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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Essential Works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel," the foundational precepts of Hegelian philosophy are meticulously presented, capturing the complexity and nuances of dialectical reasoning. This compilation showcases Hegel's distinctive literary style, characterized by dense, reflective prose that instigates profound contemplation on the evolution of consciousness, reality, and freedom. Engaging with themes of history, art, religion, and politics, Hegel's work invites readers to navigate the intricate pathways of his thought, woven into the fabric of 19th-century German Idealism, thus enriching the philosophical discourse of the time. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a towering figure in Western philosophy, draws upon his rich academic background and experience in German universities to craft these essential works. His engagements with contemporary thinkers and the socio-political upheavals of his era shaped his theories about the unfolding dynamics of spirit and reality. Hegel's dedication to elucidating the complexities of human experience reflects his belief in philosophy as a living discipline, aimed at addressing the existential realities of society. This tome is a critical resource for students, scholars, and enthusiasts of philosophy alike, offering insightful pathways into Hegel's perspective on historical development and individual agency. By engaging with "The Essential Works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel," readers will find themselves enriched by the profound intellectual legacy that continues to inform contemporary philosophical debates. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Essential Works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection assembles a core suite of writings centered on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, presenting a concentrated path into one of philosophy’s most ambitious systems. It gathers major works, representative lectures, and orienting materials that collectively chart Hegel’s treatment of logic, mind, society, art, and history. While focused on a single author, it also includes select companion and critical texts to frame his influence and reception. The aim is twofold: to offer a coherent entry point for newcomers and a consolidated reference for returning readers. By bringing these texts together, the volume highlights Hegel’s systematic vision and its ongoing role in modern intellectual life.
The contents span several scholarly genres and text types. They include systematic treatises, such as the Phenomenology of Mind and the Science of Logic; works on specific domains, including the Philosophy of Mind, the Philosophy of Right, the Philosophy of Law, and the Philosophy of Fine Art; and lecture courses published from notes and editorial reconstructions, such as the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and the Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God. The Life and Work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel provides biographical orientation, while The Criticism of Hegel’s Work and Hegelianism surveys responses. Companion texts by Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William Wallace supply contextual perspectives.
Across this body of work, several unifying themes stand out. Hegel’s hallmark is a dialectical method that traces how concepts develop through tensions and resolutions. He treats freedom, reason, and social institutions as interdependent achievements of Spirit, unfolding historically. Logic and metaphysics ground this movement; ethics, politics, art, religion, and philosophy display it in distinct media. The result is a system that connects abstract categories to concrete life. These writings remain significant because they propose a rigorous account of modernity’s promises and contradictions, illuminating how rational norms, collective institutions, and self-understanding coevolve and shape the terms of human agency.
The Phenomenology of Mind follows the formative journey of consciousness as it learns what it is and what it knows. Moving through characteristic shapes of experience, it dramatizes the tensions that propel thought beyond partial standpoints. Its prose is demanding yet strikingly vivid, alternating between reflective analysis and concrete examples. The work’s enduring appeal lies in how it links knowledge, recognition, and social life while modeling a method that turns impasses into deeper insight. It serves both as an introduction to Hegel’s approach and as a standalone exploration of how experience transforms into self-conscious understanding.
The Science of Logic pursues the inner movement of pure thought, developing a sequence of categories that structure intelligibility. Rather than applying logic to an external subject matter, Hegel investigates the logic of concepts as they generate and refine themselves. The work is highly technical and systematic, known for its sustained attention to transitions and its distinctive account of negation and determination. Its significance resides in articulating a framework within which later philosophies of metaphysics, language, and science have been debated, appropriated, or contested. In this collection, it anchors the theoretical core that informs Hegel’s treatments of mind, society, art, and history.
The Philosophy of Mind and related treatments of right and law unfold how freedom takes shape in subjective life and social institutions. The Philosophy of Mind traces stages from individual cognition and will to forms of communal life and cultural expression. The Philosophy of Right addresses personhood, moral responsibility, civil society, and the state. The Philosophy of Law, presented here alongside Right, engages legal and institutional dimensions of ethical life. Read together, these texts show how abstract principles become effective in practices and norms. They continue to influence political philosophy, jurisprudence, and social theory, especially debates about modern institutions and ethical agency.
The Philosophy of Fine Art examines art as a distinctive mode of presenting truth, attentive to form, content, and historical development. It considers how artistic media and styles disclose ideas in sensuous shape and how artistic epochs express changing conceptions of meaning. The Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God explore classic arguments within a modern, critical framework, relating rational theology to broader philosophical commitments. Both texts exemplify Hegel’s effort to understand how reason appears in diverse cultural forms. Their joint inclusion highlights the interrelation of aesthetics and religion within a comprehensive account of spirit’s self-presentation.
The Lectures on the Philosophy of History offer a conceptual interpretation of world history. They present historical development as intelligible, shaped by the unfolding of social forms and political institutions. Delivered as university lectures and preserved through notes and editorial work, they pair programmatic theses with concrete case discussions. The result invites readers to consider how historical narratives and concepts mutually inform each other. The lectures have been influential and controversial, spurring debate about progress, particularity, and historical method. Within this collection, they connect Hegel’s logic of development to questions of global change, culture, and state formation.
The Lectures on the History of Philosophy situate Hegel’s system in dialogue with its predecessors and contemporaries. Rather than offering a neutral catalogue, they trace how key doctrines emerge, conflict, and transform across epochs. The series is notable for integrating ancient, medieval, and modern thinkers into a single narrative that emphasizes conceptual inheritance and reconfiguration. It has shaped subsequent histories of philosophy by modeling how systematic reflection and historical study can be mutually illuminating. Included here, the lectures underscore that Hegel’s project is not isolated: it refracts ongoing debates and offers a framework for interpreting philosophy’s evolving problems and solutions.
The collection’s critical and interpretive materials clarify Hegel’s reception and assist orientation. The Criticism of Hegel’s Work and Hegelianism surveys lines of response that have assessed, adapted, or resisted Hegelian themes. Arthur Schopenhauer’s The Basis of Morality and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil provide alternative approaches to ethics, value, and culture that stand in productive tension with systematic rationalism. William Wallace’s Key to Understanding Hegel serves as an interpretive aid, addressing terminology and guiding first engagements. These inclusions do not replace Hegel’s texts; they frame them, demonstrating how disagreements and reinterpretations have sustained the tradition of reading Hegel.
