Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher born in 1770 who developed a complex philosophical system known as German idealism. He is considered one of the most influential modern philosophers. He believed that reality is capable of being fully expressed through rational thought and that history and societies can be understood through dialectical processes of change over time as contradictions and tensions are resolved. Hegel had a major influence on later philosophers and political thinkers.

1. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770-1831)

2. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (27 August 1770 –
14 November 1831) was a German philosopher.
He is considered one of the most important
figures in German idealism and one of the
founding figures of Modern philosophy, with his
influence extending
to epistemology, logic, metaphysics, aesthetics,
philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, and
the history of philosophy.
He is known as one of the greatest systematic
thinkers in the history of Western philosophy. He
has been called the “Aristotle of modern times”.
He was the last of the great philosophical system
builders of modern times.

3. In the early 19th Century, although his ideas
went far beyond earlier Kantianism,
he founded his own school of Hegelianism.
Hegelianism is a philosophical school based on the
writings of the German Idealist philosopher Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the philosophical
tradition that began with him. It was centered
in Germany during the mid-19th Century.
His works are considered notoriously difficult to
understand, but his philosophy can perhaps be
summed up by the motto "the rational alone is
real“. Which means that all reality is capable of
being expressed in rational categories.

4. Hegel’s life and education
Hegel was born on 27 August 1770 in Stuttgart in
south-western Germany. His father, Georg Ludwig
Hegel, was secretary to the revenue office at the court
of the Duke of Württemberg; his mother, Maria
Magdalena Louisa, was the well-to-do and well-
educated daughter of a lawyer at the High Court of
Justice at the Württemberg court (she died when Hegel
was thirteen of a "bilious fever"). Hegel had a younger
sister, Christine (who was later committed to an asylum
and eventually drowned herself), and a younger
brother, Georg Ludwig (who was to die in Napoleon's
Russian campaign of 1812).

5. At the age of three, Hegel went to the "German School",
and entered the "Latin School" at age five, and then
attended Stuttgart's Gymnasium high school from 1784
to 1788. He was a serious, hard-working and successful
student, and a voracious reader from a young age,
including Shakespeare, the ancient Greek philosophers,
the Bible and German literature. In addition to German
and Latin, he learned Greek, Hebrew, French and English.
At the age of eighteen, he entered a Protestant
seminary attached to the University of Tubingen. Having
graduated from the Tubingen Seminary in 1793, Hegel
became house tutor to an aristocratic family in Berne,
Switzerland, and then took a similar position
in Frankfurt-am-Main from 1797 to 1801.

6. In 1801, Hegel secured a position as an unsalaried
lecturer at the University of Jena (with the
encouragement of his old friend Schelling, who was
Extraordinary Professor there).
He lectured on Logic and Metaphysics and,
with Schelling, gave joint lectures on an "Introduction
to the Idea and Limits of True Philosophy" and held a
"Philosophical Disputorium". In 1802, Schelling and
Hegel founded a journal, the "Kritische Journal der
Philosophie" ("Critical Journal of Philosophy"), and he
produced his first real book on philosophy, "Differenz
des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der
Philosophie" ("The Difference between Fichte's and
Schelling's Systems of Philosophy") in 1801.

7. In 1805, the University promoted Hegel to the position
of Extraordinary Professor, he brought out the book
which introduced his system of philosophy to the
world, "Phänomenologie des Geistes" ("Phenomenology
of Mind"), in 1807, just after Napoleon
Bonaparte (whom Hegel greatly admired) had entered
the city of Jena and closed the University. The same
year, he had an illegitimate son, Georg Ludwig Friedrich
Fischer by his landlady, Christiana Burkhardt (who had
been abandoned by her husband). However, unable to
find more suitable employment, he was then forced to
move from Jena and to accept a position as editor of a
newspaper, the "Bamberger Zeitung", in Bamberg.

8. In 1811, he married Marie Helena Susanna von Tucher,
the eldest daughter of a Senator, and they had two
sons, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm in 1813 and Immanuel
Thomas Christian in 1814.
From 1816 to 1818, Hegel taught at the University of
Heidelberg, and then he took an offer for the chair of
philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he
remained until his death in 1831. He published
his "Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts" ("Elements
of the Philosophy of Right") in 1821. At the height of
his fame, his lectures attracted students from all over
Germany and beyond, and he was appointed Rector of
the University in 1830, and decorated by King Frederick
William III of Prussia for his service to the Prussian
state in 1831.

