G.W.F Hegel

10 Key excerpts on "G.W.F Hegel"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  A Companion to Hegel

  • Stephen Houlgate, Michael Baur, Stephen Houlgate, Michael Baur(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  G.W.F. Hegel: An Introduction to His Life and Thought STEPHEN HOULGATE Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) is one of the giants of the European philosophical tradition. Indeed, in the eyes of many the depth and sophistication of his thought are matched only in the work of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. Hegel’s texts and lectures are by no means easy to read, but his influence on the modern world has been profound and wide-ranging. His thought helped spawn Marxism, existentialism, American pragmatism and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School; his philosophy of religion has left its mark on theologians, such as Karl Barth, Hans Küng, and Rowan Williams; he was considered by Ernst Gombrich to be the “father” of art history; 1 and he continues to provide inspiration to many contemporary philosophers, including Judith Butler, John McDowell, and Robert Brandom. Hegel is worth studying, however, not just because of the influence he has exercised, but also because of the intrinsic merits of his thought. He has challenging and profound views on thought and being, nature and natural science, consciousness and language, human freedom in society and the state, and on history, art, religion, and the history of philosophy. The bulk of the chapters in this collection examine aspects of Hegel’s mature thought, which is set out in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and the texts and lectures Hegel produced in the years following the Phenomenology ’s publication. All of the principal parts of Hegel’s system are covered in this collection, including the philosophy of nature and philosophy of subjective spirit, which are often overlooked in studies of Hegel

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Debates in Nineteenth-Century European Philosophy

  Essential Readings and Contemporary Responses

  • Kristin Gjesdal(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  IV G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831)

  Introduction

  Few works in philosophy have been as influential as G. W. F.

  Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

  (1807). While intended as an introduction to his system, the Phenomenology presents the world-historical panorama through which Hegel retrieves his path to the position he would designate, against subjective idealism (Kant and Fichte) and objective idealism (Schelling), as an absolute idealism. With its employment of intellectual figures and historical examples, Hegel’s work would inspire Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, and Wilhelm Dilthey, though they all sought to position themselves against Hegel and the Hegelianism that came to dominate intellectual discourse in Germany. As a result of Alexandre Kojève’s lectures in Paris in the 1930s, Hegel’s phenomenology, and in particular his analysis of the struggle for recognition, also came to influence generations of French philosophers.

  Hegel’s discussion of the struggle for recognition has been—and still is—at the center of Hegel scholarship, both in a German and in an Anglophone context. In “From Desire to Recognition: Hegel’s Account of Human Sociality,” Axel Honneth approaches Hegel’s notion of recognition from a psychoanalytical point of view and sees the encounter with an other as, ultimately, involving a subject’s encounter with its own nature. This encounter, Honneth argues, makes possible a proto-morality that is part of the very constitution of human self-consciousness. Robert Pippin’s response to Honneth, “On Honneth’s Interpretation of Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology of Self-Consciousness’,” questions this view (and the usefulness of the psychoanalytic framework for our understanding of Hegel’s turn to recognition) and argues that the struggle for recognition highlights a relation that, although constitutive for cognition and reason, cannot (yet) be ascribed a moral dimension.

  Further Reading

  • Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  From Kant to Lévi-Strauss

  The Background to Contemporary Critical Theory

  • Jon Simons(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  Hegel hopes in the Phenomenology to have worked through the process of historical development to the point where he can begin to set out a philo-sophical system proper: a task which occupied the rest of his life, and which is perhaps best represented by his Science of Logic (1812–16). From Hegel to Here As the last great idealist, Hegel spurred on the competing modern materialisms which all sought to bring idealism back down to earth. From the sharp bump to Hegel’s head delivered by the hard rock of scientific-analytical scepticism for any philosophy dealing with spirit, to the soft landing of Marxist respect for the granddaddy of dialec-tics, which gently sets him on his feet, a range of receptions have dealt differently with Hegel’s impact. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 43 One of Hegel’s biggest impacts was on political and social theory. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1821) celebrated enlightened capitalist modernity, but cautioned that it rode roughshod over ethically significant elements of the feudal tradition, such as the ideal of the politically neutral monarch or the sophisticated artisan identities supported by the guild system, as well as undermining the peasantry and creating instead an indigent rabble. His ideal of a reformed Prussian state which would balance monarchy, democracy and the various ‘estates’ of society in an earthly expression of a harmonious divine ideal has been interpreted in very contrasting ways. It has been taken as an archetype by various Right Hegelians, who valorise existing social forms as positive expressions of the totality, resisting the notion of thorough-going revolutionary change. Most recently, Fukuyama has portrayed capitalist democracy as the final social form, confirming Hegel’s announcement of the beginning of the end of history, an end which will come with the universalisation of capitalism through globalisation.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Historiae Mundi

