Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Based on Wikipedia: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

On October 13, 1806, the day before two armies would clash on a plateau outside Jena, a thirty-six-year-old philosophy lecturer watched Napoleon Bonaparte ride through the city streets on reconnaissance. The lecturer was rushing to finish a book manuscript, quite literally as cannon fire echoed in the distance. He wrote to a friend that evening: "I saw the Emperor—this world-soul—riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it."

The lecturer was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The book was the Phenomenology of Spirit, which would become one of the most influential—and notoriously difficult—works in the history of Western philosophy.

That image captures something essential about Hegel: he believed history had a direction, that it was going somewhere, and that certain individuals and events were vehicles for its progress. Napoleon, for Hegel, wasn't just a brilliant general or an ambitious emperor. He was the French Revolution on horseback, spreading its principles of freedom and rational government across a feudal Europe that desperately needed transformation.

The Making of a Philosopher

Hegel was born in 1770 in Stuttgart, the capital of the Duchy of Württemberg—a small state in what is now southwestern Germany, but was then part of the patchwork Holy Roman Empire. His father was a civil servant, a secretary to the revenue office at the ducal court. His mother, the daughter of a lawyer, taught young Wilhelm his first Latin declensions before he even entered school. She died of bilious fever when he was thirteen. Hegel and his father caught the same disease but survived.

As a teenager, Hegel was a voracious reader and meticulous note-taker, copying long passages from books into his diary. He devoured the works of Enlightenment thinkers—rational, skeptical writers who believed human reason could improve society and combat superstition. His first biographer noted that his gymnasium education "belonged entirely to the Enlightenment with respect to principle, and entirely to classical antiquity with respect to curriculum." His graduation speech bore the wonderfully specific title "The Abortive State of Art and Scholarship in Turkey."

At eighteen, Hegel entered the Tübinger Stift, a Protestant seminary attached to the University of Tübingen. He went there not because he wanted to become a minister—he had, by all accounts, a profound distaste for orthodox theology—but because it was state-funded and his family couldn't afford other options.

What he found at Tübingen would shape the rest of his life.

His roommates were two other young men who would become famous: Friedrich Hölderlin, who would emerge as one of Germany's greatest poets, and Friedrich Schelling, who would become a leading philosopher in his own right. The three shared a cramped dormitory, a dislike for the seminary's restrictive atmosphere, and an intense admiration for ancient Greece. They read Plato and Sophocles together. They studied Rousseau and debated Kant.

And they watched the French Revolution unfold.

Revolution and Its Aftermath

The French Revolution began in 1789, when Hegel was nineteen. For young German intellectuals, it was electrifying. Here was the Enlightenment's promise of reason and liberty being put into practice. Feudal privileges abolished. A declaration of the rights of man. A new constitution based on rational principles rather than inherited tradition.

Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling were enthusiasts. According to legend—though it may be apocryphal—they planted a "liberty tree" together in celebration. What is certain is that Hegel drank a toast to the storming of the Bastille every July 14th for the rest of his life.

The violence of the Terror in 1793—the mass executions, the guillotine working overtime, the revolution devouring its own children—dampened his hopes. But it didn't destroy them. Hegel identified with the moderate Girondin faction rather than the radical Jacobins, and he never abandoned his commitment to the revolution's core principles. The question that would occupy him for decades was: how do you achieve rational freedom without the chaos? How do you transform society through reason rather than bloodshed?

After graduating from the seminary, Hegel spent several years as a private tutor—first to an aristocratic family in Berne, Switzerland, then to a wine merchant's family in Frankfurt. These were not glamorous years. His employers in Berne were difficult, and he was often lonely. But he was thinking and writing constantly, producing manuscripts on Christianity, religion, and love that wouldn't be published until long after his death.

Something interesting happened in Frankfurt. In Berne, Hegel had been sharply critical of orthodox Christianity, very much in the skeptical Enlightenment mode. But under the influence of Hölderlin and the early Romantic movement, his thinking shifted. He began exploring mystical experience, particularly the experience of love, as the true essence of religion. This wasn't a conversion to conventional piety—it was something stranger, an attempt to find what was genuinely valuable in religious experience while stripping away what he saw as its irrational dogmas.

The Jena Years and the Phenomenology

In 1801, Hegel moved to Jena to pursue an academic career. The University of Jena was then one of the intellectual centers of Germany. Schelling was already there as a professor, and Hegel joined the faculty as an unsalaried lecturer—meaning he was paid only by the students who enrolled in his courses.