Certain stylistic and editorial features warrant attention. Hegel’s writing advances by careful transitions, technical vocabulary, and claims that revise earlier positions while preserving their insights. Readers will encounter terminological variations across translations and editions. For example, titles such as Phenomenology of Mind and Phenomenology of Spirit reflect different renderings, and treatments of right and law appear under distinct headings in this collection. The lecture texts derive from delivered courses and subsequent editorial work, which shapes their form. A patient approach—tracking concepts, contrasts, and developments—reveals the systematic architecture and the remarkable continuity that links logic, psychology, social theory, art, religion, and history.
Taken together, these works offer a comprehensive view of Hegel’s ambition to think through the structures of modern life and knowledge. The biographical overview orients readers to the historical setting; the principal treatises and lectures present the system’s core and its applications; the critical and companion texts illuminate reception and ongoing disputes. The result is not a single book but an intellectual landscape, open to different paths of entry. Whether one begins with logic, with social and political writings, or with art and history, the collection provides the materials to follow ideas across domains and to assess why Hegel remains consequential.
Author Biography
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was a central figure of German Idealism and one of the most influential philosophers of the modern era. Writing in the wake of the Enlightenment and the political upheavals of his time, he developed a systematic philosophy spanning logic, nature, society, art, religion, and history. His work sought to show how reason becomes actual in the world, shaping institutions and consciousness. Though demanding in style, Hegel’s system offered an ambitious synthesis that inspired followers and critics across generations. From early studies to his Berlin lectures, he pursued the unity of thought and reality, leaving a lasting imprint on European intellectual life.
Hegel received a classical and theological education at the Tübinger Stift, where he studied alongside the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the philosopher F. W. J. Schelling. He read Kant closely and engaged with Spinoza, Rousseau, and the Greek classics, combining Enlightenment rationalism with an enduring interest in ancient ethical life. Early manuscripts on religion and politics display his search for a reconciliation between modern freedom and communal forms. This formative period forged his conviction that philosophy should be systematic and historically minded. The intellectual milieu of late eighteenth-century Swabia and the revolutionary era set the stage for his lifelong engagement with reason, history, and culture.
After tutoring posts in Swiss and German households, Hegel moved into academic life at Jena in the early 1800s, a hub of post-Kantian debate. There he collaborated with Schelling on a philosophical journal and wrote essays distinguishing his position from contemporaries. His first major book, Phenomenology of Spirit, emerged from this environment, presenting a narrative of consciousness that culminates in speculative knowledge. The turmoil of the Napoleonic wars disrupted university life, and Hegel left Jena soon after publication. Nonetheless, the Phenomenology announced the breadth of his project and introduced themes—recognition, ethical life, the shapes of spirit—that would inform his later system.
In the following decade, Hegel’s career unfolded outside the traditional university track before returning to it. He briefly edited a newspaper and then served as rector and teacher at a humanist gymnasium, experiences that sharpened his practical orientation to education and civic life. During these years he published the multi-volume Science of Logic, elaborating the movement of concepts without appeal to external presuppositions. A university appointment in Heidelberg gave him a platform to systematize his views in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, a compendium outlining logic, philosophy of nature, and philosophy of spirit and designed to accompany his lectures.
Hegel soon joined the University of Berlin, where he taught until his death and became a prominent public philosopher. There he published Elements of the Philosophy of Right, addressing law, civil society, and the state, and he offered celebrated lecture series on aesthetics, the philosophy of religion, the history of philosophy, and world history. Many of these lectures were later published from student notes, shaping the reception of his thought. His courses drew large audiences, and his standing grew amid debates about modernity, religion, and political order. Berlin provided the stage on which Hegel’s mature system reached its most visible expression.
At the core of Hegel’s philosophy is absolute idealism: the claim that reality is intelligible as the self-unfolding of thought, or spirit, rather than a collection of inert facts. His dialectical method tracks how concepts develop by overcoming their limitations, though not as a simple formula. Logic, nature, and spirit form an articulated whole in which freedom becomes actual through institutions, work, and shared norms. He treated art and religion as modes of truth that anticipate philosophy’s comprehension. Critics charged obscurity and dogmatism; admirers found a powerful account of historical rationality. His rigorous system aspired to reconcile critique with affirmation.
Hegel died in Berlin in 1831. In the decades that followed, his legacy generated intense controversy and a wide array of movements, including conservative and radical strands of Hegelianism. His ideas influenced figures as different as Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, and later British idealists, and they informed twentieth-century debates in phenomenology, hermeneutics, and critical theory. Renewed engagement in recent philosophy has emphasized his accounts of recognition, normativity, and social freedom. Today, scholars read Hegel both as a historical system builder and as a resource for analyzing law, politics, art, and religion, ensuring his continued presence in philosophical and humanistic inquiry.
Historical Context
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) wrote across the upheavals that remade Europe from the Enlightenment to the Restoration. Born in Stuttgart in the Duchy of Württemberg and dying in Berlin during the 1831 cholera epidemic, he spanned the French Revolution (1789), the Napoleonic Wars, and the political recomposition of German lands after 1815. His oeuvre engages the rise of constitutional projects, bureaucratic statecraft, expanding markets, and a learned public sphere shaped by universities, salons, and journals. The works gathered here—systematic treatises, lectures later edited by students, critiques, and receptions—reflect the same historical arc: the drive to rationalize institutions while preserving the ethical life of modern societies.
Hegel’s formation at the Tübinger Stift (entered 1788) placed him within Württemberg Pietism and humanist classicism, a milieu crucial to his treatments of religion, art, and ethical life. His friends and interlocutors Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, also seminarians, shared readings in Kant, Rousseau, and Greek antiquity that left a durable stamp on Hegel’s analyses of freedom and community. The intellectual scene of Swabia, at the hinge of Enlightenment and early Romanticism, oriented Hegel toward reconciling reason with historical tradition—a methodological commitment that threads through his Logic, Philosophy of Mind, aesthetics lectures, and his reflections on law, right, and the modern state.
Years as a private tutor in Bern (1793–1796) and Frankfurt am Main (1797–1800) acquainted Hegel with republican debates, commercial society, and urban corporative life. His early manuscripts on popular religion, love, and the constitution of civic bonds prefigure later analyses of civil society, morality, and Sittlichkeit in the Philosophy of Right and in the accounts of objective and absolute spirit. Exposure to Swiss federalism, Frankfurt’s patrician institutions, and the ambient reception of Kant and Fichte sharpened his sense that freedom must be concretized in institutions. The economic dynamism and social stratification of these cities provided empirical touchstones for his dialectic of need, labor, and ethical integration.