  Studies in Universal History

  • Bloomsbury Publishing(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  14 Universal Historiography and World History according to Hegel Allegra de Laurentiis Introduction G.W.F. Hegel’s theory of the relation between history and historiography must be culled from a variety of texts, 1 principally the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History , 2 delivered in the last decade of his life, and the political philosophy of his system, that is, the Philosophy of Right of 1821 3 and its abbreviated version in the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (1830). 4 In the Lectures , ‘world history’ ( Weltgeschichte ) and occasionally ‘universal world history’ ( allgemeine Weltgeschichte ) refer to the history of mankind as a whole. In the Philosophy of Right , however, ‘world history’ is more often used to refer to international events peculiar to modern history and their foreseeable developments – not unlike our contemporary use of ‘globalisation’. To begin with, the terminology at work in these texts requires a few clarifications. Hegel’s term Geschichte refers to the open-ended, non-cyclical aspects of human life activities on earth. 5 It denotes the social, political, economic, also artistic, religious, even psychological and physi-ological self-transformations of the species over time – the totality of which he calls ‘world spirit’ ( Weltgeist ). Accordingly, ‘spirit’ does not denote a ‘substance’ in the traditional metaphysical sense 6 but rather the totality of processes and activities set in motion by human needs and actions. When the focus is on the dynamic aspect of this super-individual agency, Hegel calls it ‘the movement of spirit’. The study of spirit’s movement is the study of history. Hegel postulates and claims to prove that history exhibits a pattern. 7 In keeping with Aristotelian and Stoic conceptions of world-immanent logos, he calls this discernible pattern the ‘logic’ of world spirit or ‘reason in history’.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Hegel-Marx Connection

  • T. Burns, I. Fraser(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  It is arguably the case that the form of social and political action that most takes his eye as the catalyst for progressive social change is revolution. In Marx’s view social conflict quite often comes to a head in a revolution which inaugurates a period represent- ing a new and higher stage in our history. Hegel In understanding Hegel’s views of history we have also to understand his view of philosophy because the two are intertwined. Hegel regards history as it is ordinarily understood as the outward manifestation of a deeper process of the developing of spirit: History is a conscious, self-mediating process – Spirit emptied out into time . . . The goal, absolute knowledge, or spirit that knows itself as spirit, has for its path the recollection of the spirits as they are in 200 Howard Williams themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their realm. Their preservation, regarded from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is history; but regarded from the side of their comprehended organization, it is the science of know- ing in the sphere of appearance: the two together, comprehended his- tory, form alike the inwardizing and the Calvary of absolute spirit, the actuality, truth, and certainty of his throne, without which he would be lifeless and alone. Only from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth for him his own infinitude. 2 Theology also comes into this general philosophical vision of the reali- sation of spirit. True philosophy for Hegel comprises within it the most important teachings of the Christian religion. The key concept in Hegel’s philosophy is, in our view, the concept of spirit or Geist. The concept of Geist states in the shortest form possible Hegel’s philosophical idealism. Hegel is not an idealist in the everyday moral sense that he expects well of other individuals and the world in general, but in the deeper philosophical sense that he thinks that reality is ultimately thought or idea.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Modern European Philosophers

