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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ( ; 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, philosophy of law, 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 heavily influenced by the French and American revolutions, as well the Napoleonic wars. He attended the Tubinger Stift seminary with Friedrich Holderlin and Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, both of whom exerted a strong influence on him philosophically. After receiving his PhD in 1800, he worked as a lecturer at the University of Jena, where he also wrote and published his most famous work, Phenomenology of Spirit. However, after Napoleon defeated the Prussian army in the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt in 1806, he had difficulty finding work. He moved to Bamberg, where he worked as a newspaper editor, and then worked as a headmaster in Nuremberg, where he published his second major work, The Science of Logic which brought him fame and a position at the University of Heidelberg. Two years later, Hegel took a position as a professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he lectured on his philosophical system and attracted a large following that cemented his reputation as one of the most famous and influential philosophers of the 19th century.

Hegel's philosophical system is split into three parts: Logic, Nature, and Spirit ('Geist'). In his Phenomenology, he introduces his philosophical system and develops a successive process by which knowledge obtained from sense-perception is refined and moved towards a greater understanding. In his Science of Logic, Philosophy of Right, and Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, he further expands upon the different parts of his system. Many of the ideas in his system are also expanded upon further in posthumously published lecture notes that were compiled by his students on Aesthetics, Religion, 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 Right Hegelians such as and the Young Hegelians such as David Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer. Both of these schools of Hegelianism went on to influence a variety of other philosophical movements including Marxism, Existentialism, and British idealism. In the 20th century, Hegel's philosophy has also influenced existentialists such as Martin Heidegger and neo-Hegelians such as Alexandre Kojève. His philosophy continues to exert influence in modern times over contemporary philosophical movements in both the Analytic and Continental traditions.

Life
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

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 Wilhelm Joseph 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.

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, Hölderlin, or an unknown fourth person. 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.

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:

"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,, a position he obtained with the help of Niethammer. Ludwig Fischer and his mother stayed behind in Jena.

In Bamberg, as editor of the , which was a pro-French newspaper, Hegel, bearing no resentment for the destruction of Jena, 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, 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 of 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).

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 aesthetics, 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.

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, who followed a theological path—lived long and safeguarded their father's manuscripts and letters, and produced editions of his works.

Philosophical system
The first and most wide-reaching consideration of the process of the idea, or reason, reveals to us the truth that the idea must be studied (1) in itself; this is the subject of logic or metaphysics; (2) out of itself, in nature; this is the subject of the philosophy of nature; and (3) in and for itself, as mind; this is the subject of the philosophy of mind (Geistesphilosophie).

Some of Hegel's writing was intended for those with advanced knowledge of philosophy, although his Encyclopedia was intended as a textbook in a university course. Nevertheless, Hegel assumed that his readers are well-versed in Western philosophy. Especially crucial are Aristotle, Immanuel Kant and Kant's immediate successors, most prominently Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Those without this background would be advised to begin with one of the many general introductions to his thought. As is always the case, difficulties are magnified for those reading him in translation. In fact, Hegel himself argued, in his Science of Logic, that German was particularly conducive to philosophical thought.

According to Walter Kaufmann, the basic idea of Hegel's works, especially the Phenomenology of Spirit, 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". Kaufmann has argued that as unlikely as it may sound, it is not the case that Hegel was unable to write clearly, but that Hegel felt that "he must and should not write in the way in which he was gifted."

Logic
In logic – which, according to Hegel, is really metaphysic – we have to deal with the process of development applied to reality in its most abstract form. According to Hegel, in logic, we deal in concepts robbed of their empirical content: in logic we are discussing the process in a vacuum, so to speak. Thus, at the very beginning of Hegel's study of reality, he finds the logical concept of being.

Now, being is not a static concept according to Hegel, as Aristotle supposed it was. It is essentially dynamic, because it tends by its very nature to pass over into nothing, and then to return to itself in the higher concept, becoming. For Aristotle, there was nothing more certain than that being equaled being, or, in other words, that being is identical with itself, that everything is what it is. Hegel does not deny this; but, he adds, it is equally certain that being tends to become its opposite, nothing, and that both are united in the concept becoming.

For instance, the truth about this table, for Aristotle, is that it is a table. For Hegel, the equally important truth is that it was a tree, and it "will be" ashes. The whole truth, for Hegel, is that the tree became a table and will become ashes. Thus, becoming, not being, is the highest expression of reality. It is also the highest expression of thought because then only do we attain the fullest knowledge of a thing when we know what it was, what it is, and what it will be—in a word, when we know the history of its development.

