THESIS 72: GEORGE WILLIAM
FRIEDRICH HEGEL
gel
Life:
He was born August 17, 1770 in
Stuttgart and died at the age of 61 in
Berlin. Along with J.G. Fichte and F.W.J.
von Schelling, Hegel belongs to the period
of “German Idealism” in the decades
following Kant. He was born during
Beethoven was born and also during the
time of Goethe. He was deeply impressed
by the Greek writers, coming eventually to
believe that they are the only source of
Modern Philosophy.
Hegel developed a comprehensive
philosophical framework of Absolute
Idealism to account in an integrated and
developmental way for the relation of mind
and nature.
The Hegelian System
The heart of Hegel’s system is his Logic,
where philosophical thinking seeks to
penetrate
thought
and find
in it the
revelation of reality. It is true enough to
say that reality is truly real only when it is
thought reality even though man’s
awareness of this identification cannot be
achieved independent of the historical
process of developing consciousness. It is
true enough to say that reality is truly real
only when it is thought reality; but it is
equally true that thought is truly thought
only as a process of coming to terms with
the real.
It is for this reason that, while
contemplating the articulation of his logic
as the cornerstone of his system, Hegel
realized that it would be impossible to
plunge into the depths of thought, there to
find reality, without prefacing his effort
with an account of the process whereby
awareness becomes thought in the fullest
sense of the term. Hegel holds, “the world
is rational, and the goal of human enquiry
is to ‘bring this rationality to
consciousness’, that is, to become aware of
this rationality, and hence achieve a fully
adequate comprehension of reality.”1
Notion of Spirit
“Spirit is not to be considered only as
individual, finite, consciousness, but as that
Spirit which is universal and concrete
within itself… Spirit’s intelligent
comprehension of itself is at the same time
the progression of the total evolving
reality. This progression is not one that
takes its course through the thought of an
individual and exhibits itself in a single
consciousness, for it shows itself to be
universal Spirit presenting itself in the
history of the world in all the richness of
its form.”2
1 4
Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, 4-5.
2 5
Hegel, Lectures on the History of
Philosophy, 33.
The Subjective Spirit
“Self-consciousness, in being an object, is
just as much ‘I’ as ‘object’. With this, we
already have before us the Notion of Spirit.
What still lies ahead for consciousness is
the experience of what Spirit is – this
absolute substance which is the unity of the
different independent self-consciousness’s
which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect
freedom and independence: the ‘I’ that is
‘We’ and the ‘We’ that is ‘I’. It is in self-
consciousness, in the Notion of Spirit, that
consciousness first finds its turning point,
where it leaves behind it the colorful show
of the sensuous here-and-now and the night
like void of the supersensible beyond, and
steps out into the spiritual daylight of the
present.”3
“Similarly here, too, the concept is to be
regarded not as the act of self-conscious
understanding, not as the subjective
understanding, but as the concept in its
own absolute character which constitutes a
stage of nature as well as of spirit”4
Objective Spirit
Hegel identifies the actual history of
spirit with “objective spirit” that is, “in the
development of human social structures,
paradigmatically, the political constitutions
of states.”5
The stage which concern about the true
nature of man, precisely because he is free,
not merely acting and reacting but self-
3
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 110-11.
Hegel, Science of Logic, 257.
Hegel, Elements of Philosophy of Right,
349.
determining, in the sense that
determines himself to be a self:6
 A. individual person who is
characterized by rights, initially
the right to own that which is not
he.
 B. the individual person as self-
determining to moral behavior.
 C. the person not merely as
individual but as a member of the
society.
Dialectic Process
This has been the pattern of the
argumentations of Hegel in his books
especially in the Phenomenology of the
Spirit. He did not make a clear explanation
6
Hegel, Elements of Philosophy of Right, 78.
he of the triadic movement from thesis, book Science of Logic which discussed in
antithesis and synthesis in this book yet he detail his dialectical method.
used this method to explain his thoughts.
Since he has a focus on the ideas, this
process of argumentation aims to yield at
an Absolute Idea. This statement in the
earlier part of the Phenomenology of the
Spirit can be an affirmation to these
assertions:
Furthermore, the very attempt to
define how a philosophical work is
supposed to be connected with
other efforts to deal with the same
subject-matter drags in an
extraneous concern, and what is
really important for the cognition
of the truth is obscured. The more
conventional opinion gets fixated
on the antithesis of truth and
falsity, the more it tends to expect
a given philosophical system to be
either accepted or contradicted;
and hence it finds only acceptance
or rejection.7
The Phenomenology of the Spirit was the
first to be finished in all his books and this
dialectical method was employed in this
book. After few years he published his
7
Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, 2.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Source:

Hegel, G.W.F. Complete Works. Trans. By A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.