Hegel - Biography
Biography
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, who became one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century.[1]
Hegel was born in Stuttgart on August 27, 1770, the son of a revenue officer with the civil service. He was brought up in an atmosphere of Protestant Pietism and became thoroughly acquainted with the Greek and Roman classics while studying at the Stuttgart gymnasium (preparatory school). Encouraged by his father to become a clergyman, Hegel entered the seminary at the University of Tübingen in 1788. There he developed friendships with the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling.
Having completed a course of study in philosophy and theology and having decided not to enter the ministry, Hegel became (1793) a private tutor in Bern, Switzerland.
At this early age, 23, Hegel is already poking holes in the cold rationalism of the Enlightenment and in the dusty creeds of the church.
In 1797, he assumed a similar position in Frankfurt. Two years later his father died, leaving a financial legacy that was sufficient to free him from tutoring. His intellectual approach to the religion mirrors my early experience. His focus is reconciliation, which occurs through love. At this stage, he is romantic, almost mystical. Dead religion bothered Hegel, and freedom excited him. He did consider Jesus in this period, but wanted to recover the subjectivity that Jesus exhibited, recovering a sense of the passion and liveliness of the moment. Kierkegaard was also concern with how the state-run, state-endorsed churches focused upon external observance and were afraid of the passion of the moment. Earlier, in England, John Wesley was also concerned with the state church of his day as being wrapped up in ceremony and ritual instead of having a lively faith. It almost seems as if boredom is the heresy. Hegel called it positive religion that focused upon externals demands rather than the liveliness of subjectivity. Kant was a representative of such positivity in that Jesus models the categorical imperative and duty and obedience. Although he had a place for wonderment, he set aside quickly. The warm spot in Kant is that he asked the questions what can I know (Critique of Pure Reason), what ought I to do (Critique of Practical Reason), and in what may I hope (Religion and immortality). The heartbeat of religion is not bureaucracy and liveliness cannot be legislated. Positive religion is homework. Too many churches feel like funeral homes that will not admit something has died. I have always looked with fascination upon those who can give themselves so fully in worship and in music in genuine devotion. Hegel will call it the beautiful soul. I envy that sometimes. Something inside me hold back. I must keep probing doubt and certainty. Am I built to wrestle rather than swoon? The faith I do have keeps questioning. Hegel started annoyed, and I suspect I unite with him in that. Is emotion one path to God? That type of faith has the fireworks. My intellectual is full of curiosity, but I like to think it has led to a long, steady lantern of light.
I have joked with people that the most religious feeling I have had was when I was with my two sons at a Paul McCartney concert in Indianapolis, Indiana. And there was just something almost spiritual about people from so many different generations. But you could have, like in that case, in our case even, it was two generations, but I saw grandparents there with their grandkids, and there was just something deeply religious about how Paul McCartney's music could unite people. And that was a, I would not say necessarily mystical, but it certainly was a heightened feeling that I do not think I have ever even had in the church or in religion.
In 1801, Hegel went to the University of Jena, where he studied, wrote, and eventually became a lecturer. At Jena, he completed The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807; trans. 1910), one of his most important works. For a whole week in October 1806, Hegel went around devastated Jena carrying in his coat pocket German philosophy. They contained the last part of the “Phenomenology of Spirit,” completed in unusual haste during a restless night by a tormented author not only disturbed by the political events of the time but also pressed by a very impatient publisher. The next day, as usual with lightning speed, Napoleon fought and won the battle for Jena. And Hegel then saw “the emperor—this world soul … riding out through the city to reconnoiter: it is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, here concentrated at one point, sitting on a horse, surmounting and ruling the world.” But Hegel himself had been plundered, and it was only some days later that he was able to send his manuscript to the publisher in Bamberg.
He remained at Jena until October 1806, when the French took the city and he was forced to flee. Reconciliation remans the theme, but love is elevated to the messy dialectic of reason. Hegel is chasing a longing for wholeness, discovering that Truth, Goodness, and Beauty are magnets that attract us toward certain ideas and behaviors. Such reconciliation is never finished because we have not finished healing yet.
Having exhausted the legacy left him by his father, Hegel became editor of the Bamberger Zeitung in Bavaria. Bamberg was an important publishing center at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Up to then he had tried in vain to get a full professorship in Heidelberg, Erlangen and Berlin. He was in fact appointed as extraordinary professor at Jena in 1805, after asking for Goethe’s support in a letter written in 1804, in which he described himself as “the eldest of the non-salaried teachers of philosophy” in the university. After the battle, however, conditions in Jena and at the university had become unpleasant. So, Hegel was extremely glad to be able to take over the vacant post of editor of the Bamberger Zeitung. But not for long. He was soon longing to be released from the “newspaper-galley,” and he jumped at once at the offer of a post much more in accord with his philosophical bent.
