 1997). "Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Rockmore, Tom (2003). Before and After Hegel: A Historical Introduction to Hegel's Thought. Hackett Publishing. ISBN 0872206475. Hegel follows Kant ... in limiting claims to know to the empirically real. In short, he adopts a view very similar to Kant's empirical realism.
• Rosen, Stanley, 2000. G.W.F Hegel: Introduction To Science Of Wisdom, (Carthage Reprint) St. Augustines Press; 1 edition ISBN 978-1-890318-48-2
• Sarlemijn, Andries (1975). Hegel's Dialectic. D. Reidel Publishing Company. ISBN 9027704813.
• Solomon, Robert, 1983. In the Spirit of Hegel, Oxford: Oxford University Press
• Stewart, Jon, ed., 1996. The Hegel Myths and Legends. Northwestern University Press.
• Stace, W. T., 1955. The Philosophy of Hegel. New York: Dover.
• Taylor, Charles, 1975. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29199-2.

External links

Societies

• The Hegel Society of America
• The Hegel Society of Great Britain
• Hegel-Archiv

Audio and Video

• Works by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Presentation by Terry Pinkard on Hegel: A Biography, 10 May 2000

Hegel texts online

• Works by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel at Internet Archive
• Scans of all (original, German) books from Hegel (all editions) between 1807 and 1850 as PDFs at hegel.net
• Hegel by HyperText, reference archive on Marxists.org

Other Resources

• Andrew Chitty's (University of Sussex) Hegel Bibliography