The two friends founded a philosophical journal together and collaborated on lectures. But Hegel was developing his own distinctive approach, different from Schelling's, and the partnership eventually cooled. When Schelling left for another university in 1803, the collaboration ended.

Hegel's financial situation was precarious. The university promoted him, but still without a salary. A philosophical rival, Jakob Friedrich Fries, was appointed to a paid professorship ahead of him, which Hegel took as a personal affront. He had an affair with his landlady, Christiana Burkhardt, and in 1807 she gave birth to his illegitimate son, Ludwig.

Under enormous pressure to produce a book—both to advance his career and to support his new child—Hegel worked furiously on the Phenomenology of Spirit. He was literally finishing the manuscript as Napoleon's army approached Jena in October 1806.

The day after Hegel saw Napoleon ride through the city, French and Prussian forces clashed in the Battle of Jena. The Prussians were routed. Napoleon's victory effectively ended the old order in Germany—the Holy Roman Empire had already been formally dissolved two months earlier—and began a period of French dominance and reform.

For Hegel, this wasn't simply a political event. It was philosophy happening in real time. In the Phenomenology, he had already written that the French Revolution was now passing to another land—Germany—which would complete "in thought" what the Revolution had only partially accomplished in practice. He saw himself as working out the philosophical implications of the new era that Napoleon was inaugurating by force.

What Did Hegel Actually Believe?

Here's where things get complicated. Hegel is notoriously difficult to read. His sentences are long, his vocabulary is technical, and he often seems to be using words in ways that don't match their ordinary meanings. Generations of readers have struggled with his prose, and there's a famous—probably apocryphal—story that on his deathbed, Hegel said, "There was only one man who ever understood me, and even he didn't understand me."

But the core ideas, stripped of their technical apparatus, are actually quite graspable.

Start with this: Hegel believed that reality is fundamentally rational. Not rational in the sense that everything is pleasant or makes us happy, but rational in the sense that it forms a coherent, intelligible whole. The universe isn't a collection of random, disconnected things. It's a system that can, in principle, be understood.

More than that, Hegel believed that this rational system develops over time. History isn't just one thing after another. It has a direction. Specifically, it's the story of what Hegel called "spirit" (the German word is Geist, which can also be translated as "mind") becoming conscious of itself.

What does that mean? Think of it this way. Human beings are the part of the universe that can reflect on itself. We can ask what things are, why they exist, and how they relate to each other. We can ask who we are and what we should do. Through art, religion, philosophy, and political institutions, humanity gradually comes to understand itself and its place in reality.

This process isn't smooth or automatic. It happens through conflict, contradiction, and struggle. An idea or institution emerges, reveals its limitations and internal contradictions, and is eventually superseded by something more comprehensive. This is the famous "dialectic," though Hegel himself rarely used that exact word.

Consider a crude example. A society might start with the idea that some people are naturally suited to rule and others to be ruled. This is how ancient societies justified slavery and aristocracy. But the idea contains an internal contradiction: if reason is what qualifies someone to rule, and all humans have reason, then the principle actually implies that everyone should have some say in governance. The recognition of this contradiction drives history forward, toward more inclusive forms of political organization.

For Hegel, the French Revolution was a crucial moment in this process. Its declaration that all men are free and equal wasn't just a political slogan—it was a philosophical breakthrough, the recognition of a truth that had always been implicit in human reason but had never before been made explicit.

The Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia

After Napoleon's victory at Jena, the university's enrollment collapsed and Hegel's financial situation became desperate. He moved to Bamberg and became editor of a local newspaper, a job he obtained through his friend Niethammer. As editor of this pro-French paper, Hegel praised Napoleon and criticized Prussian accounts of the war. He became a figure in Bamberg society, indulging his taste for fine food, cards, and local beer.

But he was contemptuous of provincial Bavarian life, frequently calling the region "Barbaria" in his letters. In 1808, Niethammer helped him secure a position as headmaster of a gymnasium (roughly equivalent to a high school) in Nuremberg.

Hegel spent eight years in Nuremberg, adapting his philosophical work for the classroom and writing his second major book, the Science of Logic, published in three volumes between 1812 and 1816. He also married Marie von Tucher, the daughter of a local senator, in 1811. They had two sons, and in 1817, Hegel's illegitimate son Ludwig—now ten years old and orphaned after his mother's death—joined the household.