Hegel’s Jena period (1801–1807) unfolded amid the Weimar–Jena constellation of Goethe, Schiller, and the early Romantics, and within Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. Co-editing the Critical Journal of Philosophy (1802–1803), Hegel absorbed philology, natural science, and aesthetic theory into a single speculative horizon. The Battle of Jena–Auerstedt (October 1806) and Napoleon’s entry into the city, which Hegel famously described as the world-soul on horseback, concentrated his reflections on history and consciousness. The Phenomenology of Mind (1807) emerges from this crucible, but the same experiences also animate the later lectures on history and art, and the systematic ambition that culminates in the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia project.
After Jena’s collapse, Hegel edited the Bamberger Zeitung (1807–1808), then served as rector of the Nuremberg Gymnasium (1808–1816). Marriage into the patrician Tucher family (1811) embedded him within municipal elites undergoing administrative modernization. Nuremberg’s legal and commercial order, still marked by imperial law and guild remnants yet touched by Napoleonic reforms, offered a living laboratory for concepts later formalized in the Philosophy of Right: property, contract, corporations, and police (Polizei) administration. During these years he published the three parts of the Science of Logic (1812, 1813, 1816), refining the dialectical method that undergirds his analyses of mind, law, art, religion, and historical development across the Berlin lectures.
Summoned to Heidelberg in 1816, Hegel entered a reformed university system shaped by Wilhelm von Humboldt’s ideals of Wissenschaft. There he issued the first Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817), condensing his system into Logic, Nature, and Spirit. The encyclopedia framework integrated the Philosophy of Mind (Spirit) with treatments of objective spirit—law, morality, ethical life—linking the conceptual architecture of the Logic to institutions and culture. Heidelberg’s cosmopolitan faculty and the Rhine intellectual corridor facilitated exchanges with jurists, classicists, and theologians, preparing Hegel for the public role he would assume in Berlin and for the lecture cycles on art, religion, history, and the history of philosophy.
In 1818 Hegel accepted a chair at the new University of Berlin, invited by Minister Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein into a Prussian reform project balancing modernization with monarchical authority. The Carlsbad Decrees (1819) tightened censorship and oversight of universities even as Humboldtian ideals persisted. Within this tension Hegel presented a systematic account of modern ethical and legal life in the Philosophy of Right (1821), articulating civil society, estates, corporations, and constitutional monarchy. The same historical pressures informed his Berlin lectures: an attempt to comprehend the rational in the actual without capitulating to reaction, while defending the autonomy of philosophy and the vocation of the modern university.
Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics (1818–1829), later edited by Heinrich Gustav Hotho, unfolded as public museums, antiquarian societies, and art academies institutionalized art history. Building on Winckelmann and the Romantic critics, Hegel located art within the development of spirit, analyzing symbolic, classical, and romantic forms across sculpture, drama, and music. The claim that art’s highest vocation has passed to religion and philosophy registers a broader nineteenth-century shift: the relocation of meaning from sacred and civic forms to reflective culture. These lectures resonate with the Phenomenology’s accounts of sensuous shape and with the Philosophy of Mind’s treatment of imagination, language, and the social embodiment of spirit.
Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history (from 1822) arose alongside new archival practices, state statistical bureaus, and a growing historical profession. His narrative of world-historical peoples—Oriental, Greek, Roman, and Germanic-Christian—sought the logic of freedom’s unfolding in institutions, law, and religion. The framework connects directly to his analyses of right and ethical life, and to the religious lectures that construe Christianity as the religion of reconciliation. It also encodes Eurocentric and teleological assumptions characteristic of his era’s scholarship, formed amidst colonial expansion and global trade. The work shaped debates about progress, sovereignty, and nationhood well beyond Berlin, informing later receptions and critiques across Europe.
The lectures on the history of philosophy (delivered 1816–1831, edited by Karl Ludwig Michelet) canonized a lineage from the Presocratics to German Idealism, reading past systems as stages in the self-education of thought. This historiography depends on the Logic’s categories while orienting the Philosophy of Mind and Right within a cumulative rational tradition. Its method reflects Berlin’s philological rigor and the museum-like ordering of knowledge then institutionalizing in universities. At the same time, it set terms for Hegelian and anti-Hegelian narratives: whether philosophy culminates in system, and how to read antiquity and the medieval schools relative to modern science, law, and Protestant reconciliation.
Hegel’s lectures on religion (notably 1821, 1824, 1827, 1831), with discussions of the proofs of God’s existence later excerpted and edited by Philipp Marheineke, engage post-Kantian theology’s crisis. Kant’s critique had unsettled traditional demonstrations; Hegel recast cosmological and ontological arguments within a speculative logic of concept and being. The Prussian Union of Churches (1817) and Protestant controversies over rationalism and Pietism formed the ecclesial backdrop, while biblical criticism advanced in Berlin’s theological faculty. These lectures interlock with the Philosophy of Mind’s account of absolute spirit and with the Philosophy of Right’s treatment of the state’s relation to religious life, education, and civil institutions.
Debates over codification and public law framed Hegel’s analyses of right and law. The Prussian Allgemeines Landrecht (1794), the Napoleonic Code (1804), and reforms by Stein and Hardenberg supplied live models of property, contract, and administrative police. German jurists disputed Roman-law traditions, customary rights, and the status of corporations; poor relief, guild transformation, and press regulation tested notions of civil society. Hegel’s terminology oscillates in translation as Philosophy of Right or Philosophy of Law, and related encyclopedia sections refine these themes. The same context also seeded later critiques—from the Young Hegelians to Marx—of alienation, class conflict, and the limits of ethical integration in market societies.
Hegel’s Berlin career was institutional as well as intellectual. He served as rector (1829–1830), navigated censorship, and was honored by Frederick William III, even as student politics and secret societies drew suspicion after 1819. The editorial afterlife of his teaching shaped the corpus: Hotho’s Aesthetics (1835), Michelet’s History of Philosophy (1833–1836), Eduard Gans’s Philosophy of History (1837), and Marheineke’s Religion lectures (1832) organize diverse manuscripts and auditors’ notes. His death on 14 November 1831 during the cholera epidemic cut short revisions to the Encyclopedia and lectures, leaving the Hegelian school—students, colleagues, and critics—to contest the meaning and political bearings of the system.
