Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (/hel/;

[5]
German: [e k vlhlm fid hel];
August 27, 1770 November 14, 1831) was
a German philosopher of the late Enlightenment.
He achieved wide renown in his day and, while
primarily influential within the continental tradition
of philosophy, has become increasingly influential
in the analytic tradition as well.[6] Although he
remains a divisive figure, his canonical stature
within Western philosophy is universally
recognized.[7]
Hegel's principal achievement is his development
of a distinctive articulation of idealism sometimes
termed "absolute idealism,"[8] in which the
dualisms of, for instance, mind and nature
and subject and object are overcome. His
philosophy of spirit conceptually integrates
psychology, the state, history, art, religion, and
philosophy. His account of the masterslave
dialectic has been highly influential, especially in

20th-century France.[9] Of special importance is his

concept of spirit (Geist: sometimes also translated
as "mind") as the historical manifestation of the
logical concept and the "sublation" (Aufhebung:
integration without elimination or reduction) of
seemingly contradictory or opposing factors;
examples include the apparent opposition
between nature and freedom and
between immanence and transcendence. Hegel
has been seen in the 21st century as the
originator of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad;
however, as an explicit phrase, this originated
with Johann Fichte (17621814).[10]
Hegel has influenced many thinkers and writers
whose own positions vary widely.[11] Karl
Barth described Hegel as a
"Protestant Aquinas,"[12] while Maurice MerleauPonty wrote that "All the great philosophical ideas
of the past centurythe philosophies
of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology,

German existentialism, and psychoanalysishad

their beginnings in Hegel."[13]

I should refrain from saying anything about who, if

anyone might, would be adhering to the wrong
religious doctrines in our own times. Though the
legacy of Hegel after his death is controversial, this
book allows us to consider him "a philosopher of
religion" (p. 1), for whom "the proper object of
theology is religion itself, the relationship." (p. 32).
With his knowledge of philosophy, Hegel was able to
break religion down into four stages, in which the
Greek religion based on art was considered the
second stage. Political superpower ideology seems to
follow this as the Roman stage followed the height of
Greek civilization.
"The time of grief came when the Romans smashed
the living individualities of the peoples, putting their
spirits to flight and destroying their ethical life, before
extending the universality of their lordship over the
dismembered singular parts. At the time of this
dismembering for which there was no reconciliation,

and of this universality that had no life--in this

boredom of the world when peace was lord over all
the civilized earth--the original identity had to rise out
of its rent condition, it had to lift its eternal force above
its grief and come again to its own intuition. Otherwise
the human race must have perished inwardly." (p. 88).
I was most impressed by the connection between
humor and legal oppression that arises in this
situation, as if Hegel was also aware that comedy and
law play to the same audience.
"The latter [the Stoic autonomy of thinking, which
passes through the movement of the skeptical
consciousness to find its truth in that shape which we
have called the unhappy self-consciousness] knows
what the validity of the abstract person amounts to in
actuality and equally in pure thought.