Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was born in Stuttgart and educated at Tübingen seminary, alongside the epic poet Friedrich Hölderlin and fellow philosopher Friedrich Schelling. The three of them together watched the unfolding of the French Revolution and collaborated in a critique of the idealist philosophies of Kant and his follower Fichte.

With the exception of a brief period as a newspaper editor, Hegel devoted his life wholly to teaching, first at Jena, then Nuremberg, Heidelberg, and finally Berlin. The first two posts were in schools, only the latter ones from 1816, where as a university 'professor' as he is congenitally depicted, and many of his key works date from his grammar school rather than his university period.

Hegel rejected the metaphysical systems that went before his, as being too unconcerned with history. Hegel believed that a philosophy rooted in history was better able to grasp a complex, interconnected reality.

Hegel's first and most celebrated major work is the Phenomenology of Spirit (or 'Mind'). During his life he also published many other works including the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, the Science of Logic and the Philosophy of Right. Many consider Hegel's thought to represent the summit of 19th Century Germany's movement of philosophical idealism; it certainly led to the 'historical materialism' of Karl Marx as well as to the development of the fascist ideology, via Giovanni Gentile, in Italy, Spain and Germany.

Life

He was born in Stuttgart to a civil servant, and had a Protestant upbringing, his mother wanting him to enter the clergy. He studied philosophy at the Tübinger Stift seminary, meeting Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Schelling, and read Kant, Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and many other philosophers of his own accord. He then went on to teach in the home of Friedrich von Stieger in Berne. Although well paid and with enough free time to read, he was subject to bouts of depression. This was relieved when he was offered a job teaching in the home of Johann Gogel in Frankfurt, spending time with Hölderlin and rethinking many of his philosophical positions. During these years, he mostly worked on religious and ethical themes, originally thinking of religion along the lines of the Enlightenment, then later having a more mystical appreciation of religion and defending religion from such Enlightenment critique.

He then moved to Jena in 1801, becoming a Privatdozent, an unsalaried professor who lives off student fees. At this time, he spent more time reading Kant, and published The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy. In 1806, he wrote the Phenomenology of Spirit, a major and systematic work of philosophy, and published it the next year. The Napoleonic army was occupying the city at the time, and closed the university down in 1807.

The Phenomenology of Spirit contained a criticism in the Preface which Friedrich Schelling took to be at his expense, and promptly ended their friendship.

From 1807 to 1808, he was the editor of the Bamberger Zeitung, a newspaper in Bamberg, which satisfied some of his political goals. After this, he spent eight years as a school teacher and rector at the Ägidien-Gymnasium in Nuremberg, where although a successful teacher, he tried and failed to extend the curriculum with philosophy. During this time, he got married, had children and published the Science of Logic.

Finally, in 1816, Hegel got an academic post a the University of Heidelberg as a professor of philosophy, where he gave lectures on aesthetics and political philosophy, the latter becoming the Philosophy of Right. During his time at Heidelberg, he also published the three-volume Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. In 1817, he ws offered the position of chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, a position that had belonged to Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Hegel died on November the 1th 1831, having been something of a celebrity in Berlin. Shortly thereafter, his students published collections of his lectures. The government then appointed Schelling as his replacement at the University of Berlin.