In the same way as "being" and "nothing" develop into the higher concept becoming, so, farther on in the scale of development, life and mind appear as the third terms of the process and in turn are developed into higher forms of themselves. (Aristotle saw "being" as superior to "becoming", because anything which is still becoming something else is imperfect. Hence, God, for Aristotle, is perfect because He never changes, but is eternally complete.) But one cannot help asking what is it that develops or is developed?

Its name, Hegel answers, is different in each stage. In the lowest form it is "being", higher up it is "life", and in still higher form it is "mind". The only thing always present is the process (das Werden). We may, however, call the process by the name of "spirit" (Geist) or "idea" (Begriff). We may even call it God, because at least in the third term of every triadic development the process is God.

Metaphysics
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.

Frederick Beiser states that the status of Hegel's metaphysics is "probably the most disputed question in Hegel scholarship." Traditional scholarship often saw favored a more straightforward religious interpretation of Hegel's metaphysics as an attempt to justify Christian beliefs through reason. However, some scholars have stressed a non-metaphysical approach that interprets it 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 impossibilty of determining unconditioned Knowledge through pure reason in his Critique.

While Hegel did reject traditional metaphysics along with Kant, he also rejected Kant's concept of transcendence.

Dialectic
To describe the activity of overcoming the negative, Hegel also often used the term Aufhebung, variously translated into English as "sublation" or "overcoming", to conceive of the working of the dialectic. Roughly, the term indicates preserving the useful portion of an idea, thing, society, etc., while moving beyond its limitations.

Spirit (Geist)
"Mind" and "Spirit" are the common English translations of Hegel's use of the German "Geist", which combines the meaning of spirit—as in god, ghost, or mind—with an intentional force. In Hegel's draft manuscripts written during his time at the University of Jena, his notion of "Geist" was tightly bound to the notion of "Aether", from which he also derived the concepts of space and time, but in his later works (after Jena) he did not explicitly use his old notion of "Aether".

The philosophy of mind begins with the consideration of the individual, or subjective, mind. It is soon perceived, however, that individual, or subjective, mind is only the first stage, the in-itself stage, of mind. The next stage is objective mind, or mind objectified in law, morality, and the State. This is mind in the condition of out-of-itself.

There follows the condition of absolute mind, the state in which mind rises above all the limitations of nature and institutions, and is subjected to itself alone in art, religion, and philosophy. For the essence of mind is freedom, and its development must consist in breaking away from the restrictions imposed on it in its otherness by nature and human institutions.

History
Hegel's philosophy of the State, his theory of history, and his account of absolute mind are perhaps the most often-read portions of his philosophy due to their accessibility. The State, he says, is mind objectified. The individual mind, which (on account of its passions, its prejudices, and its blind impulses) is only partly free, subjects itself to the yoke of necessity—the opposite of freedom—in order to attain a fuller attainment of itself in the freedom of the citizen.

This yoke of necessity is first met within the recognition of the rights of others, next in morality, and finally in social morality, of which the primal institution is the family. Aggregates of families form civil society, which, however, is but an imperfect form of organization in comparison to the State. The State is the perfect social embodiment of the idea, and stands in this stage of development for God Himself.

The State, studied in itself, furnishes for our consideration constitutional law. In relation to other States it develops international law; and in its general course through historical vicissitudes it passes through what Hegel calls the "Dialectics of History".

Hegel teaches that the constitution is the collective spirit of the nation and that the government and the written constitution is the embodiment of that spirit. Each nation has its own individual spirit, and the greatest of crimes is the act by which the tyrant or the conqueror stifles the spirit of a nation.

War, Hegel suggests, can never be ruled out, as one can never know when or if one will occur, an example being the Napoleonic overrunning of Europe and its abolition of traditional Royalist systems. War represents a crisis in the development of the idea which is embodied in the different States, and out of this crisis usually the State which holds the more advanced spirit wins out, though it may also suffer a loss, lick its wounds, yet still win in the spiritual sense, as happened for example when the northerners sacked Rome — Rome's form of legality and its religion "won" out in spite of the losses on the battlefield.