  • Wayne P. Pomerleau(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  252 Modern European Philosophers, First Edition. Wayne P. Pomerleau. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 16 Source: Sophus Williams/The Library of Congress/Public Domain Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel -16. Biography 253 16.1 Overview Hegel’s absolute idealism was influenced by the philosophies of other German idealists, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, while being distinctly different. Hegel is, arguably, the last great revolution- ary thinker (after Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant) in modern European philosophy – such that his successors have to come to terms with his system. While he is a radically original thinker, he can also be regarded as the first great historian of Western philosophy and can mine this expertise to strengthen the development of his own system. 1 He is unusual, up to his time, in being both a numerical monist, like Spinoza (as opposed to a generic monist like Hobbes or Berkeley), and an idealist – believing that all reality is one and spiritual in nature. And, perhaps most striking of all, recognizing the inadequacies of the old Aristotelian logic for coming to know ultimate reality, he invented a new dialectical logic. 16.2 Biography Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born on August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart, in southwest Germany, the son of Georg Ludwig Hegel, a civil servant in the department of finance, and Maria Magdalena Louisa Hegel, the daughter of a lawyer in the high court of justice. His only sister, Christiane, born in 1773, never married and suffered mental problems. Their brother, Georg Ludwig Hegel, born in 1776, died fighting for Napoleon in the Russian campaign of 1812. They seem to have enjoyed a comfortable, stable family life in that Protestant enclave in Catholic Swabia in what was then still part of the “Holy Roman Empire.” Hegel started school in 1773 and seems to have been an earnest, diligent student who was, how- ever, not considered gifted.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Hegel and History

  • Will Dudley(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  World history, for Hegel, may remain a singular and even unilinear history of spirit, but that process is not thereby contraposed to the particularity and variety of empirical reality. Rather, developmental world history itself incorporates difference, instantiating “the differentiation of . . . spirit within itself.” 55 In recent years much discussion has been devoted to the concept of “alternative modernities.” 56 To the extent that this discussion thematizes diverse types of modernity, 57 Hegel would be an unlikely proponent. For him modernity—and his theory of history is also an account of moder- nity—expresses a uniform logic, depicting development of a concept of spirit whose structures derives from his logic and metaphysics. But Hegel does not thereby claim that a developmental account of modernity can- not assume multiple forms and expressions. Multiple accounts flow from appreciation of how history—tellingly fashioned as world rather than universal history—requires empirical diversity for its concrete articulation. Hegel himself advances a conception of history that forefronts European considerations. And a Eurocentric bias may attach to any account rooted in notions of freedom, spirit, and subjectivity as derived from the Western philosophical tradition. Still, appreciation of the nuanced nature of his account of history reveals an openness to alternative accounts, including those that supplement his own Western orientation. Thesis 5 I have argued that Hegel’s philosophy of history, far from serving as a positivistic apotheosis of the existing realities of Europe and European modernity, is advanced rather as part of a normative reconstruction, one that, while acknowledging the achievements of the West, also represents a challenge to any narrow understanding of those achievements. This point can be further developed, however, by regarding the philosophy of history as much as a normative-practical as a normative-theoretical under-

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Hegel, the End of History, and the Future

  • Eric Michael Dale(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Hegel and the philosophy of history 148 philosopher will make use of the seeming contingencies of history, because ordinary people can grasp the story of history as a sequence of events, and because the external facts of history are, in fact, the empirical forms of the one universal a priori world plan. Gadamer (1977: 5) calls such an ahistorical stance the “alienation of the historical consciousness – the noble and slowly perfected art of holding ourselves at a critical distance in dealing with wit- nesses of past life.” His philosophy of hermeneutical retrieval, grounded in Heidegger but harking back to Hegel’s open-ended historical consciousness, is an attempt, in part, to overcome such alienation and close the historical dis- tance between the world and the observer via the medium of language. The Fichtean philosopher, however, uses history for his or her own purposes and is willing to cast it aside when it is no longer useful for elucidating the inner logic of the Weltplan. In fact, the philosopher does not actually need history at all, for history has nothing to do with origins (though it has its own definite origin), and philosophy cares only for the a priori sources of knowledge. The philosopher cannot assert that which has never actually occurred (Antony won the battle of Actium; Napoleon was victorious at Waterloo; Tokugawa’s forces were routed at Sekigahara) – the philosopher also dwells within the temporal realm, and is bound to the contingent appearances of the world. But the phil- osopher knows the truth, and as such is able to assert that which is; and should the deep thinker actually arrive at the absolute within the sphere of historical time, “he need not be surprised at this, for only on this account is he a phil- osopher” (SW 7:141). Because the philosopher grasps the a priori principles of history, he already knows all that history contains, or could ever contain, of necessity, including the past, all present epochs, as well as the future.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Hegel's Dialectic

