Georg Friedrich Hegel
|
Born: 1770
Died: 1831, at the age of 61
Country of origin: Germany
- Areas of focus: Idealism
- Major Books written by Georg Friedrich Hegel:
- "Phenomenology of Spirit" (1807)
- "Science of Logic" (1816)
- "Elements of the Philosophy of Right" (1821)
- "Lectures on Aesthetics" (1829)
- "Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences" (1830)
- "Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion" (1832)
- Cocktail summary of Georg Friedrich Hegel's main ideas:
Hegel is remembered primarily for 2 reasons: first for writing some of
the most difficult books ever to come from the pen of a philosopher,
and second for his idea of the "dialectic": the progression of ideas from
mutual opposition to an eventual fusing together into a synthesis of
opposites, an idea which inspired both considerable praise and
considerable criticism.
Hegel represents the pinnacle of the Age of Reason, and its logical
conclusion. The project begun by Rene Descartes, The Age of Reason, in
which all "particulars" of knowledge could be explained within a
single, Universal, all-encompassing theory, saw its final result in the
monumental Philosophy of Hegel. In addition to herding all ideas into
one single corral of theory, he contributed a novel idea which modified
the inherited logic of Aristotle.
Aristotle's "first move" of Logic was simply this: "A cannot equal
non-A". Ideas begin with a positive statement, which are met by an
opposing statement, and the purpose of Logic is to choose the correct
statement, then discard the incorrect one. If you say the earth is
round and I say the earth is flat, logically only one statement is
right and the other statement is wrong. A and non-A are opposed, and
only one position wins in the end.
But Hegel argued that ideas follow a more organic path towards
resolution. Instead of 2 states of opposition battling for supremacy,
ideas flow in and out of each other, with one statement (a "thesis")
opposing another statement (an "antithesis"), but with both statements
containing an element of truth. Resolution is reached with the thesis
and antithesis merging into a Synthesis, a union of opposites in which
the thesis and antithesis cancel each other out and create a new
solution that is greater than the 2 opposites. Hegel described this
pattern of logic as "Dialectic", with the word referring to "dialect"
or "dialog", a conversation between 2 positions.
Hegel called this synthesis of opposites a "Sublation", which is a
condition in which the new solution both absorbs and transcends both of
the original opposing positions. Hegel applied this description not
only to ideas but to all of human history. One force - which can be
either an idea, a morality, a nation, a Class, etc. - asserts itself,
only to become unstable and be superceeded by an opposing force, which
itself becomes unstable. The 2 forces interplay back and forth, like 2
instruments playing different melodies, until eventually the 2 merge
into a harmony that didn't exist before but contains elements of both
original forces.
Hegel saw this constant state of flux as a creative process, in which
Truth is defined basically by negotiation rather than by absolute
arbitration. The Crusades of Absolute Truth are replaced by the
bargaining-tables of Relative Truth. Hegel didn't view this as an
endless process, like a pendulum endlessly swinging back and forth, but
argued that it was linear, headed towards a final goal. This goal was a
state that he called "Absolute Knowledge", a state in which all
subjectivity is removed from all knowledge, leaving only a perfect,
pure, objective view of the "Absolute": pure thought or, as he called
it, "pure Spirit". (Hegel used the word "Spirit" a lot to refer to
Reason.)
Hegel argued that there were 3 paths to Absolute Knoweldge: Art,
Religion, and Philosophy. Art deals with the senses and serves as a
sort of medium between the senses and Reason. Religion deals with what
he called "picture thinking", visualizations of the Absolute, and
therefore is also basically associated with the senses. Philosophy is
the the most direct route to Absolute Knowledge, he argued, since it
deals with pure, imageless perception of ideas. All 3 paths to
knowledge point in the same directions towards the Absolute, but simply
use different methods.
He focused a lot of attention on Art, and used the traditional division
of the Arts into 5 types, in order of priority: Architecture,
Sculpture, Painting, Music, and Poetry. He argued that the quality of a
piece of artwork is dependent on its level of organization and how well
all of its elements integrate with the overall creation. Art could have
no irrational elements, no accidents, no chance, no untidiness. If a
painter is facing a model sitting for a portrait, the artist should
paint that person's ideal likeness, not necessarily their photographic
likeness. He said, "It makes a great difference whether the artist
merely reproduces a person's facial features, as it quietly presents
itself to him, in its surface and external configuration, or whether
the artist insightfully represents the true features which express the
subject's own soul." In other words, paint what the person should look
like, not what they actually look like.
Hegel argued that Poetry was the highest of all the Arts, because it
was the form of Art with the greatest independence of its expression
from its medium - pure ideas expressed in the medium of language.
Unlike a picture, which needs to be expressed within certain boundaries
of form and color, a poetic idea can be expressed in any number of
words in different languages. The word for "toad" in 5 different
languages may all sound very different, but they all point to the same
idea. Thus a poetic idea enjoys the greatest amount of freedom than all
the other Arts, with Poetry being the Art most like Philosophy. In
fact, Hegel believed that only Poetry could heal the growing divide
between Religion and Reason in his time.