In 1808, he moved to Nürnberg, where he served for eight years as headmaster of a Gymnasium. He met the poet Holderlin here, and he never lost the romance and emotion exhibited in that poetry. He would learn Spinoza here, and logic would become a keen interest of his, and gave him a brief flirtation with pantheism. He would meet Nanette Shelling, his first love. She was intellectually sharp, the type who could quote Kant at a dinner party and make people laugh with the reference. He would write romantic letters to her. She would die in childbirth in 1810. During the Nürnberg years Hegel met and married Marie von Tucher in 1811. Three children were born to the Hegels, a daughter, who died soon after birth, and two sons, Karl and Immanuel. Before his marriage, Hegel had fathered an illegitimate son, Ludwig, who eventually came to live with the Hegels. She was a charming woman of 20 and they would have a happy marriage.
While at Nürnberg, Hegel published over a period of several years The Science of Logic (1812, 1813, 1816; trans. 1929). It was a propaedeutic for the pupils at the gymnasium—on whom he made considerable demands. Where the phenomenology stops, the science of logic begins. Phenomenology of Spirit ends with absolute knowledge, then Logic picks up by mapping out pure thought.
In 1816, Hegel received the long-desired call: he accepted a professorship in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. At forty-six he was now teaching for the first time as full professor, well equipped in every way, able to present his ideas in a comprehensive, precisely formulated system. Soon after, he published in summary form a systematic statement of his entire philosophy entitled Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817; trans. 1959). Heidelberg had become too narrow for him, and amid revolts in the universities by student fraternities, gymnasts and others intoxicated by the idea of freedom.
In 1818, Hegel came to occupy Fichte’s professorial chair, invited to teach at the University of Berlin, where he was to remain. In his inaugural lecture, in a humble and almost prayer-like statement:
I am permitted to wish and hope, that I shall succeed in winning and deserving your confidence on the path which we shall tread. To start with, however, I may claim no more of you. In this branch of study, faith and reason, confidence and faith in yourselves, the prime precondition for the study of philosophy is courage for truth and faith in the power of spirit. Humanity is meant to honor itself and to deem itself worthy of the very highest.
For all his system-building, Hegel still wants permission. Like he is saying: this path is dark but walk it with me. And notice—he does not ask for belief in God up front. He asks for belief in you. Which, in his mind, is the same thing. Courage for truth. Not the truth of dogma—the truth that you can bear it. It is a strange kind of humility: I am showing you everything, but only if you are brave enough to look. So, Hegel was invited by Prussia’s first Kultusminister, Altenstein, to that rising state, devoted alike to military and educational pursuits: to the University of Berlin, founded in 1810 within the framework of Humboldt’s educational reforms (other names associated with the post include Schleiermacher, Niebuhr, F. A. Wolf, Savigny, Fichte). His wishes and hopes were soon abundantly fulfilled. At an early stage, he was not only professor but also head of a school, admired and surrounded by many supporters; he had considerable influence in appointments to positions of state and was able to make several journeys abroad. At the same time, he had many opportunities quietly to expand his system on all sides. The foundation had been laid down, the total plan worked out, in the Encyclopaedia.
Hegel recovered some of the interests of his youth in the 1820s, including the lectures on the philosophy of art, religion, world history, and the history of philosophy, all of which were published in the year after his death. In his youth, he wrote of history and theology, and his final years he lectured on both. In the intervening years Christ was hardly mentioned.
A brief side note is appropriate here. People were squeezing into auditoriums, servants included, to hear him talk about history like it was happening right now. He would walk in; they would stand up. Not because he demanded it—just because it felt necessary. And you would hear him say things like the rational is the real in this calm Swabian drone, and somehow the room felt bigger. He was not charismatic like a preacher. But he was intimate. Like your grandfather reading the newspaper aloud and somehow explaining the universe.
The last full-length work published by Hegel was The Philosophy of Right (1821; trans. 1896).
He proceeds in his lectures by way of philosophy of world history, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion and finally philosophy of philosophy (history of philosophy).
In 1830, on his 60th birthday, he had received from his pupils a specially minted medallion on whose obverse was depicted his own image and whose reverse showed a genius sitting between a scholar stationed before an owl and a female figure with the cross. And this was meant to represent Hegel mediating between philosophy and theology, between a philosophy of reason and a theology of the cross. This little story, which I did not know of until reading Hans Kung, summarizes what the philosophy of Hegel was about: Hegel perched between the owl—his cold reason—and the woman with the cross—raw suffering made divine. He is not choosing. He is the hinge. Genius. I think that is why, for all his dryness, people still love him—he did not want victory; he wanted witness. And now his students give him metal proof.
