G. W. F. Hegel

In the process of analysing the nature of the Absolute, Hegel made significant contributions in a variety of philosophical fields, including the philosophy of history, ethics, and political philosophy. With respect to history, his two key explanatory categories are reason and freedom. As a rational process, history is the “progress of the consciousness of freedom”. That is, it is the progressive realization on the part of the human spirit (or “finite spirit”) that its own essential nature is freedom, and thereby the realization of that freedom.

For Hegel, every historical civilization expresses a certain underlying conception of the human spirit through the customs, ethical practices, and social and political institutions that it establishes. It is only once these practices and institutions have been established and become familiar that the people of that civilization can go on to make this underlying conception explicit to itself through its art, religion, and philosophy. As Hegel put it, “the Owl of Minerva” (that is, the wisdom of philosophy) “spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”. However, by so making this underlying conception explicit to itself, the people come to experience it as contradictory, and as inadequate to its sense of what the human spirit really is. As a result, people gradually lose their loyalty to the established practices and institutions, and the civilization begins to decay. Eventually a figure appears who leads the way in overthrowing the old instruments and replacing them with a new set that more adequately expresses the real nature of the human spirit as free. Hegel calls such figures “world historical individuals” and gives Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon I as examples. The whole historical process of the rise and fall of civilizations is then a process through which the human spirit gradually comes to self-knowledge and freedom.

Hegel saw the ethical practices and the social and political institutions of modern society (such as the nuclear family and the market economy) and of the modern state (for example, an impartial system of law, a system of representation, and a constitutional monarch) as effectively the final stage in this evolution of social and political institutions. With their consolidation in Europe in the wake of the French Revolution it appeared that the “end of history” had been reached. Accordingly, Hegel thought of these institutions as fully expressing the freedom that is the defining character of the human spirit. In The Philosophy of Right he attempted to show how these institutions embodied freedom in all its aspects, and so to justify them. In particular, he tried to show how they unite two different kinds of ethical outlook, which he called “morality” (Moralität) and “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit). At the level of morality, right and wrong are matters of individual reason and individual conscience. At the level of ethical life, duty is a matter of allegiance to the social wholes of which one is a member: one’s family, one’s social class or “estate”, and one’s country. Since individuals are only complete through their social relationships, morality alone is inadequate and one must move beyond it to the level of ethical life. The state is the expression of the most inclusive social whole to which one can belong, one’s own country, and so when there is a conflict of duties, one’s duties to the state override all others. Obedience to the general will, which is manifested in the properly constituted state, is the act of a fully free and rational individual. Hegel emerges as a political conservative, in that he supported the basic institutions of the modern state, but he should not be interpreted as sanctioning totalitarianism, for he argued that the state when properly constituted must allow spheres of private property, freedom of conscience, domestic privacy, and choice of economic activity.

At the time of Hegel’s death, he was the most prominent philosopher in Germany. His views were widely taught, and his students were highly regarded. His followers soon divided into right-wing and left-wing Hegelians. Theologically and politically the right-wing Hegelians offered a conservative interpretation of his work. They emphasized the compatibility between Hegel’s philosophy and Christianity. Politically, they were orthodox. The left-wing Hegelians eventually moved to an atheistic position. In politics, many of them became revolutionaries. This historically important left-wing group included Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Marx. Engels and Marx were particularly influenced by Hegel’s idea that history moves dialectically, but they replaced Hegel’s philosophical idealism with materialism.

Hegel’s metaphysical idealism had a strong impact on 19th- and early 20th-century British philosophy, notably that of Francis Herbert Bradley; on such American philosophers as Josiah Royce; and on Italian philosophy through Benedetto Croce. Hegel also influenced the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Phenomenology has been influenced by Hegel’s ideas on consciousness.

For most of the 20th century, however, Hegel’s metaphysical ambitions, his obscure language, and the apparently closed nature of his system were anathema to most philosophers, especially those in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. However, many post-war European thinkers—from Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and the postmodernists—have been deeply influenced by aspects of his thought, despite rejecting his overall system. Hegel’s analysis in The Phenomenology of Spirit of the most primitive relationship between human beings as one of “mastery and servitude”, a relationship in which the servant recognizes the master as embodying his own essence as free while the master fails to reciprocate that recognition, has influenced thinkers and writers as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Franz Fanon, and Samuel Beckett. Meanwhile, ideas drawn from his philosophy of history and political philosophy have played a major role in the development of “communitarianism” in political philosophy, a standpoint that places the community at the heart of analysis, developed in the 1980s by philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer. The extensive and diverse impact of Hegel’s ideas on subsequent philosophy is evidence of the remarkable range and the extraordinary depth of his thought.