Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | Biography

The German philosopher and educator Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel took all knowledge as his domain and made original contributions to the understanding of history, law, logic, art, religion, and philosophy. Living in a time of geniuses and revolutions, Hegel claimed his own work to be not so much a revolution as the consummation of human development.

Hegel was born in Stuttgart on August 27, 1770, the son of an official serving the Duke of Württemberg. Urged by his Pietist father to enter the clergy, he registered in the Tübingen Lutheran seminary in 1788. A fair student, Hegel generally preferred the conviviality of cafés and country walks to scholarly asceticism. His love of wine and company, his passion for the secular writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and his interest in practical political matters prevailed over the stern demands of a religious calling. Nevertheless, he studied philosophy for two years and theology for three, completing his theological examination in 1793.

At the seminary Hegel read deeply in German poetry and Greek literature, in the company of Friedrich Hölderlin, the poet, and Schelling, who was to reach early eminence as a philosopher of romanticism. The three friends professed ardent sympathy with the French Revolution and took for their motto "Freedom and Reason."

Hegel was a private tutor in Berne where he learned about the Bernese political situation. His first published work, in 1798, consisted of notes and his translation of and exiled lawyer's letters criticizing the city's oligarchy.

In 1797 Hegel became a private tutor in Frankfurt. His employer owned a fine library and allowed him time to be with friends, especially Hölderlin. Most importantly, he had time to write. Among his many concerns were the "conditions of profit and property" in England, the history of Christianity, love, the Prussian penal code, and theology.

Hegel's father died in January 1799, leaving a legacy that enabled Hegel to leave tutoring and prepare seriously for an academic career. In 1801 he lived with Schelling, already a professor, at the great University of Jena. There he worked fervently; he wrote a detailed, critical study of the Constitution of the German Empire and completed his first published book The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy (1801). Challenging the popular view that Fichte and Schelling were master and disciple, Hegel brought out their obscured but basic differences. Recognizing that their philosophies were irreconcilable, Hegel resolved to work out a complete system that would account for the common aim and many differences of previous philosophies. Hegel's would have to be the system of all philosophy.

In 1801 Hegel also submitted a Latin dissertation on the orbits of the planets and consequently was granted the right to teach in any German university (the venia legendi). He began to give lectures at Jena and eventually became one of the better-known lecturers. In addition to teaching and writing, Hegel worked with Schelling to found and edit the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie (1802-1803), to which he contributed several articles and reviews.

While at Jena the idea of a wholly reconciling philosophy was gestating in Hegel's mind. It came to fruition in 1806 as the dense but exciting work Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirit), which compares the dialectical stages of historical development with the individual's growth with regard to a concept that Hegel called Spirit. The entire book was written in haste and was completed on October 13, the very day Napoleon and his troops occupied Jena. Later, Hegel saw a parallel between Napoleon as an individual and the historical context he occupied.

Since the university was in disarray and his own financial situation desperate, Hegel arranged to become editor of the Bamberger Zeitung. He held this position for a year, and on November 15, 1808, thanks once again to Niethammer, he was appointed headmaster of the gymnasium, or secondary school, at Nuremberg. For eight years Hegel taught philosophy and occasionally Greek literature and calculus. In 1811 Hegel married Marie von Tucher. He had one son previously and two sons, Karl and Immanuel, by her. While at Nuremberg, Hegel completed his second major work, Wissenschaft der Logik ( Science of Logic). This difficult book presents the science of thought, purified of all reference to experience, to acts, or to facts of nature.

In 1816 Hegel was called to the University of Heidelberg. He published The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817), a summary of his system later revised considerably in 1827 and again in 1830. The book began with a section on logic, followed by "the philosophy of nature" and "the philosophy of spirit," and concluded with the self-knowledge (or freedom) vouchsafed only to philosophy. Since philosophy includes every kind of knowledge, true freedom is not separation but the most complete relatedness. In 1817 Hegel was granted a professorship at Berlin.

By this time Hegel's enthusiasm for the French Revolution had waned, and he published his major political work. Here he insisted, "Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thought." Published in 1821, the book as translated by T. M. Knox is entitled Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1952).

Hegel did not write a book about his ideas concerning "absolute Spirit," which develops through three kinds of activity: art, religion, and philosophy. But students, after his death, compiled and published their lecture notes. Hegel studied history as the development of human freedom, rather than as a series of events.

Hegel became rector of the university in 1830. The next year he wrote a critical study of the situation in England, On the English Reform Bill. For the fall semester of 1831, he announced two lecture courses. He gave his first lectures on November 10; on November 14 Hegel succumbed to cholera, then epidemic in Europe.

Hegel's influence on subsequent generations is incalculable. Perhaps, the history of European thought since Hegel has been a series of revolts against his ideas. Many who are sympathetic to his achievement regard his legacy as the "crisis of philosophy" which so preoccupies philosophers a century later.