Posthumous reception polarized Hegelianism. Right Hegelians (e.g., Göschel, Gabler, Hinrichs) defended orthodox and monarchical readings; Left Hegelians, including David Friedrich Strauss, Bruno Bauer, and Ludwig Feuerbach, radicalized critique of religion and the state. Søren Kierkegaard attacked systematic mediation, while Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels reworked dialectic around labor, alienation, and material production. The 1848 revolutions and emerging industrial capitalism reframed issues of civil society and law already central to Hegel. In France, Victor Cousin’s eclecticism popularized Hegel; in Britain, idealist ethics and political theory took shape. These currents inform the section on the criticism of Hegel’s work and the broader history of Hegelianism.
Arthur Schopenhauer’s On the Basis of Morality (1840), submitted to the Royal Danish Society’s 1839 prize competition and published after rejection, exemplifies an anti-Hegelian polemic forged in Berlin. Teaching alongside Hegel in the 1820s, Schopenhauer denounced academic idealism and grounded ethics in compassion and the metaphysics of will. His attacks intersect issues central to Hegel’s Right and Mind—freedom, motivation, punishment—while rejecting teleological history and rational reconciliation. The rivalry extended beyond doctrine to institutional authority and style: aphoristic pessimism versus systematic science. Schopenhauer’s subsequent influence prepared a climate in which Nietzsche and later critics contested the claims of dialectical reason and philosophical system.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886) addresses the inheritance of German Idealism from a later, philologically trained vantage. He displaced system with genealogy, questioned the moral universalism presupposed by state and law, and mocked the dialectical hunger for reconciliation. While rarely engaging Hegel directly, Nietzsche’s critique of herd values, historical consciousness, and truth’s metaphysical pretensions targeted the cultural conditions that sustained Hegelian schools in Germany, Britain, and Italy. His intervention helped reshape late nineteenth-century debates about art, religion, and morality—the very spheres Hegel linked under absolute spirit—prefiguring twentieth-century receptions that would oscillate between dialectical revivals and radical anti-systematic stances.
Anglophone mediation was decisive for Hegel’s modern reception. William Wallace (1844–1897), an Oxford scholar, produced influential translations and guides—most notably of the Encyclopedia Logic and the Philosophy of Mind—and wrote a Key to Understanding Hegel that oriented generations of readers. His work intersected British Idealism (T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet) and American neo-Hegelianism (Josiah Royce), which applied Hegelian categories to ethics, jurisprudence, and civic institutions. Translation choices shaped how Right/Law, Mind/Spirit, and the Logic were taught. This intermediary tradition ensured that Hegel’s system, lectures, and critics entered English-language discourse, sustaining debates that span philosophy, history, theology, and the arts.
Synopsis (Selection)
Introduction
Outlines the aims, scope, and editorial approach of the anthology, situating Hegel within German Idealism and offering guidance for approaching his system.
The Life and Work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
A concise biography tracing Hegel’s education, career, and intellectual development, alongside the historical context and reception of his major works.
Books
The core corpus of Hegel’s treatises and lectures presented in translation, arranged to reflect the progression of his system from logic to spirit.
The Phenomenology of Mind
A narrative of consciousness’s ascent from sense-certainty to absolute knowing through dialectical stages, examining self-consciousness, reason, social life, religion, and knowledge.
The Science of Logic
A systematic exposition of the categories of thought—being, essence, and concept—unfolded by dialectical method to articulate the structure of reason and the absolute idea.
The Philosophy of Mind
Charts mind from subjective capacities (soul, consciousness, psychology) through objective institutions (law, morality, ethical life) to absolute spirit (art, religion, philosophy).
The Philosophy of Right and The Philosophy of Law
Hegel’s social and political philosophy grounding freedom in the institutions of property, contract, morality, civil society, and the constitutional state, and articulating the rational structure of modern law.
The Philosophy of Fine Art
Hegel’s aesthetics, arguing that art sensuously presents truth and tracing the historical development of symbolic, classical, and romantic forms across the arts.
Lectures on the Philosophy of History
Portrays world history as the progressive realization of freedom through the ‘cunning of reason,’ analyzing states, cultures, and world‑historical individuals.
Lectures on the History of Philosophy
A survey from antiquity to modernity that reconstructs each philosophy’s core insight and situates it within a teleological progression toward speculative reason.
Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God
Reassesses the ontological, cosmological, and teleological proofs, integrating them within speculative logic to clarify the relation of faith and reason.
The Criticism of Hegel’s Work and Hegelianism
Collected critiques assessing Hegel’s method, metaphysics, and politics, outlining major objections to the system and the debates around Hegelian schools.
The Basis of Morality by Arthur Schopenhauer
A sustained critique of ethical rationalism that grounds morality in compassion rather than duty, opposing Kantian principles and offering a counterpoint to Hegelian ethics.
Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
Challenges traditional morality and metaphysics, advancing perspectivism, the will to power, and a revaluation of values through incisive aphoristic critique.
Key to Understanding Hegel by William Wallace
An interpretive guide clarifying Hegel’s terminology, dialectical method, and system architecture, offering practical orientation for reading the major works.
The Essential Works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Introduction
The Life and Work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), German philosopher, was born at Stuttgart on the 27th of August 1770. His father, an official in the fiscal service of Württemberg, is not otherwise known to fame; and of his mother we hear only that she had scholarship enough to teach him the elements of Latin. He had one sister, Christiana, who died unmarried, and a brother Ludwig, who served in the campaigns of Napoleon. At the grammar school of Stuttgart, where Hegel was educated between the ages of seven and eighteen, he was not remarkable. His main productions were a diary kept at intervals during eighteen months (1785–1787), and translations of the Antigone, the Manual of Epictetus, &c. But the characteristic feature of his studies was the copious extracts which from this time onward he unremittingly made and preserved. This collection, alphabetically arranged, comprised annotations on classical authors, passages from newspapers, treatises on morals and mathematics from the standard works of the period. In this way he absorbed in their integrity the raw materials for elaboration. Yet as evidence that he was not merely receptive we have essays already breathing that admiration of the classical world which he never lost. His chief amusement was cards, and he began the habit of taking snuff.
In the autumn of 1788 he entered at Tübingen as a student of theology; but he showed no interest in theology: his sermons were a failure, and he found more congenial reading in the classics, on the advantages of studying which his first essay was written. After two years he took the degree of Ph.D., and in the autumn of 1793 received his theological certificate, stating him to be of good abilities, but of middling industry and knowledge, and especially deficient in philosophy.
As a student, his elderly appearance gained him the title “Old man,” but he took part in the walks, beer-drinking and love-making of his fellows. He gained most from intellectual intercourse with his contemporaries, the two best known of whom were J. C. F. Hölderlin and Schelling. With Hölderlin Hegel learned to feel for the old Greeks a love which grew stronger as the semi-Kantianized theology of his teachers more and more failed to interest him. With Schelling like sympathies bound him. They both protested against the political and ecclesiastical inertia of their native state, and adopted the doctrines of freedom and reason. The story which tells how the two went out one morning to dance round a tree of liberty in a meadow is an anachronism, though in keeping with their opinions.
On leaving college, he became a private tutor at Bern and lived in intellectual isolation. He was, however, far from inactive. He compiled a systematic account of the fiscal system of the canton Bern, but the main factor in his mental growth came from his study of Christianity. Under the impulse given by Lessing and Kant he turned to the original records of Christianity, and attempted to construe for himself the real significance of Christ. He wrote a life of Jesus, in which Jesus was simply the son of Joseph and Mary. He did not stop to criticize as a philologist, and ignored the miraculous. He asked for the secret contained in the conduct and sayings of this man which made him the hope of the human race. Jesus appeared as revealing the unity with God in which the Greeks in their best days unwittingly rejoiced, and as lifting the eyes of the Jews from a lawgiver who metes out punishment on the transgressor, to the destiny which in the Greek conception falls on the just no less than on the unjust.
The interest of these ideas is twofold. In Jesus Hegel finds the expression for something higher than mere morality: he finds a noble spirit which rises above the contrasts of virtue and vice into the concrete life, seeing the infinite always embracing our finitude, and proclaiming the divine which is in man and cannot be overcome by error and evil, unless the man close his eyes and ears to the godlike presence within him. In religious life, in short, he finds the principle which reconciles the opposition of the temporal mind. But, secondly, the general source of the doctrine that life is higher than all its incidents is of interest. He does not free himself from the current theology either by rational moralizing like Kant, or by bold speculative synthesis like Fichte and Schelling. He finds his panacea in the concrete life of humanity. But although he goes to the Scriptures, and tastes the mystical spirit of the medieval saints, the Christ of his conception has traits that seem borrowed from Socrates and from the heroes of Attic tragedy, who suffer much and yet smile gently on a destiny to which they were reconciled. Instead of the Hebraic doctrine of a Jesus punished for our sins, we have the Hellenic idea of a man who is calmly tranquil in the consciousness of his unity with God.
During these years Hegel kept up a slack correspondence with Schelling and Hölderlin. Schelling, already on the way to fame, kept Hegel abreast with German speculation. Both of them were intent on forcing the theologians into the daylight, and grudged them any aid they might expect from Kant’s postulation of God and immortality to crown the edifice of ethics. Meanwhile, Hölderlin in Jena had been following Fichte’s career with an enthusiasm with which he infected Hegel.
It is pleasing to turn from these vehement struggles of thought to a tour which Hegel in company with three other tutors made through the Bernese Oberland in July and August 1796. Of this tour he left a minute diary. He was delighted with the varied play of the waterfalls, but no glamour blinded him to the squalor of Swiss peasant life. The glaciers and the rocks called forth no raptures. “The spectacle of these eternally dead masses gave me nothing but the monotonous and at last tedious idea, ‘Es ist so.’”
Towards the close of his engagement at Bern, Hegel had received hopes from Schelling of a post at Jena. Fortunately his friend Hölderlin, now tutor in Frankfort, secured a similar situation there for Hegel in the family of Herr Gogol, a merchant (January 1797). The new post gave him more leisure and the society he needed.
About this time he turned to questions of economics and government. He had studied Gibbon, Hume and Montesquieu in Switzerland. We now find him making extracts from the English newspapers on the Poor-Law Bill of 1796; criticising the Prussian land laws, promulgated about the same time; and writing a commentary on Sir James Steuart’s Inquiry intothe Principles of Political Economy. Here, as in contemporaneous criticisms of Kant’s ethical writings, Hegel aims at correcting the abstract discussion of a topic by treating it in its systematic interconnexions. Church and state, law and morality, commerce and art are reduced to factors in the totality of human life, from which the specialists had isolated them.
But the best evidence of Hegel’s attention to contemporary politics is two unpublished essays—one of them written in 1798, “On the Internal Condition of Württemberg in Recent Times, particularly on the Defects in the Magistracy,” the other a criticism on the constitution of Germany, written, probably, not long after the peace of Lunéville (1801). Both essays are critical rather than constructive. In the first Hegel showed how the supineness of the committee of estates in Württemberg had favoured the usurpations of the superior officials in whom the court had found compliant servants. And though he perceived the advantages of change in the constitution of the estates, he still doubted if an improved system could work in the actual conditions of his native province. The main feature in the pamphlet is the recognition that a spirit of reform is abroad. If Württemberg suffered from a bureaucracy tempered by despotism, the Fatherland in general suffered no less. “Germany,” so begins the second of these unpublished papers, “is no longer a state.” Referring the collapse of the empire to the retention of feudal forms and to the action of religious animosities, Hegel looked forward to reorganization by a central power (Austria) wielding the imperial army, and by a representative body elected by the geographical districts of the empire. But such an issue, he saw well, could only be the outcome of violence—of “blood and iron.” The philosopher did not pose as a practical statesman. He described the German empire in its nullity as a conception without existence in fact. In such a state of things it was the business of the philosopher to set forth the outlines of the coming epoch, as they were already moulding themselves into shape, amidst what the ordinary eye saw only as the disintegration of the old forms of social life.
His old interest in the religious question reappears, but in a more philosophical form. Starting with the contrast between a natural and a positive religion, he regards a positive religion as one imposed upon the mind from without, not a natural growth crowning the round of human life. A natural religion, on the other hand, was not, he thought, the one universal religion of every clime and age, but rather the spontaneous development of the national conscience varying in varying circumstances. A people’s religion completes and consecrates their whole activity: in it the people rises above its finite life in limited spheres to an infinite life where it feels itself all at one. Even philosophy with Hegel at this epoch was subordinate to religion; for philosophy must never abandon the finite in the search for the infinite. Soon, however, Hegel adopted a view according to which philosophy is a higher mode of apprehending the infinite than even religion.
At Frankfort, meanwhile, the philosophic ideas of Hegel first assumed the proper philosophic form. In a MS. of 102 quarto sheets, of which the first three and the seventh are wanting, there is preserved the original sketch of the Hegelian system, so far as the logic and metaphysics and part of the philosophy of nature are concerned. The third part of the system—the ethical theory—seems to have been composed afterwards; it is contained in its first draft in another MS. of 30 sheets. Even these had been preceded by earlier Pythagorean constructions envisaging the divine life in divine triangles.
