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Unit 10: George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Hegel’s father died in 1799. His inheritance was modest. He gave up tutoring and took to writing. Notes
He published a book differentiating the philosophies of Fichte and Schelling. In collaboration with
Schelling, he edited the Journal fur Philosophie. His long work, Science of Logic in three volumes,
appeared in 1812, 1813 and 1816. By this time he became quite well-known, and in 1816 he was
invited to take up the post of professor of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. Here he
wrote the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences.

Hegel’s well-known Phenomenology of Mind appeared in 1807. He was a university
lecturer at Jena from 1801 to 1807. After working for a year as a newspaper editor in
Bamberg, he moved to Nuremberg as headmaster of a high school in 1808, and
continued in this position till 1816.

By this time, Hegel became quite famous, and the Prussian minister of education offered him the
prestigious chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, succeeding Fichte. Berlin was the
intellectual centre of Germany, and Hegel accepted the offer and taught at Berlin from 1818 till his
death in 1831. This period was the most eventful in his life. He wrote his famous work Philosophy
of Right, and lectured on the philosophy of history, religion, aesthetics and the history of philosophy.
In all these diverse areas, he covered many aspects of political theory.
Hegel was the founder of modern idealism and the greatest influence in the first half of the
eighteenth century, when the entire academic community in Germany was divided between
Hegelians, the Left Hegelians and the Right Hegelians. He formulated the theories of dialectic and
of self-realization. He gave a new theory of history, which, according to him, was the human spirit
writ large, the “march of reason in the world”. He was critical of purely reflective knowledge, as
“the owl of Minerva spreads its wing only at the gathering of the dusk”. Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right published in 1821 dealt with key issues of law, politics and morality, and made an important
distinction between the state and civil society.
Towards the end of his life, Hegel started attracting large audiences from the entire German-
speaking world. It was his disciples who published several of his lecture notes after Hegel’s death.
Some of Hegel’s other well-known works include Lectures in the Philosophy of History, Lecture on
Aesthetics, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and Lectures on the History of Philosophy. In 1830, in
recognition of his works, Hegel was elected rector of the university. The following year, he suddenly
died on November 14, at the age of 61.

10.2 Importance of Reason

Hegel was critical of Kant’s handling of reason while dealing with the challenge of empiricism. If
things in themselves were beyond the scrutiny of reason, then reason remained merely subjective,
without control over objective reality, leading to an unacceptable division of the world between
subjectivity and objectivity. The relation between subject and object was a complex but interrelated
one, with unity of the opposite subjects or matters both in theory and practice leading to praxis.
This conflict was of crucial importance to Hegel, as his seminal contribution of alienation originated
with this formulation. The alienation of mind originated when the objective factors which were
originally produced by human labour and knowledge became detached and unrecognizable to
man. In such a situation, theory did not reflect reality, and truth had no meaning in the real world.
As a result, human frustration and helplessness increased. To end this separateness in all its
manifestations, the entire framework of enquiry was brought within the ambit of reason.
Separateness had to be ended by a theory of unity of totality in philosophy.

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