Hegel and German Idealism: What Is His Philosophy?

Who Hegel was

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he studied philosophy and then theology in Tübingen between 1788 and 1793, spent years outside academic life, and returned to university in 1816 in Heidelberg; in 1818 he gained the chair of philosophy in Berlin, where he stayed until his death in 1831, the last decade of it marked by wide recognition. The Phenomenology of Spirit, his first major work, was finished in 1806 and published in 1807; the Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s main work on political philosophy, appeared in Berlin in 1821, while the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences condenses the whole system into logic, nature, and spirit. Readers who want to place Hegel within the history of political ideas can start from how Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau thought about the social contract, the ground on which his philosophy of right builds.

German idealism, after Kant

German idealism is the German philosophical movement running from the 1780s to the 1840s, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Its starting point is Kant’s transcendental idealism, set out in the Critique of Pure Reason, which drew a careful line between appearances, how things seem to us, and things in themselves.

Fichte, Schelling and Hegel pushed this position further, turning it into absolute idealism: for them, the very idea of an unknowable thing in itself is self-contradictory. For Fichte, thinking of a thing in itself independent of thought already turns it into an object for consciousness, which is self-contradictory. Within this movement, Hegel assigned Fichte to the subjective side and Schelling to the objective, or absolute, side. Among the German idealists, according to the source, Hegel remains the most read and the most influential.

German idealism, though, is a different current from Berkeley’s: it doesn’t deny that an outside world exists, but concerns how reason structures our knowledge of reality. Readers familiar with the moral side of Kant’s philosophy, the categorical imperative, will recognize the same question shifted from ethics to knowledge.

The dialectic: aufheben and determinate negation

In Hegel’s method, the dialectic is the process that surfaces a concept’s contradictions and resolves them, carrying thought toward a richer form of consciousness, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The German verb aufheben, central to this method, carries a double meaning: to negate a concept and to preserve it at the same time.

Practical example: think of an opinion that looks obvious until you find its limit. You correct it: the new version still holds something of the original idea, in a more precise form. That’s the pattern Hegel calls aufheben.

In Hegel’s dialectic, negation doesn’t produce absolute nothingness but a determinate negation, one that carries a specific content. Each dialectical step produces a new concept, richer than the one before it, because it both negates and contains it.

The well-known formula “thesis-antithesis-synthesis”, often used in textbooks to summarize Hegel’s dialectic, belongs to Fichte’s vocabulary: to describe his own method, Hegel used different terms.

Geist, or Spirit

The German term Geist, central to Hegel’s philosophy, can be translated as either mind or Spirit; the second is preferred because it carries the cultural and collective sense of the concept, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel moves from the study of individual consciousness to objective spirit, the cultural and social forms shared by a community.

Hegel lived out his own philosophy in his relationships with colleagues too: he and Schelling had been friends and fellow seminary students in Tübingen. To Schelling, though, a sharp passage in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit felt like a direct affront, and the friendship between the two ended on the spot. After Hegel’s death, the Prussian authorities called Schelling to his own chair in Berlin: according to the source, to counter the influence Hegel’s philosophy had built over a generation of students.