9. Major Works
Hegel published only four main books during his
life: "Phänomenologie des Geistes" ("Phenomenology of
Mind") in 1807, his account of the evolution of
consciousness from sense-perception to absolute
knowledge; the three volumes of "Wissenschaft der
Logik" ("Science of Logic") in 1811, 1812 and 1816,
the logical and metaphysical core of his
philosophy; "Enzyklopädie der philosophischen
Wissenschaften" ("Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences") in 1816, a summary of his entire
philosophical system, intended as a textbook for a
university course; and "Grundlinien der Philosophie des
Rechts" ("Elements of the Philosophy of Right") in 1821,
his political philosophy and his thoughts on “civil
society”.

10. Hegel's thought can be seen as part of a progression of
philosophers (going back
to Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Leibniz, Spinoza, Rousseau
and Kant) who can generally be described as Idealists,
and who regarded freedom or self-determination as real,
and as having important ontological implications Hegel
also discussed the concept of alienation in his work, the
idea of something that is part of us and within us and yet
seems in some way foreign or alien or hostile. He
introduced the figure of the "unhappy soul", who prays
to a God whom he believes to be all-powerful, all-
knowing and all-good, and who sees himself in
contrast as powerless, ignorant and base. Hegel submits
that this is wrong because we are effectively part of
God (or Geist or Mind), and thus possessed of all good
qualities as well as bad or soul or mind or divinity.

11. Philosophy of History
Hegel was the first major philosopher to
regard history and the Philosophy of History as
important. Hegel's Historicism is the position that
all human societies (and all human activities such as
science, art or philosophy) are defined by their history,
and that their essence can be sought only through
understanding that. According to Hegel, to
understand why a person is the way he is, you must put
that person in a society; and to understand that
society, you must understand its history, and the forces
that shaped it. He is famously quoted as claiming that
"Philosophy is the history of philosophy".

12. His system for understanding history, and the
world itself, was developed from his
famous dialectic teachings
of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. He saw
history as a progression, always moving
forward, never static, in which each successive
movement emerges as a solution to
the contradictions inherent in the preceding
movement. He believed that every complex
situation contains within itself conflicting
elements, which work to destabilize the
situation, leading it to break down into a new
situation in which the conflicts are resolved.

13. Self knowledge of Absolute
Hegel's main philosophical project, then, was to take
the contradictions and tensions he saw throughout modern
philosophy, culture and society, and interpret them as part
of a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity that, in
different contexts, he called "the absolute
idea" or "absolute knowledge". He believed that everything
was interrelated and that the separation of reality
into discrete parts (as all philosophers since Aristotle had
done) was wrong. He advocated a kind of historically-
minded Absolute Idealism (developed out of
the Transcendental Idealism of Immanuel Kant), in which
the universe would realize its spiritual potential through
the development of human society, and in which mind and
nature can be seen as two abstractions of one indivisible
whole Spirit.

14. Dialectics
• He developed a new form of thinking and Logic, which he
called "speculative reason" (which includes the more
famous concept of "dialectic") to try to overcome what he
saw as the limitations of both common sense and of
traditional philosophy at grasping philosophical problems
and the relation between thought and reality. His method
was to begin with ultra-basic concepts (like Being and
Nothing), and to develop these through a long sequence of
elaborations towards solutions that take the form of
a series. He also took the concept of the dialectic one step
further, arguing that the new synthesis is not the final truth
of the matter, but rather became the new thesis with its
corresponding antithesis and synthesis. This process would
continue effectively ad infinitum, until reaching the ultimate
synthesis, which is what Hegel called the Absolute Idea.

15. Influence
After his death, Hegel's followers split into two opposing
camps: the Protestant, conservative Right ("Old")
Hegelians, and the atheistic, revolutionary Left ("Young")
Hegelians. Although that distinction is perhaps now
considered somewhat naïve, it can be seen as a tribute to
the breadth of Hegel's vision. In the latter half of the 20th
Century, Hegel's philosophy has undergone a major
renaissance, partly due to the re-evaluation of Hegel as a
possible philosophical progenitor of Marxism, and partly
due to a resurgence of the historical perspective that he
brought to everything, and an increasing recognition of the
importance of his dialectical method.