  • Gordon Rogoff(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  For that reason it often appears that one need only stretch Hegel's interpretation of the history of philosophy slightly to make the positive-reasonable content in earlier thinking evident beyond a doubt. But in Heidegger's case, things are not so very different. To be sure, the history of metaphysics is articulated in his thought as being's fate for us (Seinsgeschick), which is seen as determining both the present and the future. And according to its inner necessity this his-tory, the history of obliviousness to being, moves towards its most radical consequence. But Heidegger also sees the continuing influ-ence and power of the origin of thought. It continues to prevail even in us; it is there in Aristotle's physis, in the enigma of the analogía 112 Hegel's Dialectic entis, in Leibniz's thirst for existence, in Schelling's ground in God and thus, ultimately, in Hegel's unity of the speculative and reasonable. There is indirect evidence of the distance Hegel was able to main-tain from his own method and thus also, of the proximity of Heidegger to Hegel in spite of the former's criticism of the latter for being too Greek. That is in the relationship both have to the spec-ulative spirit of the German language. Over the period of a century and a half we have, after all, grown accustomed to the way Hegel uses the German language in developing his concepts. Every step of the way the philosophically trained and historically oriented reader en-counters the contagious power of his language in the decades of think-ing where Hegel continued to prevail. The real presence which Hegel has in the language of his contemporaries does not consist in a few rickety concepts such as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis or subjective, objective, and absolute spirit. Nor, moreover, does it consist in the numerous schematic applications of these concepts which were made in the most diverse fields of research in the first half of the nineteenth century.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Nineteenth-Century Philosophy of Religion

  The History of Western Philosophy of Religion, Volume 4

  • Graham Oppy, N. N. Trakakis(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4

  G. W. F. HEGEL

  Paul Redding

  It is said that reading her husband’s posthumously published lectures on the philosophy of religion had caused the devout and pious widow, Marie Hegel, considerable distress (Pinkard 2000: 577). How could the man she knew to have been a good Lutheran express the heretical views that were to be found there? This anecdote captures well the apparent ambiguity that marked the attitude to religion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), an ambiguity that was at the heart of the undoing of the ‘Hegelianism’ of his followers in the years after his death.

  As is well known, after Hegel’s death in 1831, his followers soon split into ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ factions, and while this split is now remembered in terms of its political consequences (it was from the Left Hegelian faction that the doctrine of Marxism was eventually to emerge), the context of the split was a religious one. A contest over the properly ‘Hegelian’ philosophical attitude to religion had been sparked by the publication in 1835–6 of David Strauss’ The Life of Jesus Critically Examined . While the conservative Right defended Hegelianism as a philosophy that reflected Christian orthodoxy, the Left came to see it as a humanistic doctrine of the historical emancipation of humanity. However, while this was the first internal breach of Hegelianism, the implications of Hegel’s philosophy for religious belief had been contentious since his rise to prominence in the 1820s.

  Only a few years after his appointment to the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin in 1818, Hegel started to attract accusations of ‘pantheism’ and, a little later, ‘atheism’ from more orthodox thinkers. Here the issues seemed to centre on the consequences of Hegel’s metaphysics for the traditional issues of the personality of God and the immortality of the soul. On the former, a defence of Hegel could appeal to the fact that Hegel had himself, in his first major work, the Phenomenology of Spirit (1808), explicitly characterized his position against Baruch Spinoza, the prototypical pantheist (see Vol. 3, Ch. 11): while Spinoza had conceived ‘the absolute’ as ‘substance’, Hegel had asserted that it had to be equally understood as ‘subject’ (Hegel 1977: §17). But exactly what was meant by this formula, and whether it amounted to the idea of a personal God, was in fact far from clear. Indeed, Hegel elsewhere clearly suggested that the existence of God was dependent on the existence of the human beings who had thoughts about

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book