A peaceful revolution is also possible (according to Hegel) when the changes required to solve a crisis are ascertained by thoughtful insight and when this insight spreads throughout the body politic:

Politics (Right/Rechts)
Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

Hegel distinguished between civil society and state in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right. In this work, civil society (Hegel used the term "bürgerliche Gesellschaft" though it is now referred to as Zivilgesellschaft in German to emphasize a more inclusive community) was a stage in the dialectical relationship between Hegel's perceived opposites, the macro-community of the state and the micro-community of the family. Broadly speaking, the term was split, like Hegel's followers, to the political left and right. On the left, it became the foundation for Karl Marx's civil society as an economic base; to the right, it became a description for all non-state (and the state is the peak of the objective spirit) aspects of society, including culture, society and politics. This liberal distinction between political society and civil society was used by Alexis de Tocqueville. In fact, Hegel's distinctions as to what he meant by civil society are often unclear. While it appears that he felt that a civil society, such as the one in which he lived, was an inevitable step in the dialectic, he allowed for the crushing of other "lesser," not fully realized civil societies as they were not fully conscious of their lack of progress. It was perfectly legitimate in Hegel's eyes for a conqueror, such as Napoleon, to come and destroy that which was not fully realized.

Hegel's State is the final culmination of the embodiment of freedom or right (Rechte) in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. The State subsumes family and civil society and fulfills them. All three together are called "ethical life" (Sittlichkeit). The State involves three "moments". In a Hegelian State, citizens both know their place and choose their place. They both know their obligations and choose to fulfill them. An individual's "supreme duty is to be a member of the state" (Elements of the Philosophy of Right, section 258). The individual has "substantial freedom in the state". The State is "objective spirit" so "it is only through being a member of the state that the individual himself has objectivity, truth, and ethical life" (section 258). Every member loves the State with genuine patriotism, but has transcended simple "team spirit" by reflectively endorsing their citizenship.

Theory of Art History
Hegel considered three periods of art history - which he called "pre-Greek" "Greek" and "Christian" which he associated with "symbolic" "classical" and "romantic" forms of art, respectively.

Types of Art
Hegel considered five different kinds of art - archetecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry.

Manuscripts
Lydia Moland states that understanding Hegel's theory of Aesthetics presents a significant challenge with Hegel scholarship due to the nature of the surviving materials on Aesthetics. Although Hegel lectured on art several times, he died before he was able to publish the handbook that he intended to use to accompany the lectures, and outside of the Phenomenology he only published. After his death, one of his former students, Heinrich Gustav Hotho, gathered the lecture notes that Hegel had intended to adapt for publication and combined them with a significant number of student notes. While this work has been the standard text for almost 200 years, more recent studies by Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert have shown that there is a significant amount of material in Hotho's text that is not represented in the student notes, and it is unclear how much of the material is originally based on manuscripts that have been lost. Additionally, the student notes show that Hegel's views on aesthetics evolved over time, while Hotho's text only presents a compiled, synthesized version of Hegel's thought.

Religion
In religion, mind feels the superiority of itself to the particular limitations of finite things. Here, as in the philosophy of history, there are three great moments, Oriental religion, which exaggerated the idea of the infinite, Greek religion, which gave undue importance to the finite, and Christianity, which represents the union of the infinite and the finite. Last of all, absolute mind, as philosophy, transcends the limitations imposed on it even in religious feeling, and, discarding representative intuition, attains all truth under the form of reason. As a graduate of a Protestant seminary, Hegel's theological concerns were reflected in many of his writings and lectures. For instance, in his "The Philosophy of History", Hegel argued the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years' War was part of the struggle against absolutism and advanced the cause of human freedom. His thoughts on the person of Jesus Christ stood out from the theologies of the Enlightenment. In his posthumously published Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Part 3, Hegel is particularly interested in demonstrations of God's existence and the ontological proof. He espouses that "God is not an abstraction but a concrete God [...] God, considered in terms of his eternal Idea, has to generate the Son, has to distinguish himself from himself; he is the process of differentiating, namely, love and Spirit". This means that Jesus, as the Son of God, is posited by God over and against himself as other. Hegel sees relational and metaphysical unities between Jesus and God the Father. To Hegel, Jesus is both divine and human. Hegel further attests that God (as Jesus) not only died, but "[...] rather, a reversal takes place: God, that is to say, maintains himself in the process, and the latter is only the death of death. God rises again to life, and thus things are reversed". The philosopher Walter Kaufmann argued that there was sharp criticism of traditional Christianity in Hegel's early theological writings. Kaufmann also pointed out that Hegel's references to God or to the divine and spirit drew on classical Greek as well as Christian connotations of the terms. Kaufmann wrote: "Aside to his beloved Greeks, Hegel saw before him the example of Spinoza and, in his own time, the poetry of Goethe, Schiller, and Hölderlin, who also liked to speak of gods and the divine. So he, too, sometimes spoke of God and, more often, of the divine; and because he occasionally took pleasure in insisting that he was really closer to this or that Christian tradition than some of the theologians of his time, he has sometimes been understood to have been a Christian". Hegel continued to develop his thoughts on religion both in terms of how it was to be given a 'wissenschaftlich', or "theoretically rigorous," account in the context of his own "system," and how a fully modern religion could be understood.