Hegel talked of the "End of Art", by which he meant that, over the past
3,000 or so years of history, Art has experienced all possible creative
impulses and has produced all possible forms of expression. By his
time, Hegel argued, Art had reached a point of exhaustion, with the
only future creative options being to revisit old territory and simply
producing variations on creative ground already covered. Just as every
revolution eventually becomes solidified into the status quo, so too
does every artistic innovation eventually just become another "ism",
with there only ever being a finite number of possible isms. At the end
of the road, Art can only look back into itself, no longer looking
ahead. This was similar to how he viewed his own Philosophy, portraying
it as a culmination of all previous Philosophy into a state of unified
perfection. (Hegel was not known for his modesty).
The legacy of Hegel after his death was almost more significant than
his life. His ideas were seized upon by several later important
thinkers, with both positive and negative intentions. Hegel's students
broke into 3 factions after his death, all loosely called the "Young
Hegelians". The so-called "Right Hegelians" used his ideas to build up
Christian theology around his idea of dialectical evolution of
doctrine. The "Center Hegelians" were basically the reverse of the
Right, in that they re-interpreted Christian doctrine from the
perspective of Hegel's ideas, trying to re-package Christianity in a
form more acceptable to the Age of Reason. And the "Left Hegelians"
went the other way and dismissed all religious dogma and used Hegel's
ideas to replace doctrine with Rationalistic, Atheist philosophy.
The most famous of the Left Hegelians were Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels. They saw all of history as a dialectic battle between social
Classes, and developed their idea of so-called "Dialectic Materialism",
in which all of history is defined by Hegel's description of the back
and forth interplay of thesis, antithesis, and eventual union into a
synthesis of opposites and the creation of a new state of being, in
their case a synthesis of Classes into an egalitarian Classless
society. The key to this application of Hegel's ideas was that the Left
Hegelians insisted that this evolution of forces was inevitable and as
predetermined as the moon's orbit. The ebbing flow of history could not
be changed, only understood, and the eventual Classless future was a
foregone conclusion, and they appealed to Hegel's dialectic as
scientist would appeal to Mathematics.
Perhaps the most significant effect of Hegel's philosophy was the
backlash it created in the following century of Romanticism.
Existentialist writers like Schopenhaur, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche
viewed Hegel's entire system of Philosophy with contempt, viewing it as
totally divorced from reality, lost in a maze of meaningless words.
Hegel viewed all of history as being motivated by ideas, whereas the
Existentialst writers argued that history is motivated by non-rational
forces, by a subliminal "Will", by instinct rather than intellect. If
Hegel's thought represtented the pinnacle of Philosophy then it was
time to climb down from the mountain and look at the real world, the
Existentialists argued. His ideas are notoriously difficult to follow
and they represent a highly-developed, deeply-layered monument to human
thought, but has little to do with how the world really operates,
argued the Existentialists.
- Georg Friedrich Hegel praised & criticized:
- Hegel has never had a shortage of admirers and detractors. His
admirers have been inspired by his description of the dialectic nature
of ideas, applying the organic yin-yang'ish ebbing and flowing of ideas
to every possible field, from history to biology to romance and to
politics. Many who argue that there is a little bit of truth in every
statement, and that no combatant is without mixed motives in any
battle, refer to the idea of the Dialectic as a way to explain the
result of any struggle and as the best path towards resolving any
current conflicts.
However, Hegel has also been soundly criticized for the same reason,
primarily to how he applied his Dialectic reasoning to politics. His
idea of the back and forth interplay of forces was applied to how
societies are organized and governed, and his conclusion was that the
form of government that eventually emerges as victorious in the battle
between parties is the best possible government. He once said,
"Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable"
(In other words, That which is, is right.) and he used the kingdom of
Prussia as an example of the "synthesis" of opposing political ideas,
which transcended all other political "thesis" and therefore contained
all of the best parts of the forces that it transcended.
He elabortated on this idea by arguing that it is only through
political organzation that Reason is able to express itself. He once
said, "Only in the State does man have a rational existence... Man owes
his entire existence to the State, and has his being within it alone.
Whatever worth and spiritual reality he possesses are his solely by
virtue of the State." The King of Prussia was, therefore, one of
Hegel's biggest fans...
Hegel also saw this same kind of Dialectic interplay of forces in the
rise of the French Revolution, in which the forces of real political
freedoms were supposedly exerting themselves on the world stage, in
opposition to the traditional power-base. The revolutionaries
represented the "antithesis" to the French monarchy's "thesis", and the
interplay would produce a new political "synthesis" that contained all
the most rational elements of both positions. He saw Napoleon as a
symbol of this new synthsis in political form.
