Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Thinking the real as a rational process that advances through its own contradictions: nothing has truth in isolation, all is understood only within the whole, and spirit grasps itself only after the fact.
German · 1770 – 1831
The summit and turning point of , he builds, after , and , the most ambitious system of modern philosophy: a dialectic in which being, nature and spirit unfold and understand themselves as the moments of one rational process. He finishes the at Jena in 1806, as Napoleon enters the city (it appears the following year), writes the (1812–1816) at Nuremberg, then, from Berlin, reigns over German philosophical life, where the appear. At his death his school splits between Hegelian right and left, out of which comes : few bodies of thought have so marked the history, politics and art of the two following centuries.
The true is not to be thought as an inert substance that mind would know from outside: it is also subject, the Idea that unfolds, externalizes itself and returns to itself in knowing itself. This is absolute idealism.
Nothing fixed comes first: pure being, indeterminate, is indistinguishable from nothing, and their truth is becoming; every figure carries the contradiction that (aufhebt) it to a higher level.
History is not a chaos of accidents but a process oriented toward freedom: through the , the passions of great men accomplish, unbeknownst to them, a universal end that surpasses them.
The individual has substantial freedom only within the ethical whole that precedes them: is not an external constraint, it is the substance in which they finally become themselves.
To be free is not to follow one's caprice (Willkür): it is to determine oneself by reason and to be at home in the other; freedom is not asserted against institutions, it is fulfilled in them.
No truth stands alone: it is real only as the entire system that develops and mediates itself; a proposition taken in isolation is always one-sided, true only in its place within the whole that surpasses it.
Justification
Truth is not the agreement of an isolated proposition with a fact: it resides in the entire system that develops and mediates itself. A determination taken apart is always one-sided; it becomes true only in its place within the whole that engenders and surpasses it. This is not a mere internal consistency of statements: the true is the adequacy of a thing to its concept, reached when the whole has fully unfolded.
The true is the whole.Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface
Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface
Justification
Philosophy does not prescribe to the world what it ought to be: it always comes too late for that, when a shape of life has already grown old and can only be understood. It grasps its own time in thought, it does not run ahead of it. Hence its reserve toward reformers who set against the real the wish of an ought-to-be. And "what is rational is actual" does not bless the given: actual (wirklich) does not mean everything that exists, but what fulfills its concept.
The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Preface
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Preface · Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §6 Remark (the sense of "actual")
Justification
Doubt and skepticism are not the last word but a moment thought passes through and integrates: the is the path by which consciousness rises to absolute knowing, where the object is no longer an alien in-itself but spirit itself. The system therefore attains a definitive truth, not by a dogma posited at the outset, but as the result of a course that has endured the negative. This absolute knowing is not omniscience, but the form in which the subject recognizes itself in the object.
Phenomenology of Spirit, ch. VIII (absolute knowing)
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Justification
Against the abstract universal, a mere common mark obtained by erasing differences, Hegel thinks the : a universal that particularizes itself and lives in its individuals, like the concept or the state. Universals are therefore real, but as a structure that actualizes itself, neither separate Forms nor mere names.
Science of Logic, Doctrine of the Concept · Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §163-165
Justification
Suffering and the negative are not pure evils to be abolished: they are the labour of the negative, the power by which spirit tears itself apart, tests itself and rises. The life of spirit is the one that "endures death and maintains itself in it": nothing ripens without passing through the rending.
Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface (the power of the negative)
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Justification
Despite the slaughter-bench of history, the world is at bottom rational and ordered toward the good: evil and suffering are moments that the whole and reconciles. The reconciliation (Versöhnung) of spirit with actuality, not resignation to the tragic, is the last word of the system.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Preface · Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Lectures)
Justification
True freedom is a self-determination reconciled with necessity: to be free is to will rationally and to recognize oneself in what determines us, not to escape all determination. Hence a compatibilism, equidistant from the indeterminate free will that would choose without reason and the determinism that would deny the will.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Introduction §4-7
Justification
History is not a chaos of accidents but an oriented process: progress in the consciousness of freedom, from the Orient where one is free to the modern world where all are. Yet its direction is not imposed as a linear fate: it is accomplished through contingency and passion. This is the , which uses the private ends of great men to realize, unbeknownst to them, its universal end. The court of history, a phrase borrowed from Schiller, judges the peoples.
World history is the progress in the consciousness of freedom.Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Introduction
Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Introduction (Lectures) · Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §340-342
Justification
Society is not a sum of individuals that would preexist it: it is the ethical whole, , which has priority over them, not chronological but conceptual, and in which alone they attain their substantial freedom. Family, civil society and state are the moments of a that particularizes itself in its members and lives in them. The abstract individual, prior to any community, is a fiction.
I that is We, and We that is I.Phenomenology of Spirit, ch. IV (self-consciousness)
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §142-157 (ethical life) · Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §257-258 (the state)
Justification
To be free is not to follow one's caprice: the arbitrary will (Willkür) that chooses among given desires does not produce their content; it is only an apparent freedom, the freedom of the void that, in politics, turns into the frenzy of destruction. True freedom is the will that wills itself and finds itself at home in the other: it is fulfilled in rational institutions, not against them.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Introduction §§4-29 (§5 the freedom of the void, §15 Willkür)
Justification
The state is not a contract by which already-constituted individuals would associate to protect their interests: that would confuse it with civil society and dissolve the substantial into arbitrary choice. It is the actuality of the ethical Idea, first in relation to individuals not in time but in concept, the whole in which alone the universal and the particular are reconciled. Hegel credits with grounding the state on will and freedom, but refuses to make it the arbitrary will of summed individuals rather than the rational will.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §257-258 (and the §258 Remark)
Justification
Crime negates right; punishment is the negation of that negation, which annuls the crime and restores right. Deterrence treats the criminal like a dog threatened with a stick; retributivism, by contrast, honors him as a rational being, for his punishment is contained in his very deed and constitutes his own right. The measure is not literal like-for-like, but the equivalence of value between crime and punishment.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §90-103 (§99 negation of the negation, §100 the criminal honored, §99 Add. the stick and the dog)
Justification
To hold the criminal responsible and inflict on him what he deserves is to honor him as a rational being, author of his deed, and not to treat him as an animal trained by threat. Merit and fault are real, not mere instruments of social utility.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §100
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Justification
The morality of duty alone, in , is an empty formalism: from the mere form of law, non-contradictory universalizability, no determinate duty follows, and one can make it hold that "there ought to be property" as well as the contrary. The good has content only in concrete , the mores and institutions in which the individual is formed, not in abstract moral conscience (Moralität).
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §135 Remark (the empty formalism) · Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §142 ff. (Sittlichkeit)
Justification
The question here is no longer what makes an action good, but where morality draws its authority. Against the command of a transcendent God as against the purely formal law of reason, and without reducing to sentiment, Hegel roots obligation in reason become concrete: spirit objectified in the mores and institutions of a community, the Sitten from which takes its name. The authority of the good is thus immanent and historical, yet rational, not an arbitrary and revisable convention.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §142-156 (mores, Sittlichkeit)
Justification
The rational state is neither the arbitrary power of a master nor the absence of authority: Hegel defends a constitutional monarchy articulated into powers, corporations and estates (Stände), where authority holds by its rationality and not by force alone. Order is necessary, but an order in which rational law prevails.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §273-320 (the constitution)
Justification
Hegel distrusts direct democracy, where the many risk being but a formless mass given over to opinion: the rational will is embodied first in institutions and in the universal class of civil servants, not in the vote of all alone. But the corporations, the estates (Stände) and public opinion give the many a mediated voice: it is not a pure technocracy, rather an ordered competence in which the many are represented without being sovereign.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §287-297 and §303-305 (the executive, the universal class)
Justification
The true cannot be thought as inert matter that mind would observe from outside: it must be grasped also as subject. The real is the Idea that unfolds, externalizes itself, then returns to itself in knowing itself; its structure is rational, and matter has truth only through the thought that runs through it. Whether the reach of this idealism is cosmic or merely logical still divides readers.
Everything turns on grasping and expressing the true not only as substance, but equally as subject.Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface
Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface · Science of Logic, Doctrine of the Concept
Justification
Nothing fixed comes first: pure being, wholly indeterminate, is indistinguishable from nothing, and their truth is becoming. Every determination arises from a negation, and every figure carries within it the contradiction that drives it beyond itself, to be (aufgehoben) in a richer figure. Against 's motionless being, truth is process. The triad "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" is, incidentally, not his.
Science of Logic, Doctrine of Being (being, nothing, becoming) · Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §§86-88
Justification
Faith and reason do not oppose each other: religion and philosophy have the same object, the true, but under two forms. Religion grasps it in representations (Vorstellung), narratives and images; philosophy thinks it in the concept (Begriff). Philosophy therefore does not destroy religion: it raises its content to its highest form.
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §573 · Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Lectures)
Justification
The philosophy of history is a theodicy: it justifies reason at work in the world, not by denying evil but by passing through it. History is a slaughter-bench on which the happiness of peoples and the virtue of individuals are sacrificed, and yet nothing great is done there without passion: the negative is the motor by which spirit fulfills itself. It is a theodicy without external providence, immanent to the process.
Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Introduction (Lectures) · Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface (the power of the negative)
Justification
Work forms the one who performs it: it is by shaping the thing that the bondsman of the master–slave dialectic gains a self-consciousness that the master, an idle consumer, has lost. But Hegel also sees, in modern civil society, the work that dispossesses and produces the wretched rabble, beginning the analysis of that would take up.
Phenomenology of Spirit, ch. IV (lordship and bondage) · Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §189-245 (the system of needs, the rabble)
Justification
Art's sole end is not pleasure: it gives the Idea a sensuous form, and is thus one of the three ways, with religion and philosophy, in which absolute spirit knows itself. But because modern inwardness overflows every sensuous form, art, on the side of its highest vocation, is for us "a thing of the past": not that we stop making it, but that it is no longer where the highest is uttered.
The beautiful is the sensuous shining of the Idea.Lectures on Aesthetics, Introduction
Lectures on Aesthetics, Introduction (Lectures)
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Justification
The divine is not a separate beyond posited outside the world: the Absolute is coming to itself in nature, history and human consciousness. There is no intact world-behind, but a process in which the infinite realizes itself in the finite and recognizes itself there. Yet this Absolute exceeds every finite moment, which forbids reducing it to a pure immanent naturalism: hence a position of immanence, but a qualified one.
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §553-577 (absolute spirit) · Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Lectures)
Justification
Hegel affirms God, but as that knows itself, not as the transcendent, personal creator of classical theism: religion and philosophy have the same content, which the former represents and the latter thinks. This God, thus rethought, was read both as the Christian God (Right Hegelians) and as divinized humanity (Left Hegelians, among them and ): the debate over his theism remains open.
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §1 and §573 · Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Lectures)
Justification
Nature and spirit are not explained by mechanism alone: an immanent teleology is at work in them, not a design imposed from outside, but the end the concept gives itself in realizing itself. The whole precedes and orients the development of its parts.
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §204-212 (teleology)