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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel –

Top 10 Amazing Facts about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher. He is considered one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern philosophy, with his influence extending to epistemology, logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy. 

Hegel was the last of the great philosophical system builders of modern times. His work, following that of Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Friedrich Schelling, thus marks the pinnacle of classical German philosophy. As an absolute idealist inspired by Christian insights and grounded in his mastery of a fantastic fund of concrete knowledge, Hegel found a place for everything logical, natural, human, and divine in a dialectical scheme that repeatedly swung from thesis to antithesis and back again to a higher and richer synthesis. 

Here are 10 amazing facts about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

1. Hegel’s principal achievement was the development of absolute idealism

Hegel’s distinctive articulation of idealism, in which the dualisms of, for instance, mind and nature and subject and object are overcome. In contrast to Immanuel Kant, who held that the subject imposes rational a priori pure concepts of understanding upon the sense-data of intuitions.

Hegel believed that the pure concepts are grounded in reality itself. Pure concepts are not applied subjectively to sense impressions, but rather things exist for their concept. The unity of concept and reality is the idea. The idea itself is dynamic, active, self-determining, self-moving, and purposive.

2. Georg Hegel is also known for his dialectical logic, contained within his Science of Logic

Book by Muesse –

In this book, Hegel creates a  logic of pure thought, which begins with pure being. In the logic, positions and ideas are examined and revealed to be imminently contradictory. The contradiction within the position and itself is sublated, in which a new position is posited which negates the previous position’s contradiction. 

An example of sublation is the contradictory nature of pure indeterminate being. Pure being is revealed to be both equal to and different from nothing. This contradiction within being is resolved with its sublation into becoming, in which nothing passes into being and being passes into nothing. 

3. Hegel influenced a wide variety of thinkers and writers

For example, theologian Paul Tillich wrote that the historical dialectical thought of Hegel “has influenced world history more profoundly than any other structural analysis.” In his work Systematic Theology, Tillich referred to Hegel’s work as “perfect essentialism,” later writing “essentialism was in Hegel’s system fulfilled.” Karl Barth described Hegel as a “Protestant Aquinas” while Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that “all the great philosophical ideas of the past century the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis had their beginnings in Hegel.

Michael Hardt has highlighted that the roots of post-structuralism and its unifying basis lies, in large part, in a general opposition not to the philosophical tradition tout court but specifically to the “Hegelian tradition” dominating philosophy in the twentieth century prior to post-structuralism.

4. Georg’s work has been considered the completion of philosophy

Hegel by Kugler –

The most influential thinkers in existentialism, post-structuralism, and twentieth-century theology consider Hegel’s work as the completion of philosophy. 

Jacques Derrida wrote of Hegel in his work Of Grammatology that “if there were a definition of Différance, it would be precisely the limit, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian dialectical synthesis wherever it operates. Martin Heidegger observed in his 1969 work Identity and Difference and in his personal Black Notebooks that Hegel’s system in 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.

5. Hegel’s first book was published in 1801

In 1801, Hegel came to Jena at the encouragement of his old friend Schelling, who held the position of Extraordinary Professor at the University of Jena. Hegel secured a position at the University of Jena as an unsalaried lecturer after submitting the inaugural dissertation, in which he briefly criticized arguments that assert based on Bode’s Law or another arbitrary choice of mathematical series there must exist a planet between Mars and Jupiter.

Unbeknownst to Hegel, Giuseppe Piazzi had discovered the minor planet Ceres within that orbit on 1 January 1801. Later in the year, Hegel’s first book The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy was completed.

6. In 1805, the university promoted Georg Hegel to the position of Extraordinary Professor

Hegel-Porträt by Jakob Schlesinger –

This is 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.

7. In 1817, Hegel published The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline

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 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.

8. During the last ten years of his life, Hegel did not publish another book but thoroughly revised the Encyclopedia

Hegelmuseum Stuttgart: Encyklopädie by Muesse –

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 a 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.

9. Hegel’s Science of Logic is “the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation” of the world

As with God, the Logic is a Trinity of three phases or aspects. In order of their dialectical deduction, these are Being, Essence, and Concept. The doctrines of Being and Essence together comprise Objective Logic, which is analogous to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and the doctrine of the Concept is Subjective Logic, analogous to the Organon.

Now, Hegel differs from Aristotle in that he aims to unite Logic and Metaphysics into a total, unified system of concepts. To do this, he builds on the insights of Immauel Kant. In his first Critique, Kant laid out a Table of Categories, the twelve pure, ancestral concepts that structure all experience irrespective of content.

10. Hegel distinguished between civil society and state in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right

In this work, civil society 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.