This was a fore-runner of Darwin's "Survivial of the Fittest" idea,
where ethics is basically defined by strength. It amounted to a "might
makes right" argument, and the ultimate failure of this idea was
realized in the rise of the Nazi party in the 1930's. According to
Hegel's arguments, the Nazis transcended all of the lesser forces they
opposed and they therefore represented the best, most morally superior
form of government. But even the most ardent Hegelian argeed that this
wasn't right, and realized that perphaps the most inferior force
sometimes wins the dialectical battle. Thus, Hegel is sometimes seen as
a defender of Totalitarianism.
Besides being difficult to read, another common criticism of Hegel is
that he changed the rules of Logic, and thereby innaugurated the modern
area of relative truth, in which there are no absolutes of any kind,
even in science. If a thesis and an antithesis are always partial
mirrors of each other, with the final synthesis being a type of
scavenging of scraps of truth in order to build a new semi-truth, then
we have no basis for Law or Ethics or Morality or even Science. Hegel
would have replied that his method of synthesis is the only way to
preserve Truth and Logic, since reality is never black and white,
always grey. For this reason Hegel is sometimes seen as the leaky tire
of the Age of Reason, in which the air of Absolute Truths began to
escape through a Philosophical puncture.
- Notable Facts about Georg Friedrich Hegel:
- Religious affiliation:
Religion, for Hegel, was a complex topic. He viewed religion as one
type of perception on an increasing scale of clarity, along with Art
and Philosophy - Art, Religion, and Philosophy are all different kinds
of lenses through which a person perceives reality. But he argued that
his overall theory of knowledge made faith almost irrelevant. He called
on people to know facts, not have faith in facts.
He considered religion to be an essential component of society and
argued for the creation of a form of "Folk Religion", in which religion
was cleansed of its inherited institutional baggage and left with a set
of stories and morality-tales and names that reflected greater truths
for the average person. He saw this as an attempt to make abstract
philosophical ideas more accessible to the common man. He argued that
the growing division between Religion and Reason of his time could be
healed only by Poetry. This was an idea he got from his friend
Friedrich Hölderlin, who was a poet. They both argued for the
creation of a popular Folk Religion which they described as a
"Monotheism of Reason and heart, Polytheism of imagination and Art."
Hegel never really explained whether or not he believed specific
aspects of the Bible. He was primarily concerned with how clearly they
illustrated some greater philosophical concept, rather than whether or
not they were true themselves. Such as, he argued that the story of
God's incarnation in human form in the person of Jesus was a
"pre-reflective expression" of the synthesis of universals and
particulars. Jesus was a type of "picture thinking" which symbolized
the union of opposites.
He argued that Philosophy is a more pure form of perception than
Religion, since Philosophy contemplates absolute reality in the form of
pure ideas. Religion also thinks about absolute reality but in the form
of "picture thinking", as he called it, consisting of persons and
story-narratives. Religion is superior to Art, he argued, since Art
"only" perceives absolute reality through symbolic expression. So on a
scale of Art-Religion-Philosophy, Religion falls in the middle in terms
of a useful tool for perceiving the Universe.
Hegel used religious images and language to express a lot of his ideas,
but it was primarily a tool for him, and not a source of spiritual
salvation in the traditional sense. He once said, "If religion in a
human being is founded only on a feeling, the latter has no other
function than to be the feeling of his dependency, and thus a dog would
be the best Christian. A dog even has feelings of salvation when its
hunger is satisfied by a bone."
- Hegel didn't get married until he was 40 years old. When he
did, his sister Christiane suffered a mental breakdown due to an
apparently deep-seated attachment to her brother. She was committed to
an insane-asylum in 1820, so deep was her discontent. After Hegel died
in 1831, she drowned herself within 3 months.
- Hegel died of cholera, during an epidemic in Berlin.
- Quotes:
- "Reason is the substance of the universe, the design of the world is absolutely rational."
- "Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights."
- "God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow."
- "The only thought which Philosophy brings with it to the
contemplation of history is the simple conception of Reason, that
Reason is sovereign of the world, that the history of the world,
therefore, presents us with a rational process... Reason is the
substance of the Universe."
- "This unity is consequently the absolute and all truth, the Idea which thinks itself."
- "But what is Spirit? It is the one immutably homogeneous
Infinite, pure Identity, which in its second phrase separates itself
from itself and makes this second aspect its own polar opposite, namely
as existence for and in Self as contrasted with the Universal."
- "Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable."
- "Mark this well, you proud men of action! You are, after
all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought." (In
other words, Philosophers outrank mere Politicians...)
- "Only in the State does man have a rational existence...
Man owes his entire existence to the State, and has his being within it
alone. Whatever worth and spiritual reality he possesses are his solely
by virtue of the State."
- "I saw the Emperor, that world soul!" (on seeing Napoleon riding through town one day.)
- "The German spirit is the spirit of the new world. Its aim
is the realization of Absolute Truth as the unlimited
self-determination of Freedom."
- "America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the
ages that lie before us, the burden of the world's history shall reveal
itself."
- "The essence of Matter is Gravity. The essence of Spirit is Freedom."
- Other stuff going on during Georg Friedrich Hegel's life:
- History:
- Art:
- Music:
- Literature:
- Religious trends: