Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

German Idealism

With Fichte and Schelling: the completion of the revolution in thought that Kant had launched.

💡 Did you know? Hegel is regarded as the culmination of German Idealism: after Kant, Fichte and Schelling.

Stuttgart

He kept his Swabian accent even in his Berlin chair.

💡 Did you know? Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770: the same year as Beethoven and Hölderlin.

dialectics

A position turns into its opposite and is 'sublated' in a higher unity.

💡 Did you know? Hegel's dialectic thinks in contradictions: from thesis and counter-thesis („antithesis“) arises a higher synthesis.

Aufhebung

Hegel loved the ambiguity of the German word: it is nearly untranslatable.

💡 Did you know? For Hegel „aufheben“ means three things at once: to end, to preserve and to raise up: a favourite example of the German language's depth.

Phenomenology of Spirit

Completed as Napoleon took Jena, with the famous dialectic of 'lordship and bondage'.

💡 Did you know? He finished the work in Jena in 1806: legend has it as Napoleon's troops took the city.

world-soul on horseback

So, in essence, in a letter of 1806: 'the world-soul … on horseback': world history in the flesh.

💡 Did you know? Seeing Napoleon ride through Jena, Hegel wrote that he had seen „the world-soul on horseback“.

progress in the consciousness of freedom

In it the 'world spirit' unfolds: history is a rational process.

💡 Did you know? For Hegel, world history is a meaningful process: the gradual „progress in the consciousness of freedom“.

Berlin

There he dominated the philosophy of his age: half of Prussia's officialdom attended his lectures.

💡 Did you know? In the Berlin chair Hegel became the towering authority of German philosophy.

Hölderlin and Schelling

To celebrate the French Revolution the three are said to have planted a liberty tree.

💡 Did you know? In the Tübingen seminary the student Hegel shared a room with the poet Hölderlin and the philosopher Schelling: three geniuses under one roof.

Karl Marx

For Marx it is material production, not spirit, that drives history: but the dialectic remained.

💡 Did you know? Karl Marx took over Hegel's dialectic but „set it back on its feet“: from spirit to material conditions.

barely comprehensible

Halting, throat-clearing, in a Swabian accent and yet half of Europe made the pilgrimage.

💡 Did you know? His works still count among the hardest to read in the history of philosophy.

cholera

During the great epidemic; he was buried, as he had wished, next to Fichte.

💡 Did you know? Hegel died in Berlin in 1831, probably of the cholera then raging.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was the most influential thinker of German Idealism: his dialectic shaped philosophy all the way to Marx.

💡 Did you know? Seeing Napoleon in Jena, he wrote that he had seen „the world-soul on horseback“.