Circumstances soon put Hegel in the way to complete these outlines. His father died in January 1799; and the slender sum which Hegel received as his inheritance, 3154 gulden (about £260), enabled him to think once more of a studious life. At the close of 1800 we find him asking Schelling for letters of introduction to Bamberg, where with cheap living and good beer he hoped to prepare himself for the intellectual excitement of Jena. The upshot was that Hegel arrived at Jena in January 1801. An end had already come to the brilliant epoch at Jena, when the romantic poets, Tieck, Novalis and the Schlegels made it the headquarters of their fantastic mysticism, and Fichte turned the results of Kant into the banner of revolutionary ideas. Schelling was the main philosophical lion of the time; and in some quarters Hegel was spoken of as a new champion summoned to help him in his struggle with the more prosaic continuators of Kant. Hegel’s first performance seemed to justify the rumour. It was an essay on the difference between the philosophic systems of Fichte and Schelling, tending in the main to support the latter. Still more striking was the agreement shown in the Critical Journal of Philosophy, which Schelling and Hegel wrote conjointly during the years 1802–1803. So latent was the difference between them at this epoch that in one or two cases it is not possible to determine by whom the essay was written. Even at a later period foreign critics like Cousin saw much that was alike in the two doctrines, and did not hesitate to regard Hegel as a disciple of Schelling. The dissertation by which Hegel qualified for the position of Privatdozent (De orbitis planetarum) was probably chosen under the influence of Schelling’s philosophy of nature. It was an unfortunate subject. For while Hegel, depending on a numerical proportion suggested by Plato, hinted in a single sentence that it might be a mistake to look for a planet between Mars and Jupiter, Giuseppe Piazzi had already discovered the first of the asteroids (Ceres) on the 1st of January 1801. Apparently in August, when Hegel qualified, the news of the discovery had not yet reached him, but critics have made this luckless suggestion the ground of attack on a priori philosophy.
Hegel’s lectures, in the winter of 1801–1802, on logic and metaphysics were attended by about eleven students. Later, in 1804, we find him with a class of about thirty, lecturing on his whole system; but his average attendance was rather less. Besides philosophy, he once at least lectured on mathematics. As he taught, he was led to modify his original system, and notice after notice of his lectures promised a text-book of philosophy—which, however, failed to appear. Meanwhile, after the departure of Schelling from Jena in the middle of 1803, Hegel was left to work out his own views. Besides philosophical studies, where he now added Aristotle to Plato, he read Homer and the Greek tragedians, made extracts from books, attended lectures on physiology, and dabbled in other sciences. On his own representation at Weimar, he was in February 1805 made a professor extraordinarius, and in July 1806 drew his first and only stipend—100 thalers. At Jena, though some of his hearers became attached to him, Hegel was not a popular lecturer any more than K. C. F. Kraus. The ordinary student found J. F. Fries more intelligible.
Of the lectures of that period there still remain considerable notes. The language often had a theological tinge (never entirely absent), as when the “idea” was spoken of, or “the night of the divine mystery,” or the dialectic of the absolute called the “course of the divine life.” Still his view was growing clearer, and his difference from Schelling more palpable. Both Schelling and Hegel stand in a relation to art, but while the aesthetic model of Schelling was found in the contemporary world, where art was a special sphere and the artist a separate profession in no intimate connexion with the age and nation, the model of Hegel was found rather in those works of national art in which art is not a part but an aspect of the common life, and the artist is not a mere individual but a concentration of the passion and power of beauty in the whole community. “Such art,” says Hegel, “is the common good and the work of all. Each generation hands it on beautified to the next; each has done something to give utterance to the universal thought. Those who are said to have genius have acquired some special aptitude by which they render the general shapes of the nation their own work, one in one point, another in another. What they produce is not their invention, but the invention of the whole nation; or rather, what they find is that the whole nation has found its true nature. Each, as it were, piles up his stone. So too does the artist. Somehow he has the good fortune to come last, and when he places his stone the arch stands self-supported.” Hegel, as we have already seen, was fully aware of the change that was coming over the world. “A new epoch,” he says, “has arisen. It seems as if the world-spirit had now succeeded in freeing itself from all foreign objective existence, and finally apprehending itself as absolute mind.” These words come from lectures on the history of philosophy, which laid the foundation for his Phänomenologie des Geistes (Bamberg, 1807).
On the 14th of October 1806 Napoleon was at Jena. Hegel, like Goethe, felt no patriotic shudder at the national disaster, and in Prussia he saw only a corrupt and conceited bureaucracy. Writing to his friend F. J. Niethammer (1766–1848) on the day before the battle, he speaks with admiration of the “world-soul,” the emperor, and with satisfaction of the probable overthrow of the Prussians. The scholar’s wish was to see the clouds of war pass away, and leave thinkers to their peaceful work. His manuscripts were his main care; and doubtful of the safety of his last despatch to Bamberg, and disturbed by the French soldiers in his lodgings, he hurried off, with the last pages of the Phänomenologie, to take refuge in the pro-rector’s house. Hegel’s fortunes were now at the lowest ebb. Without means, and obliged to borrow from Niethammer, he had no further hopes from the impoverished university. He had already tried to get away from Jena. In 1805, when several lecturers left in consequence of diminished classes, he had written to Johann Heinrich Voss, suggesting that his philosophy might find more congenial soil in Heidelberg; but the application bore no fruit. He was, therefore, glad to become editor of the BambergerZeitung (1807–1808). Of his editorial work there is little to tell; no leading articles appeared in his columns. It was not a suitable vocation, and he gladly accepted the rectorship of the Aegidien-gymnasium in Nuremberg, a post which he held from December 1808 to August 1816. Bavaria at this time was modernizing her institutions. The school system was reorganized by new regulations, in accordance with which Hegel wrote a series of lessons in the outlines of philosophy—ethical, logical and psychological. They were published in 1840 by Rosenkranz from Hegel’s papers.