History of Philosophy
Whatever truth there is in art and in religion is contained in philosophy, in a higher form, and free from all limitations. Philosophy is, therefore, "the highest, freest and wisest phase of the union of subjective and objective mind, and the ultimate goal of all development."

Spinoza and the Pantheism controversy
In 1786, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Letters on the Doctine of Spinoza attacked the view, arguing that reason worked against morality and religion rather than supporting them, igniting the Pantheism controversy. Jacobi proposed a dilemma - either rational atheism or an irrational leap of faith. Jacobi's attack on Spinoza's naturalism had a powerful effect on Hegel, who regarded it as even more important critique on reason than Kant.

Legacy
The far reaching influence of Hegel is due in a measure to the undoubted vastness of the scheme of philosophical synthesis which he conceived and partly realized. A philosophy which undertook to organize under the single formula of triadic development every department of knowledge, from abstract logic up to the philosophy of history, has a great deal of attractiveness to those who are metaphysically inclined. But Hegel's influence is due in a still larger measure to two extrinsic circumstances.

His philosophy is the highest expression of that spirit of collectivism typical of the nineteenth century in which he dwelled. In theology, especially, Hegel revolutionized the methods of inquiry. The application of his notion of development to Biblical criticism and to historical investigation is obvious to anyone who compares the spirit and purpose of contemporary theology with the spirit and purpose of the theological literature of the first half of the nineteenth century.

In science, too, and in literature, the substitution of the category of becoming for the category of being is a very patent fact and is due to the influence of Hegel's method. In political economy and political science, the effect of Hegel's collectivistic conception of the State supplanted, to a large extent, the individualistic conception which was handed down from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century.

Hegelianism
Hegelianism is the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel in which reality has a conceptual structure. Pure Concepts are not subjectively applied to sense-impressions but rather things exist for actualizing their a priori pure concept. The concept of the concept is called the Idea by Hegel.

Right Hegelians
Hegel's philosophy became known outside Germany from the 1820s onwards, and Hegelian schools developed in northern Europe, Italy, France, Eastern Europe, America and Britain. These schools are collectively known as post-Hegelian philosophy, post-Hegelian idealism or simply post-Hegelianism. Hegel's immediate followers in Germany are generally divided into the "Right Hegelians" and the "Left Hegelians" (the latter also referred to as the "Young Hegelians"). The Rightists developed his philosophy along lines which they considered to be in accordance with Christian theology. They included Johann Philipp Gabler, Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz, and Johann Eduard Erdmann. The Right Hegelians (Rechtshegelianer), Old Hegelians (Althegelianer), or the Hegelian Right (die Hegelsche Rechte), were those followers of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the early 19th century who took his philosophy in a politically and religiously conservative direction. They are typically contrasted with the Young Hegelians (Hegelian Left), who interpreted Hegel's political philosophy as supportive of left-wing and progressive politics or religion. Hegel's historicism holds that both ideas and institutions can only be understood by understanding their history. Throughout his life, Hegel said he was an orthodox Lutheran. He devoted considerable attention to the Absolute, his term for the infinite Spirit responsible for the totality of reality—something like God, though not the God of classical theism. This Spirit comes to fullest expression in the historical reality of the modern state. The Hegelian right expanded this conception of statism, seizing on it as an affirmation of establishment politics and orthodox religion. Hegel's historicism could be read to affirm the historical inevitability of modern institutions; a nation was an Ideal, existing in Hegelian idealism above and about the people who constituted it. To argue for political change was to attack the Ideal of the national state. The Right Hegelians believed that advanced European societies, as they existed in the first half of the nineteenth century, were the summit of all social development, the product of the historical dialectic that had existed thus far. Most praised the Prussian state, which enjoyed an extensive civil service system, good universities, industrialization, and high employment, as the acme of progress and the incarnation of the Zeitgeist.

Young Hegelians
The Leftists accentuated the anti-Christian tendencies of Hegel's system and developed schools of materialism, socialism, rationalism, and pantheism. They included Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Bruno Bauer, and David Strauss. The Young Hegelians (Junghegelianer), or Left Hegelians (Linkshegelianer), or the Hegelian Left (die Hegelsche Linke), were a group of German intellectuals who, in the decade or so after the death of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in 1831, reacted to and wrote about his ambiguous legacy. The Young Hegelians drew on his idea that the purpose and promise of history was the total negation of everything conducive to restricting freedom and reason; and they proceeded to mount radical critiques, first of religion and then of the Prussian political system. They rejected anti-utopian aspects of his thought that "Old Hegelians" have interpreted to mean that the world has already essentially reached perfection.

The German philosophers who wrote immediately after the death of Hegel in 1831 can be roughly divided into the politically and religiously radical 'left', or 'young', Hegelians and the more conservative 'right', or 'old', Hegelians. The Right Hegelians followed the master in believing that the dialectic of history had come to an end—Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit reveals itself to be the culmination of history as the reader reaches its end. Here he meant that reason and freedom had reached their maximums as they were embodied by the existing Prussian state. And here the master’s claim was viewed as paradox, at best; the Prussian regime indeed provided extensive civil and social services, good universities, high employment and some industrialization, but it was ranked as rather backward politically compared with the more liberal constitutional monarchies of France and Britain.

The Young Hegelians drew on both Hegel's veneration of Reason and Freedom (as the guiding forces of history) and his idea that the 'Spirit' overcame all that opposed reason and freedom. They wanted to overcome the religious dogma and political authoritarianism in Germany at that time. The Young Hegelians interpreted the entire state apparatus as ultimately claiming legitimacy based upon religious tenets. While this thought was clearly inspired by the function of Lutheranism in contemporary Prussia, the Young Hegelians held the theory to be applicable to any state backed by any religion. All laws were ultimately based on religious tenets. As such, their plan to undermine what they felt was the corrupt and despotic state apparatus was to attack the philosophical basis of religion.

David Strauss wrote Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus/The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined) in 1835, in which he argued – in a Hegelian framework – against both the supernatural elements of the Gospel and the idea that the Christian church was the sole bearer of absolute truth. He believed the Gospel stories were mythical responses to the situation the Jewish community at the time found themselves in. The idea that 'infinite reason' or 'the absolute' (i.e. broadly Hegelian notions of God) could be incarnated within a finite human being was particularly absurd. Moreover, the original teachings of Jesus, which were aimed at aiding the poor and downtrodden, had slowly been perverted and usurped by the establishment to manipulate and oppress the populaces of the world by promising them a reward in the afterlife if they refrained from rebellion against the powers that be in this life.

Bruno Bauer went further, and claimed that the entire story of Jesus was a myth. Bauer was originally asked to defend the position of the Old Hegelians against the claims of David Strauss's Life of Jesus. After reviewing the book, Bauer was converted and became even more radical than Strauss, becoming an atheist and arguing that Christianity was not only historically baseless, but it was also irrational and a barrier to progress. Later in his life, he would disassociate himself from the group. He found no record of anyone named "Yeshua of Nazareth" in any then-extant Roman records. (Such citations actually exist, notably by the Roman historian Tacitus in his Annals and the Jewish historian Josephus in his Antiquities of the Jews). Bauer argued that almost all prominent historical figures in antiquity are referenced in other works (e.g., Aristophanes mocking Socrates in his plays), but as he could not find any such references to Jesus, he argued that it was likely that the entire story of Jesus was fabricated.

Ludwig Feuerbach wrote a psychological profile of a believer called Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity). He argues that the believer is presented with a doctrine that encourages the projection of fantasies onto the world. Believers are encouraged to believe in miracles, and to idealize all their weaknesses by imagining an omnipotent, omniscient, immortal God who represents the antithesis of all human flaws and shortcomings.

Die Freien
Die Freien (The Free Ones) was a 19th-century circle of Young Hegelians formed at the University of Berlin by Bruno Bauer who gathered for informal discussion over a period of a few years. Attendees included Max Stirner, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, among others. Although not much is known about the group, with John Henry Mackay's biography of Max Stirner appearing to be the most authoritative source, involvement appears to have been a formative period for Marx and Engels (who wrote The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Wage-Labour and Capital and The German Ideology shortly after involvement) and Stirner (who wrote The Ego and Its Own around the same time). Consequently, the overall influence of the group to modern political thought can be considered monumental. As a cartoon by Engels shows, their small meetings were also attended by a "secret policeman", reporting on their activities to the authorities. The members of Die Freien held widely diverging views and met for the purpose of debate. They did not represent a unified political or ideological outlook, though most of them have subsequently been seen as "Young Hegelians."

Heidegger
Martin Heidegger observed in his 1969 work Identity and Difference and in his personal Black Notebooks that Hegel's system in an important respect "consummates western philosophy" by completing the idea of the logos, the self-grounding ground, in thinking through the identification of Being and beings, which is "the theme of logic", writing "[I]t is... incontestable that Hegel, faithful to tradition, sees the matter of thinking in beings as such and as a whole, in the movement of Being from its emptiness to its developed fullness."

Heidegger in various places further stated Hegel's thinking to be "the most powerful thinking of modern times."

Criticism
"'One of the few things on which the analysts, pragmatists, and existentialists agree with the dialectical theologians is that Hegel is to be repudiated: their attitude toward Kant, Aristotle, Plato, and the other great philosophers is not at all unanimous even within each movement; but opposition to Hegel is part of the platform of all four, and of the Marxists, too.'"

Analytic philosophy
In Britain, the Hegelian British idealism school (members of which included Francis Herbert Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet and in the United States Josiah Royce) was challenged and rejected by analytic philosophers Moore and Russell. In particular, Russell considered "almost all" of Hegel's doctrines to be false. In a similar vein, Robert Pippin notes that some view Hegel as having "the ugliest prose style in the history of the German language".

Late 20th Century interpretations
Continental philosopher Slavoj Žižek is considered to be a contemporary post-Hegelian philosopher.

Analytic philosopher Robert Brandom introduced a Hegelian phase in analytic philosophy (see Pittsburgh School / analytic Hegelianism).

Phenomenology of Spirit
The first edition of the Phenomenology of Spirit was published in 1807. The standard German edition is

Science of Logic
The three volumes of the Science of Logic were first published in 1812, 1813, and 1816, respectively.
 * Wissenschaft der Logik, 1812, 1813, 1816, "Doctrine of Being" revised 1831
 * Science of Logic, tr. W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers, 2 vols., 1929; tr. A. V. Miller, 1969; tr. George di Giovanni, 2010



Elements of the Philosophy of Right
Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 1821

Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences
The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences was first published in 1817, with revisions in
 * Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, 1817; 2nd ed. 1827; 3rd ed. 1830 (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences)
 * (Pt. I:) The Logic of Hegel, tr. William Wallace, 1874, 2nd ed. 1892; tr. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris, 1991; tr. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom 2010
 * (Pt. II:) Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, tr. A. V. Miller, 1970
 * (Pt. III:) Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, tr. William Wallace, 1894; rev. by A. V. Miller, 1971; rev. 2007 by M. J. Inwood

Lectures on the Philosophy of History
Hegel lectured on the Philosophy of History in. These lectures were published in "year" by "persons"

Lectures on Aesthetics
Hegel lectured on Aesthetics in. These lectures were published in "year" by "persons"

Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
Hegel lectured on Philosophy of Religion in. These lectures were published in "year" by "persons"
 * Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1895. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Eng. tr. E.B. Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson as Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, New York: Humanities Press, 1974. ISBN 1-8550-6806-0.

Lectures on History of Philosophy
Hegel lectured on the History of Philosophy in. These lectures were published in "year" by "persons"
 * (full text at Internet Archive) (see also Lectures on the History of Philosophy)

Essays and other writings

 * Early Writings
 * Jena Writings
 * Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie, 1801
 * The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy, tr. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf, 1977
 * The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy, tr. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf, 1977


 * Nurnberg and Heidelberg Writings
 * Berlin Writings

Letters

 * Briefe von und an Hegel ed. Hoffmeister, vol. 1 (1970)

Video

 * Hegel: The First Cultural Psychologist 2007 from Vimeo Andy Blunden
 * Presentation by Terry Pinkard on Hegel: A Biography, May 10, 2000

Societies

 * The Hegel Society of America
 * Proceedings of the Hegel Society of America
 * The Owl of Minerva
 * The Hegel Society of Great Britain

Hegel texts online

 * Scans of all (original, German) books from Hegel (all editions) between 1807 and 1850 as PDFs at hegel.net
 * Philosophy of History Introduction
 * Hegel by HyperText, reference archive on Marxists.org
 * Philosophy of History Introduction
 * Hegel by HyperText, reference archive on Marxists.org