This Day in Philosophy — 27 August: the birth of Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart on 27 August 1770. Today is the 256th anniversary of his birth.

He died in Berlin on 14 November 1831. The sixty-one years in between produced the most ambitious system in modern philosophy — and left behind an argument that has now run for two hundred years.

Three room-mates at Tübingen#

At the theological seminary in Tübingen, Hegel shared a room with two other students: Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Schelling.

All three were young in the first years of the French Revolution, and all three greeted it with enthusiasm. The story goes that together they planted a liberty tree.

The detail is not biographical decoration. Hegel's entire philosophy rests on the intuition that something genuinely happened in history — that after 1789 the world had changed irreversibly.

His academic progress was slow. Until he was thirty-six he worked as a private tutor and a newspaper editor, then as headmaster of a grammar school in Nuremberg. He took the Berlin chair only after passing fifty.

The Phenomenology of Spirit#

The Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807 is reckoned among the hardest books in the history of philosophy — and among the most influential.

What it does is unusual. Hegel does not put forward a theory and defend it; he narrates from within the stages through which consciousness passes as it goes beyond itself. He begins with sense-certainty and moves on to perception, understanding, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion and absolute knowing.

Each stage collapses under its own internal contradiction and gives birth to the next. That is the dialectic.

The familiar thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula is not in fact Hegel's; it is a later simplification, and it makes the process far too mechanical. What Hegel means is that a position discloses its own inadequacy by the logic internal to it.

Master and slave#

The most widely read passage in the book is the master-slave dialectic in the discussion of self-consciousness.

The story runs like this. Two consciousnesses meet. Each finds the worth of its own being in being recognised by the other. They enter a struggle to the death; one takes fright and submits, the other becomes master.

But the outcome reverses itself unexpectedly. The master receives recognition from the slave — yet in his eyes the slave is a worthless consciousness, so the recognition is empty. The slave, meanwhile, shapes nature through work and sees himself in his own labour. The real development happens on the slave's side.

This is the passage with the widest reach of anything Hegel wrote. Marx developed his conception of labour out of it. Simone de Beauvoir grounded her analysis of otherness in it. In the twentieth century, the reading Alexandre Kojève gave in his Paris lectures shaped a whole generation, from Sartre to Lacan.

Contemporary theories of recognition — Charles Taylor, Axel Honneth — come straight out of these pages. So, at a greater remove, does the thesis of the "mattering instinct" put forward by Rebecca Goldstein, which we noted in this column yesterday.

Spirit and history#

Hegel's Geist is rendered in Turkish as either tin or, untranslated, geist. It is neither an individual soul nor a mystical entity.

What he means is this. Human reason exists not only inside individual heads but in institutions, in law, in art, in religion and in language. These are the objectified forms of reason.

The philosophy of history follows from this. World history, for Hegel, is not a sequence of accidents but the advance of the consciousness of freedom. His summary scheme is famous: under oriental despotism one man is free, in Greece and Rome some are free, in the modern world all are free in principle.

That scheme is among his most heavily criticised claims. Its Eurocentrism, its attribution of a necessary direction to history, and the place it assigns to colonialism have all met serious objections — and those objections are justified.

The Philosophy of Right and two sentences#

The Elements of the Philosophy of Right of 1820 is a classic of political philosophy. Two of its sentences began to live independently of the book.

The first: "What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational." It has been read as conservative acquiescence — as though to say that whatever exists conforms to reason. Hegel's commentators object: the word wirklich does not, in Hegel, mean merely what happens to be there; it means what exists in accordance with its own concept. Read that way, the sentence supplies a critical criterion.

The second comes from the book's preface: "The owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk is falling." Philosophy can grasp an age only as that age is completing itself. Understanding arrives after the event.

That sentence is also the source of the owl in the Philosophers News emblem.

Why is he still argued over?#

Hegel occupies an unusual position in the history of philosophy: his opponents thought through him as much as his students did.

Marx set the system "on its feet" — turning the dialectic from spirit to matter. Kierkegaard spent his life objecting to it: the single individual fits inside no system. Analytic philosophy was founded at the start of the twentieth century by rejecting Hegel; the break with idealism made by Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore is the field's founding moment.

But over the past forty years the picture has changed. Through the work of figures such as Robert Brandom and John McDowell, Hegel has returned to analytic philosophy. The subject now is not the philosophy of history but the social and normative dimension of knowledge.

In Turkish#

Tinin Görüngübilimi, Mantık Bilimi, Hukuk Felsefesinin Prensipleri, Tarihte Akıl and the lectures on Estetik have all been translated into Turkish. Hegel scholarship in Turkey has a long history, and he is taken up regularly in programmes such as the Akbank Sanat philosophy seminars we have covered on this site.

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Note: Hegel lived before the invention of photography. The cover image is the portrait Jakob Schlesinger painted in 1831, the year of Hegel's death, now in Berlin.