As a teacher and master Hegel inspired confidence in his pupils, and maintained discipline without pedantic interference in their associations and sports. On prize-days his addresses summing up the history of the school year discussed some topic of general interest. Five of these addresses are preserved. The first is an exposition of the advantages of a classical training, when it is not confined to mere grammar. “The perfection and grandeur of the master-works of Greek and Roman literature must be the intellectual bath, the secular baptism, which gives the first and unfading tone and tincture of taste and science.” In another address, speaking of the introduction of military exercises at school, he says: “These exercises, while not intended to withdraw the students from their more immediate duty, so far as they have any calling to it, still remind them of the possibility that every one, whatever rank in society he may belong to, may one day have to defend his country and his king, or help to that end. This duty, which is natural to all, was formerly recognized by every citizen, though whole ranks in the state have become strangers to the very idea of it.”
On the 16th of September 1811 Hegel married Marie von Tucher (twenty-two years his junior) of Nuremberg. She brought her husband no fortune, but the marriage was entirely happy. The husband kept a careful record of income and expenditure. His income amounted at Nuremberg to 1500 gulden (£130) and a house; at Heidelberg, as professor, he received about the same sum; at Berlin about 3000 thalers (£300). Two sons were born to them; the elder, Karl, became eminent as a historian. The younger, Immanuel, was born on the 24th of September 1816. Hegel’s letters to his wife, written during his solitary holiday tours to Vienna, the Netherlands and Paris, breathe of kindly and happy affection. Hegel the tourist—recalling happy days spent together; confessing that, were it not because of his sense of duty as a traveller, he would rather be at home, dividing his time between his books and his wife; commenting on the shop windows at Vienna; describing the straw hats of the Parisian ladies—is a contrast to the professor of a profound philosophical system. But it shows that the enthusiasm which in his days of courtship moved him to verse had blossomed into a later age of domestic bliss.
In 1812 appeared the first two volumes of his Wissenschaftder Logik, and the work was completed by a third in 1816. This work, in which his system was for the first time presented in what, with a few minor alterations, was its ultimate shape, found some audience in the world. Towards the close of his eighth session three professorships were almost simultaneously put within his reach—at Erlangen, Berlin and Heidelberg. The Prussian offer expressed a doubt that his long absence from university teaching might have made him rusty, so he accepted the post at Heidelberg, whence Fries had just gone to Jena (October 1816). Only four hearers turned up for one of his courses. Others, however, on the encyclopaedia of philosophy and the history of philosophy drew classes of twenty to thirty. While he was there Cousin first made his acquaintance, but a more intimate relation dates from Berlin. Among his pupils was Hermann F. W. Hinrichs, to whose Religion in itsInward Relation to Science (1822) Hegel contributed an important preface. The strangest of his hearers was an Esthonian baron, Boris d’Yrkull, who after serving in the Russian army came to Heidelberg to hear the wisdom of Hegel. But his books and his lectures were alike obscure to the baron, who betook himself by Hegel’s advice to simpler studies before he returned to the Hegelian system.
At Heidelberg Hegel was active in a literary way also. In 1817 he brought out the Encyklopädie d. philos. Wissenschaftenim Grundrisse (4th ed., Berlin, 1817; new ed., 1870) for use at his lectures. It is the only exposition of the Hegelian system as a whole which we have direct from Hegel’s own hand. Besides this work he wrote two reviews for the Heidelberg Jahrbücher—the first on F. H. Jacobi, the other a political pamphlet which called forth violent criticism. It was entitled a Criticism on the Transactions of the Estates of Württemberg in1815–1816. On the 15th of March 1815 King Frederick of Württemberg, at a meeting of the estates of his kingdom, laid before them the draft of a new constitution, in accordance with the resolutions of the congress of Vienna. Though an improvement on the old constitution, it was unacceptable to the estates, jealous of their old privileges and suspicious of the king’s intentions. A decided majority demanded the restitution of their old laws, though the kingdom now included a large population to which the old rights were strange. Hegel in his essay, which was republished at Stuttgart, supported the royal proposals, and animadverted on the backwardness of the bureaucracy and the landed interests. In the main he was right; but he forgot too much the provocation they had received, the usurpations and selfishness of the governing family, and the unpatriotic character of the king.
In 1818 Hegel accepted the renewed offer of the chair of philosophy at Berlin, vacant since the death of Fichte. The hopes which this offer raised of a position less precarious than that of a university teacher of philosophy were in one sense disappointed; for more than a professor Hegel never became. But his influence upon his pupils, and his solidarity with the Prussian government, gave him a position such as few professors have held.
In 1821 Hegel published the Grundlinien der Philosophie desRechts (2nd ed., 1840; ed. G. J. B. Bolland, 1901; Eng. trans., Philosophy of Right, by S. W. Dyde, 1896). It is a combined system of moral and political philosophy, or a sociology dominated by the idea of the state. It turns away contemptuously and fiercely from the sentimental aspirations of reformers possessed by the democratic doctrine of the rights of the omnipotent nation. Fries is stigmatized as one of the “ringleaders of shallowness” who were bent on substituting a fancied tie of enthusiasm and friendship for the established order of the state. The disciplined philosopher, who had devoted himself to the task of comprehending the organism of the state, had no patience with feebler or more mercurial minds who recklessly laid hands on established ordinances, and set them aside where they contravened humanitarian sentiments. With the principle that whatever is real is rational, and whatever is rational is real, Hegel fancied that he had stopped the mouths of political critics and constitution-mongers. His theory was not a mere formulation of the Prussian state. Much that he construed as necessary to a state was wanting in Prussia; and some of the reforms already introduced did not find their place in his system. Yet, on the whole, he had taken his side with the government. Altenstein even expressed his satisfaction with the book. In his disgust at the crude conceptions of the enthusiasts, who had hoped that the war of liberation might end in a realm of internal liberty, Hegel had forgotten his own youthful vows recorded in verse to Hölderlin, “never, never to live in peace with the ordinance which regulates feeling and opinion.” And yet if we look deeper we see that this is no worship of existing powers. It is rather due to an overpowering sense of the value of organization—a sense that liberty can never be dissevered from order, that a vital interconnexion between all the parts of the body politic is the source of all good, so that while he can find nothing but brute weight in an organized public, he can compare the royal person in his ideal form of constitutional monarchy to the dot upon the letter i. A keen sense of how much is at stake in any alteration breeds suspicion of every reform.
