HEGEL, GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH (1770 1831), German philosopher, was born at Stuttgart on Aug. 27, 177o. His father was a revenue officer. He learned the elements of Latin from his mother before he went to the Stuttgart grammar school, where he remained until he was 18. As a schoolboy he made a collection of extracts, alphabetically arranged, comprising anno tations on classical authors, passages from newspapers, treatises on morals and mathematics from the standard works of the period. In this way he absorbed raw materials for elaboration. Yet as evidence that he was not merely receptive we have essays already breathing that admiration of the classical world which he never lost.
In the autumn of 1788 he entered at Tubingen as a student of theology; but he showed no interest in theology and his ser mons were a failure. He found more congenial reading in the classics, on the advantages of studying which his first essay was written. After two years he took the degree of Ph.D., and in the autumn of 1793 received his theological certificate, stating him to be of good abilities, but of middling industry and knowledge, and especially deficient in philosophy. As a student, his elderly appearance gained him the title "Old man," but he took part in the walks, beer-drinking and love-making of his fellows. He gained most from intellectual intercourse with his contemporaries, among whom were J. C. F. Holderlin and Schelling. With Holderlin Hegel learned to feel for the old Greeks a love which grew stronger as the semi-Kantianized theology of his teachers more and more failed to interest him. With Schelling like sympathies bound him. They both protested against the political and ecclesiastical inertia of their native state, and adopted the doctrines of freedom and reason.
On leaving college, he became a private tutor at Bern and lived in intellectual isolation. He compiled a systematic account of the fiscal system of the canton Bern; but the main factor in his mental growth came from his study of Christianity. Under the impulse given by Lessing and Kant he turned to the original records of Christianity, and attempted to construe for himself the real sig nificance of Christ. He wrote a life of Jesus, in which Jesus was simply the son of Joseph and Mary. He did not stop to criticize as a philologist, and ignored the miraculous. He asked for the secret contained in the conduct and sayings of this man which made him the hope of the human race. Jesus appeared as revealing the unity with God in which the Greeks in their best days unwittingly rejoiced, and as lifting the eyes of the Jews from a lawgiver who metes out punishment on the transgressor, to the destiny which in the Greek conception falls on the just no less than on the unjust.
The interest of these ideas is twofold. In Jesus Hegel finds the expression for something higher than mere morality : he finds a noble spirit which rises above the contrasts of virtue and vice into the concrete life, seeing the infinite always embracing our finitude, and proclaiming the divine which is in man and cannot be overcome by error and evil, unless man close his eyes and ears to the godlike presence within him. In religious life, in short, he finds the principle which reconciles the opposition of the temporal mind. But, secondly, the general source of the doctrine that life is higher than all its incidents is of interest. He does not free himself from the current theology either by rational moraliz ing like Kant, or by bold speculative synthesis like Fichte and Schelling. He finds his panacea in the concrete life of humanity.
During these years Hegel kept up a slack correspondence with Schelling and Holderlin. Schelling, already on the way to fame, kept Hegel abreast with German speculation. Both of them were intent on forcing the theologians into the daylight, and grudged them any aid they might expect from Kant's postulation of God and immortality to crown the edifice of ethics. Meanwhile, Hol derlin in Jena had been following Fichte's career with an en thusiasm with which he infected Hegel. Towards the close of his engagement at Bern, Hegel had received hopes from Schelling of a post at Jena. Fortunately his friend Holderlin, now tutor in Frankfort, secured a similar situation there for Hegel in the family of Herr Gogol, a merchant (Jan. 1797) . The new post gave him more leisure and the society he needed.
About this time he turned to questions of economics and gov ernment. He had studied Gibbon, Hume and Montesquieu in Switzerland. We now find him making extracts from the English newspapers on the Poor-Law Bill of 17 96 ; criticizing the Prussian land laws, promulgated about the same time; and writing a com mentary on James Steuart's Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy. Here, as in criticisms of Kant's ethical writings, Hegel aims at correcting the abstract discussion of a topic by treating it in its systematic interconnections. Church and state, law and morality, commerce and art are reduced to factors in the totality of human life, from which the specialists had isolated them. But the best evidence of Hegel's attention to contemporary politics is two unpublished essays—one of them written in 1798, "On the Internal Condition of Wurttemberg in Recent Times, particularly on the Defects in the Magistracy," the other a criticism on the constitution of Germany, written, probably, not long after the peace of Luneville (18oi). Both essays are critical rather than constructive.
His old interest in the religious question reappears, but in a more philosophical form. Starting with the contrast between a natural and a positive religion, he regards a positive religion as one imposed upon the mind from without, not a natural growth crowning the round of human life. A natural religion, on the other hand, was not, he thought, the one universal religion of every clime and age, but rather the spontaneous development of the national conscience varying in varying circumstances. A people's religion completes and consecrates their whole activity : in it the people rises above its finite life in limited spheres to an infinite life where it feels itself fulfilled. Even philosophy with Hegel at this epoch was subordinate to religion ; for philosophy must never abandon the finite in the search for the infinite. Soon, however, Hegel adopted a view according to which philosophy is a higher mode of apprehending the infinite than even religion.
