Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: biography of this philosopher

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, considered one of the great representatives of idealism in Germany.

His work, like that of other German philosophers of the time such as Immanuel Kant, had a great weight in thought, both in the Germanic country and in the rest of Europe, back in the 18th century and XIX. Let's see his story through this biography of Georg Hegel in summary format.

• Related article: "How are Psychology and Philosophy similar?"

Biography of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, better known simply as Hegel, He was born into a family of the petite bourgeoisie on August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart., Prussia, present-day Germany.

Hegel was trained in a Protestant seminary in the city of Tübingen, where he would meet Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Hölderlin as fellow students. He would later study at university and, in 1793, earn his doctorate.

From then on he went on to work as a private tutor in Bern and, later, in Frankfurt.. At this time, still young and without having yet marked the character of his philosophical thought, he wrote in a fragmentary way.

The texts that emerged from this period would be published much later, in 1907, under the name “Youthful Theological Writings.” The most notable of these texts are Sketches on religion and love, Life of Jesus, The positivity of the Christian religion, The spirit of Christianity and its destiny and Republican fragments.

Travels through the kingdom of Prussia

In 1801 he moved to Jena at the request and invitation of his colleague Schelling, which at the time had become the most important cultural center of all German culture. In Jena he taught until 1807 but, because of Napoleon's occupation, He was forced to flee and ended up, a year later, in Nuremberg, where he would serve as rector and philosophy teacher at his Gymnasium (German high school).

Last decades

The pedagogical activity that he carried out in Nuremberg is compiled under the title of “Philosophical Propedeutics.” However, despite being interested in pedagogy, Hegel focused on his greatest work, the science of logic, published in three volumes between 1812 and 1816.

He would later be invited to work at the University of Heidelberg, to be able to hold a professorship in philosophy.. There he would publish his complete exposition of his philosophical system in “Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences” (1817).

From 1818 until the date of his death, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would teach in the city of Berlin, where the famous Johann Gottlieb Fichte had held his professorship. His last great work, Philosophy of law, was published in 1821. He died on November 14, 1831, due to a cholera epidemic. He was 61 years old.

• You may be interested: "Immanuel Kant: biography of this important German philosopher"

Hegel and the end of the Old Regime

Georg Hegel witnessed a historical change, since he saw how the Old Regime, not very libertarian and censorious of criticism of the established power, was faltering.

At the beginning of the French Revolution, Hegel, inspired by one of the greatest enlighteners, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, considered the idea of ​​the Greek polis to be plausible. That is, the belief that cities could become sovereign states as a model of a harmonious society, with a patriotic spirit and a popular religion did not dogmatic.

At the beginning of it, Hegel, as a person who lived in the middle of the Enlightenment period, advocated the liberation of humanity from a past in which there had been oppression, both political, such as the Roman Empire or medieval states, and religious, represented in the idea of ​​Christianity.

However, Once the French Revolution was over and Napoleon came to power, Hegel changed his mind.. Seeing that, perhaps, this ideal of creating tiny states was not plausible because sooner or later some tyrant, of ideal Anyone, he would end up trying to establish his empire, shattering that belief of being able to reach a society of states ideal independents. This is why, already in Jena and Frankfurt, he took a more realistic attitude in politics and Christianity.

It is not that he was a fervent enemy of Napoleon, quite the contrary. He had great admiration for his work, since he had just destroyed the old and useless waste of the feudalism, in addition to potential what, over time, would become the modern economy policy. This gave him a fairly optimistic idea of ​​the development of the bourgeois sense of the society of his time., considering that he was experiencing the beginning of a new historical stage.

But despite being critical of feudalism and even having written about republicanism, in 1815 Hegel was in favor of the Prussian monarchy. Although it was still a regime based on the medieval idea that power had to be inherited, unelected, he considered the ideals of the Hohenzollern family to be those of reason and authentic freedom. It is then that Hegel moves to a conception that philosophy, rather than having the mission of announcing and preparing a new era, should become the recognition of the positivity of the present.

Phenomenology of the spirit

This is one of Hegel's best-known works, and this It is divided into six sections: conscience, self-awareness, reason, the spirit, religion and absolute knowledge..

In the section on consciousness, Hegel criticizes various forms of realism, in addition to vindicating the constitutive function of thought in the face of objectivity. In self-consciousness he speaks of the identity of opposites, such as the “I-subject” and the “I-object.” They are really about the same “I”, but duplicated and, apparently, seen as something contrary to each other.

In the spirit section he talks about times that were decisive for Western history and thought, starting with the ancient world, that is, Greece and Rome, reaching what, for him, was the modern Revolution French. Along the way he addressed feudalism and monarchical absolutism that had served as seeds for the bourgeois revolutions of their time to break out.

When he talks about religion, he indicates that Christianity has served as the creed he has tried to express. the demand for conciliation between the divine and the human, through the dogma of the God-man, that is, Jesus.

Philosophy of nature

In Hegelian language, the word idea refers to the totality of rational categories.. In the real world, the idea is fragmented in accidents. However, when talking about the real, it is necessary to make a differentiation between nature and spirit.

The spirit is represented by the human being and his activities, and is the entity that is capable of realizing himself as absolute. Spirit is superior to nature, a claim Hegel uses to argue against materialism and also romantic descriptions of nature, highly inspired by beliefs pantheists.

Hegel rejects empiricism and mechanism, and takes a very exaggerated view of the spirit, so much so that it even reaches animistic perspectives. For him, in nature the elements were arranged in successive degrees, going from the mechanical, through the physical and arriving at organisms, with greater or lesser complexity.

Philosophy of the spirit

With the philosophy of the spirit he develops more deeply the ideas of the absolute and the idea. For Hegel, spirit manifests itself in three phases: subjective spirit, objective spirit and absolute spirit.

1. subjective spirit

The subjective spirit corresponds to the individual soul. Emerging from nature, it is what would be understood as the individual, the man himself. The evolutionary process of the idea of ​​subjective spirit occurs in three phases: anthropology, phenomenology and psychology.

In anthropology, the subjective spirit is observed in its beginnings, in its emergence from the natural world, linking itself to a body. This idea was shared by the ancient Greeks, especially when talking about the sensitive soul. Phenomenology corresponds to the step in which the subjective spirit becomes aware of itself. He has identity. In the psychology phase, the spirit acquires reason, imagination, intuition and other internal processes. This makes the spirit reach a higher level: it is the free spirit.

2. The objective spirit

Upon reaching the last degree of subjectivity, the spirit expands. It manifests itself in works that other individuals can see, grasp, feel.. It is manifested through concepts such as law, morality and ethics. Laws are established that allow the free existence and equality of spirits in the same world, composing the legal foundations of a society.

3. The absolute spirit

The absolute spirit is the unity of the characteristics of the subjective and the objective. This spirit goes through three stages of higher subjectivity or objectivity: art, religion and philosophy.

Art, which would be an objective manifestation, although subjectively based, is the representation of the ideal of what is beautiful. It is the way that the spirit manifests itself towards others., giving birth to all types of art that, although objectively found in the real world, each one gives it a free interpretation.

Religion is conceived, according to Hegel, as something rationalist, and explains that it has manifested itself, throughout history, through three stages. In Eastern religions they were nourished by concepts that referred to the infinite; In classical Greece and Rome, reference was made to the finite. Finally, in the Christian vision there is a synthesis between the Eastern and Greco-Roman vision.

Philosophy is the definitive step of the absolute spirit, reaching its complete state. The intuition of the absolute spirit in art and its representation in religion is surpassed by philosophy. The spirit is self-aware through philosophy.