Right to the very end, Hegel did not wish to commit himself; he intended to do justice to both forces, to both Christianity and his metaphysics, to both the gospel and speculative reasoning. It was not because he lacked courage. He was both highly speculative but grounded himself in a deep respect for both faith and thought. He never let one swallow the other. That is why he endures. Not as a hero. Just as a man who refused to let God be simple. He could even write to a friend, include us in your prayer, and to another he said, direct your soul to think on God, and to receive strength and comfort in your heart from the higher love. For all the grand systems, in the end he still turned to prayer and quiet words about the soul. The philosopher was also just a man who wanted mercy—like the rest of us. That is the final reconciliation. Was not Hegel marked by a pathos to know the real God? Did he not wage an impressively truthful struggle through an orthodoxy gone rigid on the one side and enlightenment and Kantian moralism on the other, pressing forward to a deeper understanding of Christianity, going from an enlightenment style to a speculative religiosity, and hence from a rejection of Jesus via a more detached indifference into a thinking affirmation of Jesus Christ. Under that thick Swabian exterior was this restless longing for the living God, not the frozen icon or the pocket-watch moralist. Early on he flirted with outright dismissal—Jesus as myth, the church as relic—but never comfortably. It kept gnawing at him. And what he did, really, was not abandon orthodoxy so much as pry it open like a locked door, refusing to trade the gospels for Kant's icy duty or the Enlightenment's tidy scissors. So, he moved—step by stumbling step—from critique to a thinking faith. Where Jesus is not an exception to reason but its scandalous center. The resurrection is not a miracle you excuse; it is the moment thought discovers it has a heart.
The time, however, that lay ahead of Hegel scarcely looked reasonable. With the revolutions in France, Belgium and Poland, and the disturbances in Germany in 1830, it seemed as if the tempestuous years of the turn of the century had returned. Hegel had not reckoned with this. “What had never happened to him in forty years occurred now for the first time,” writes the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig: “He had to deny reality the clear and definite answer of spirit to its unspoken question. The man who—as ‘secretary of the world spirit’—had followed with understanding and approval, step by step, the course of the revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the restoration of the only community of states, averted his gaze from the new ‘jolt’ produced by history; he heard it, but could not see it, could not interpret it.”
But, while the future was taking this unexpected new turn in history, Hegel’s end was approaching closer than he or anyone else suspected. Cholera had broken out in Germany in the summer of 1831 but then declined. On November 10, he opened the lectures of the new term on philosophy of right and history of philosophy. Three days later, he was taken ill, and on the following afternoon he passed away painlessly in a gentle sleep. The cause of death, according to the doctors, was “cholera in its most intense form.” But he died, according to his wife, like a saint. It was the slumber crossing of a transfigured person. The last work on his desk, intended for publication, remained a torso: its title was “Proofs of God’s Existence.” Hegel, then, without having wrestled with death, without having seen the infirmities of old age, or witnessed the downturn in his fame, passed away peacefully at the peak of his life, without having seen the discomforts of age and declining fame, without having suspected the failure of his school. “Nothing about him was outmoded when he died,” says his distinguished interpreter Kuno Fischer. The news of Hegel’s death created immense surprise in Berlin. The funeral procession was enormous. As he had wanted, Hegel was buried next to Fichte. Germany had lost its leading philosopher, one of its great philosophers, overnight. He died in Berlin on November 13, 1831, during a cholera epidemic. At the time of Hegel's death, he was the most prominent philosopher in Germany. His views were widely taught, and his students were highly regarded. At his graveside, Philip Marheinke said, in company with our Redeemer, whose name he constantly glorified in all he thought and did, in whose divine teaching he recognized the deepest essence of the human spirit, and who, as the Son of God, gave himself into suffering and death in order to return eternally as spirit to his community, he too has now returned to his true home, and has penetrated through death to resurrection and glory. Friedrich Schleiermacher, himself a well-loved professor who would die in three years, was present. He wrote something honest—he admired Hegel's intellect but worried the system had swallowed up the personal side of faith, the sheer wonder. He called him the greatest systematizer since Aquinas, then added quietly that the Cross, in Hegel, has become a logical necessity rather than a gift. Not mean, just... different temperaments. Schleiermacher wanted God felt in your chest. Hegel wanted God thought through your skull. So, at the grave he bowed his head, respected the silence, and went home still uneasy. They never really got each other. An age—Goethe was to die a few months later—was ending.
Several sets of his lecture notes, supplemented by students' notes, were published after his death. Published lectures include The Philosophy of Fine Art (1835-38; trans. 1920), Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1833-36; trans. 1892-96), Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1832; trans. 1895), and Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837; trans. 1858).
His followers soon divided into right-wing and left-wing Hegelians. Theologically and politically, the right-wing Hegelians offered a conservative interpretation of his work. They emphasized the compatibility between Hegel's philosophy and Christianity. Politically, they were orthodox. The left-wing Hegelians eventually moved to an atheistic position. In politics, many of them became revolutionaries. This historically important left-wing group included Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Marx. Engels and Marx were particularly influenced by Hegel's idea that history moves dialectically, but they replaced Hegel's philosophical idealism with materialism. Hegel's metaphysical idealism had a strong impact on 19th-century and early 20th-century British philosophy, notably that of Francis Herbert Bradley, and on such American philosophers as Josiah Royce, and on Italian philosophy through Benedetto Croce. Hegel also influenced existentialism through the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Phenomenology has been influenced by Hegel's ideas on consciousness. The extensive and diverse impact of Hegel's ideas on subsequent philosophy is evidence of the remarkable range and the extraordinary depth of his thought.
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