At Frankfort, meanwhile, the philosophic ideas of Hegel first assumed proper philosophic form. In a ms. of 102 quarto sheets, of which the first three and the seventh are wanting, there is pre served the original sketch of the Hegelian system, so far as the logic and metaphysics and part of the philosophy of nature are concerned. The third part of the system—the ethical theory— seems to have been composed afterwards; it is contained in its first draft in another ms. of 3o sheets.
Circumstances soon put Hegel in the way to complete these out lines. His father died in January 1799 ; and the slender sum which Hegel received as his inheritance, gulden (about £260), enabled him to think once more of a studious life. Hegel arrived at Jena in January 18o1. An end had already come to the brilliant epoch at Jena, when the romantic poets, Tieck, Novalis and the Schlegels made it the headquarters of their fantastic mysticism, and Fichte turned the results of Kant to the service of revolu tionary ideas. Schelling was the main philosophical lion of the time; and in some quarters Hegel was spoken of as a new champion summoned to help him in his struggle with the more prosaic con tinuators of Kant. Hegel's first performance seemed to justify the rumour. It was an essay on the difference between the philosophic systems of Fichte and Schelling, tending in the main to support the latter. Still more striking was the agreement shown in the Critical Journal of Philosophy, which Schelling and Hegel wrote conjointly during the years 18o2–o3. So latent was the difference between them at this epoch that in one or two cases it is not possible to determine by whom the essay was written. The disser tation by which Hegel qualified for the position of Privatdozent (De orbitis planetarum) was probably chosen under the influence of Schelling's philosophy of nature.
Hegel's lectures, in the winter of 1801-02, on logic and meta physics were attended by about eleven students. Later, in 1804, we find him with a class of about thirty, lecturing on his whole system; but his average attendance was rather less. Besides phil osophy, he once at least lectured on mathematics. As he taught, he was led to modify his original system, and notice after notice of his lectures promised a text-book of philosophy—which, how ever, failed to appear. Meanwhile, after the departure (1803) of Schelling from Jena, Hegel was left to work out his own views. Besides philosophical studies, where he now added Aristotle to Plato, he read Homer and the Greek tragedians, made extracts from books, attended lectures on physiology, and dabbled in other sciences. On his own representation at Weimar, he was in Feb ruary 1805 made a professor extraordinarius, and in July i8o6 drew his first and only stipend—ioo thalers. At Jena, though some of his hearers became attached to him, Hegel was not a popular lecturer.
Of the lectures of that period there still remain considerable notes. The language often had a theological tinge (never entirely absent), as when the "idea" was spoken of, or "the night of the divine mystery," or the dialectic of the absolute called the "course of the divine life." Still his view was growing clearer,, and his difference from Schelling more palpable. Both Schelling and Hegel stand in a relation to art, but while the aesthetic model of Schel ling was found in the contemporary world where art was a special sphere and the artist a separate profession in no intimate connec tion with the age and nation, the model of Hegel was found rather in those works of national art in which art is not a part but an aspect of the common life, and the artist is not a mere individual but a concentration of the passion and power of beauty in the whole community.
On the 14th of October i8o6 Napoleon was at Jena. Hegel, like Goethe, felt no patriotic shudder at the national disaster, and in Prussia he saw only a corrupt and conceited bureaucracy. Writing to his friend F. J. Niethammer (1766-1848) on the day before the battle, he speaks with admiration of the "world-soul," the emperor, and with satisfaction of the probable overthrow of the Prussians. Hegel's fortunes were now at the lowest ebb. Yet at this time he finished and published his first great work, the Phdnornenologie des Geistes (1807) . He was, therefore, glad to become editor of the Bamberger Zeitung (1807-1808). Of his editorial work there is little to tell; no leading articles appeared in his columns. It was not a suitable vocation, and he gladly accepted the rectorship of the Aegidien-gymnasium in Nuremberg, a post which he held from December i8o8 to August 1816. As a teacher and master Hegel inspired confidence in his pupils, and maintained discipline without pedantic interference in their associations and sports.
In 1811 Hegel married Marie von Tucher (twenty-two years his junior) of Nuremberg. The marriage was entirely happy. His income amounted at Nuremberg to 1,50o gulden (L13o) and a house ; at Heidelberg, as professor, he received about the same sum; at Berlin about 3,00o thalers (i3oo). Two sons were born to them ; the elder, Karl, became eminent as a historian. The younger, Immanuel, was born on Sept. 24, 1816..
In 1812 appeared the first two volumes of his W issenscha f t der Logik, and the work was completed by a third in 1816. This work, in which his system was for the first time presented in what, with a few minor alterations, was its ultimate shape, brought him the offer of three professorships, at Erlangen, Berlin and Heidelberg. He accepted the post at Heidelberg, whence Fries had just gone to Jena (October 1816). Among his pupils was Hermann F. W. Hinrichs (q.v.), to whose Religion in its Inward Relation to Science (18 2 2) Hegel contributed an important preface.