The Science of Logic is, if anything, even more difficult than the Phenomenology. It traces the development of pure thought, showing how basic categories like "being," "nothing," and "becoming" unfold into increasingly complex and concrete concepts. The idea is that the categories we use to think about reality aren't arbitrary inventions—they have an internal logic that drives them to develop in specific directions.

In 1816, Hegel finally received offers for university professorships—from Erlangen, Berlin, and Heidelberg. He chose Heidelberg, where he published an Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences as a summary of his entire system for students. In 1818, he moved to Berlin to take the prestigious chair of philosophy that had been vacant since the death of Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Berlin: Fame and Controversy

The final thirteen years of Hegel's life were spent in Berlin, and they were his most publicly prominent. He published the Elements of the Philosophy of Right in 1821, his major work on political philosophy. He lectured extensively on aesthetics, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of history, and the history of philosophy—lectures that would be compiled from student notes and published after his death.

Despite his "notoriously terrible delivery," as one biographer put it, his lectures attracted students from all over Germany and beyond. He became the most influential philosopher in the German-speaking world.

He was also politically controversial. The Philosophy of Right contains the famous statement that "what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational." This has been interpreted in radically different ways. Some read it as a conservative endorsement of the existing Prussian state—whatever exists must be rational, so we should accept it. Others read it as a more subtle claim—only what is truly rational deserves to be called "actual" in the fullest sense, which means existing institutions can be criticized for failing to embody reason adequately.

Hegel himself was harassed by Prussian reactionaries who saw him as a dangerous liberal. The interior minister put him and his students under surveillance. At the same time, he criticized the reactionary political theorist Karl Ludwig von Haller, who argued that laws were unnecessary and that political authority should rest on pure power.

The truth is probably that Hegel was neither a straightforward conservative nor a radical. He believed in rational reform through existing institutions, not revolution. He thought the Prussian state, with its bureaucracy, legal system, and constitutional framework, was moving—imperfectly, gradually—in the right direction. He opposed both the reactionaries who wanted to restore the old feudal order and the radicals who wanted to tear everything down and start over.

Death and Legacy

In August 1831, a cholera epidemic reached Berlin. Hegel left the city for the suburb of Kreuzberg. When the new semester began in October, he returned, believing the epidemic had subsided. He was wrong. On November 14, 1831, Hegel died. The official cause was cholera, though modern scholars suspect it may have been another gastrointestinal disease.

He was sixty-one years old.

What happened next is remarkable. Hegel's followers split almost immediately into rival camps. The "Right Hegelians" emphasized the conservative aspects of his thought—the reconciliation with existing institutions, the role of religion, the importance of tradition. The "Left Hegelians" took his dialectical method and turned it against the very institutions he had seemed to endorse.

The most famous Left Hegelian was Karl Marx. Marx kept Hegel's idea that history develops through contradiction and conflict, but he "turned Hegel on his head," as he put it, replacing spirit with matter. For Marx, the driving force of history wasn't the development of ideas but the development of economic systems and class struggle. The dialectic wasn't about concepts becoming more adequate—it was about social systems generating the conditions for their own overthrow.

Ludwig Feuerbach, another Left Hegelian, argued that Hegel had gotten religion exactly backward. Hegel thought religion was spirit coming to know itself in imaginative form; Feuerbach argued that God was a human projection, a way of externalizing our own best qualities and then worshipping them as if they belonged to someone else.

In the twentieth century, Hegel's influence took new forms. The French philosopher Alexandre Kojève gave legendary lectures on the Phenomenology in Paris in the 1930s, shaping a generation of thinkers including Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Lacan. The Frankfurt School—Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse—developed a "critical theory" that drew heavily on Hegelian themes. Existentialists engaged with Hegel even when they rejected his conclusions.

Today, Hegel remains inescapable. You can reject him, but you can't ignore him. His ideas about history, freedom, recognition, and the development of self-consciousness continue to shape debates in philosophy, political theory, and beyond. Even critics who find his system implausible often find his questions unavoidable: What does it mean to be free? How do individuals and communities relate to each other? What role do contradiction and conflict play in human development?

And there's something oddly fitting about that image of Hegel watching Napoleon ride through Jena, finishing his manuscript as history happened around him. He believed that philosophy always comes too late to tell the world how it should be—it can only comprehend what has already occurred, painting "its gray on gray" only when a form of life has grown old. The owl of Minerva, he wrote, spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

But perhaps that makes philosophy more necessary, not less. We can't predict the future or control history's course. What we can do is understand where we've been and how we got here—and in that understanding, maybe, find some clarity about who we are and what we might become.