During his thirteen years at Berlin Hegel’s whole soul seems to have been in his lectures. Between 1823 and 1827 his activity reached its maximum. His notes were subjected to perpetual revisions and additions. We can form an idea of them from the shape in which they appear in his published writings. Those on Aesthetics, on the Philosophy of Religion, on the Philosophy ofHistory and on the History of Philosophy, have been published by his editors, mainly from the notes of his students, under their separate heads; while those on logic, psychology and the philosophy of nature are appended in the form of illustrative and explanatory notes to the sections of his Encyklopädie. During these years hundreds of hearers from all parts of Germany, and beyond, came under his influence. His fame was carried abroad by eager or intelligent disciples. At Berlin Henning served to prepare the intending disciple for fuller initiation by the master himself. Edward Gans and Heinrich Gustav Hotho carried the method into special spheres of inquiry. At Halle Hinrichs maintained the standard of Hegelianism amid the opposition or indifference of his colleagues.
Three courses of lectures are especially the product of his Berlin period: those on aesthetics, the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of history. In the years preceding the revolution of 1830, public interest, excluded from political life, turned to theatres, concert-rooms and picture-galleries. At these Hegel became a frequent and appreciative visitor and made extracts from the art-notes in the newspapers. In his holiday excursions, the interest in the fine arts more than once took him out of his way to see some old painting. At Vienna in 1824 he spent every moment at the Italian opera, the ballet and the picture-galleries. In Paris, in 1827, he saw Charles Kemble and an English company play Shakespeare. This familiarity with the facts of art, though neither deep nor historical, gave a freshness to his lectures on aesthetics, which, as put together from the notes of 1820, 1823, 1826, are in many ways the most successful of his efforts.
The lectures on the philosophy of religion are another application of his method. Shortly before his death he had prepared for the press a course of lectures on the proofs for the existence of God. In his lectures on religion he dealt with Christianity, as in his philosophy of morals he had regarded the state. On the one hand he turned his weapons against the rationalistic school, who reduced religion to the modicum compatible with an ordinary worldly mind. On the other hand he criticized the school of Schleiermacher, who elevated feeling to a place in religion above systematic theology. His middle way attempts to show that the dogmatic creed is the rational development of what was implicit in religious feeling. To do so, of course, philosophy becomes the interpreter and the superior. To the new school of E. W. Hengstenberg, which regarded Revelation itself as supreme, such interpretation was an abomination.
A Hegelian school began to gather. The flock included intelligent pupils, empty-headed imitators, and romantic natures who turned philosophy into lyric measures. Opposition and criticism only served to define more precisely the adherents of the new doctrine. Hegel himself grew more and more into a belief in his own doctrine as the one truth for the world. He was in harmony with the government, and his followers were on the winning side. Though he had soon resigned all direct official connexion with the schools of Brandenburg, his real influence in Prussia was considerable, and as usual was largely exaggerated in popular estimate. In the narrower circle of his friends his birthdays were the signal for congratulatory verses. In 1826 a formal festival was got up by some of his admirers, one of whom, Herder, spoke of his categories as new gods; and he was presented with much poetry and a silver mug. In 1830 the students struck a medal in his honour, and in 1831 he was decorated by an order from Frederick William III. In 1830 he was rector of the university; and in his speech at the tricentenary of the Augsburg Confession in that year he charged the Catholic Church with regarding the virtues of the pagan world as brilliant vices, and giving the crown of perfection to poverty, continence and obedience.
One of the last literary undertakings in which he took part was the establishment of the Berlin Jahrbücher für wissenschaftlicheKritik, in which he assisted Edward Gans and Varnhagen von Ense. The aim of this review was to give a critical account, certified by the names of the contributors, of the literary and philosophical productions of the time, in relation to the general progress of knowledge. The journal was not solely in the Hegelian interest; and more than once, when Hegel attempted to domineer over the other editors, he was met by vehement and vigorous opposition.
The revolution of 1830 was a great blow to him, and the prospect of democratic advances almost made him ill. His last literary work, the first part of which appeared in the PreussischeStaatszeitung, was an essay on the English Reform Bill of 1831. It contains primarily a consideration of its probable effects on the character of the new members of parliament, and the measures which they may introduce. In the latter connexion he enlarged on several points in which England had done less than many continental states for the abolition of monopolies and abuses. Surveying the questions connected with landed property, with the game laws, the poor, the Established Church, especially in Ireland, he expressed grave doubt on the legislative capacity of the English parliament as compared with the power of renovation manifested in other states of western Europe.
In 1831 cholera first entered Europe. Hegel and his family retired for the summer to the suburbs, and there he finished the revision of the first part of his Science of Logic. On the beginning of the winter session, however, he returned to his house in the Kupfergraben. On this occasion an altercation occurred between him and his friend Gans, who in his notice of lectures on jurisprudence had recommended Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Hegel, indignant at what he deemed patronage, demanded that the note should be withdrawn. On the 14th of November, after one day’s illness, he died of cholera and was buried, as he had wished, between Fichte and Solger.
Hegel in his class-room was neither imposing nor fascinating. You saw a plain, old-fashioned face, without life or lustre—a figure which had never looked young, and was now prematurely aged; the furrowed face bore witness to concentrated thought. Sitting with his snuff-box before him, and his head bent down, he looked ill at ease, and kept turning the folios of his notes. His utterance was interrupted by frequent coughing; every sentence came out with a struggle. The style was no less irregular. Sometimes in plain narrative the lecturer would be specially awkward, while in abstruse passages he seemed specially at home, rose into a natural eloquence, and carried away the hearer by the grandeur of his diction.
Philosophy.—Hegelianism is confessedly one of the most difficult of all philosophies. Every one has heard the legend which makes Hegel say, “One man has understood me, and even he has not.” He abruptly hurls us into a world where old habits of thought fail us. In three places, indeed, he has attempted to exhibit the transition to his own system from other levels of thought; but in none with much success. In the introductory lectures on the philosophy of religion he gives a rationale of the difference between the modes of consciousness in religion and philosophy (between Vorstellung and Begriff). In the beginning of the Encyklopädie he discusses the defects of dogmatism, empiricism, the philosophies of Kant and Jacobi. In the first case he treats the formal or psychological aspect of the difference; in the latter he presents his doctrine less in its essential character than in special relations to the prominent systems of his time. The Phenomenology of Spirit, regarded as an introduction, suffers from a different fault. It is not an introduction—for the philosophy which it was to introduce was not then fully elaborated. Even to the last Hegel had not so externalized his system as to treat it as something to be led up to by gradual steps. His philosophy was not one aspect of his intellectual life, to be contemplated from others; it was the ripe fruit of concentrated reflection, and had become the one all-embracing form and principle of his thinking. More than most thinkers he had quietly laid himself open to the influences of his time and the lessons of history.
The Phenomenology.
The Phenomenology