In 1817 he brought out the Encyklopadie d. philos. Wissen schaften im Grundrisse for use at his lectures. It is the only ex position of the Hegelian system as a whole which we have direct from Hegel's own hand. Besides this work he wrote two reviews for the Heidelberg Jahrbucher—the first on F. H. Jacobi, the other a political pamphlet entitled a Criticism on the Transactions of the Estates of Wurttemberg in 1815-1816.
In 1818 Hegel accepted the renewed offer of the chair of philosophy at Berlin, vacant since the death of Fichte. His in fluence upon his pupils, and his solidarity with the Prussian gov ernment, gave him a position such as few professors have held.
In 1821 Hegel published the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Reclits. h is a theory in which the fundamental principles of law, morality and social institutions (municipal and political) are shown to be connected stages in the logical evolution of rational will. It is animated by the idea that whatever is real is rational, and whatever is rational is real. His theory was not a mere formu lation of the Prussian state. It is inspired by an overpowering sense of the value of organization—a sense that liberty can never be dissevered from order, that a vital interconnection between all the parts of the body politic is the source of all good.
During his thirteen years at Berlin Hegel's whole soul seems to have been in his lectures. Between 1823 and 1827 his activity reached its maximum. His notes were subjected to perpetual re visions and additions. We can form an idea of them from the shape in which they appear in his published writings. Those on Aesthetics, on the Philosophy of Religion, on the Philosophy of History and on the History of Philosophy, have been published by his editors, mainly from the notes of his students, under their separate heads; while those on logic, psychology and the philos ophy of nature are appended in the form of illustrative and ex planatory notes to the sections of his Encyklopadie. During these years hundreds of hearers from all parts of Germany, and beyond, came under his influence. His fame was carried abroad by eager or intelligent disciples.
Three courses of lectures are especially the product of his Ber lin period : those on aesthetics, the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of history. In the years preceding the revolution of 183o, public interest, excluded from political life, turned to theatres, concert-rooms and picture-galleries. At these Hegel be came a frequent and appreciative visitor and made extracts from the art-notes in the newspapers. In his holiday excursions, the in terest in the fine arts more than once took him out of his way to see some old painting. This familiarity with the facts of art, though neither deep nor historical, gave a freshness to his lectures on aesthetics, which, as put together from the notes of 182o, 1823, 1826, are in many ways the most successful of his efforts.
The lectures on the philosophy of religion are another applica tion of his method. Shortly before his death he had prepared for the press a course of lectures on the proofs for the existence of God. In his lectures on religion he dealt with Christianity, as in his philosophy of morals he had regarded the state. On the one hand he turned his weapons against the rationalistic school, who re duced religion to the modicum compatible with an ordinary worldly mind. On the other hand he criticized the school of Schleiermacher, who elevated feeling to a place in religion above systematic theology. His middle way attempts to show that the dogmatic creed is the rational development of what was implicit in religious feeling. To do so, of course, philosophy becomes the interpreter and the superior.
One of the last literary undertakings in which he took part was the establishment of the Berlin Jahrbiicher fur wissenscha f tliche Kritik, in which he assisted Edward Gans and Varnhagen von Ense. The aim of this review was to give a critical account, certi fied by the names of the contributors, of the literary and philo sophical productions of the time, in relation to the general progress of knowledge. The journal was not solely in the Hegelian in terest ; and more than once, when Hegel attempted to domineer over the other editors, he was met by vehement and vigorous opposition.
The revolution of 183o was a great blow to him, and the prospect of democratic advances almost made him ill. His last literary work, the first part of which appeared in the Preussisclie Staatszeitung, was an essay on the English Reform Bill of 1831. It contains primarily a consideration of its probable effects on the character of the new members of parliament, and the measures which they may introduce. In the latter connection he enlarged on several points in which England had done less than many continental states for the abolition of monopolies and abuses.
In 1831 cholera first entered Europe. Hegel and his family re tired for the summer to the suburbs, and there he finished the re vision of the first part of his Science of Logic. At the beginning of the winter session he returned to his house in the Kupfergraben. On Nov. 14, after one day's illness, he died of cholera and was buried, as he had wished, between Fichte and Solger.
Hegel in his class-room was neither imposing nor fascinating. You saw a plain, old-fashioned face, without life or lustre—a figure which had never looked young, and was now prematurely aged; the furrowed face bore witness to concentrated thought. Sitting with his snuff-box before him, and his head bent down, he looked ill at ease, and kept turning the folios of his notes. His utterance was interrupted by frequent coughing; every sen tence came out with a struggle. The style was no less irregular. Sometimes in plain narrative the lecturer would be specially awk ward, while in abstruse passages he seemed specially at home, rose into a natural eloquence, and carried away the hearer by the grandeur of his diction. (For bibliography see S.V. HEGELIAN PHILOSOPHY.)