Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Book 49)

by Peter Singer

‘Himalayan severity’ of his prose, to his ‘repulsive terminology’, and to the ‘extreme obscurity’

book intended for an audience with no prior knowledge of his work is no easy task.

is to select the gentlest possible approach route.

It is Hegel’s attempt to show how the findings of the natural sciences – physics, chemistry, biology, etc. – conform to his logical categories.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770.

Napoleon: ‘The Emperor – this world soul

The period of French power, between 1806 and 1814,

immediately abolished serfdom

Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. This is now regarded as one of the greatest philosophical works of all time.

senses. Knowledge is only possible because our mind plays an active role, organizing and systematizing what we experience.

Independent reality – Kant called it the world of the ‘thing-in-itself’ – is for ever beyond our knowledge.

liable to be swayed from it by the non-rational desires which have their origin in our physical nature.

Victory is to be won by the suppression of all desires except the feeling of reverence for the moral law, which leads us to do our duty for its own sake.

‘to give human reason complete satisfaction about that which has always engaged its curiosity, but so far in vain’.

So impressive was Kant’s achievement that for a time it did indeed seem, not just to Kant but also to his readers, as if there were only a few more details to be filled in, and then all philosophy would be complete.

The first source of dissatisfaction was Kant’s view of the ‘thing-in-itself’. That something should exist and yet be completely unknowable seemed an unsatisfactory limitation on the powers of human reason.

Johann Fichte

The whole world, in Fichte’s view, was to be seen as something constituted by our active minds. What mind cannot know does not exist.

The second source of dissatisfaction was the division of human nature implied by Kant’s moral philosophy.

Sch...

To portray human nature as for ever divided between reason and passion, and our moral life as an eternal struggle between the two, is degrading and defeatist.

Schiller suggested, Kant was accurately describing the sorry state of human life today, but it was not always so and it need not always be so. In ancient Greece, so much admired for the purity of its artistic forms, there had been a harmonious unity between reason and passion.

Schiller,

Hegel expressed his admiration for Schiller’s objections to Kant’s view of human nature,

this disharmony was not an eternal truth about human nature, but a problem to be overcome.

poet Hölderlin

Friedrich Schelling.

Jesus is compared with Socrates, and emerges from the comparison as decidedly the inferior teacher of ethics.

Orthodox religion is, in Hegel’s eyes, a barrier to the goal of restoring man to a state of harmony, for it makes man subordinate his own powers of thought to an external authority.

Lutheran Christian

joined his friend Schelling at the University of Jena, in the small state of Weimar.

the small fees he collected from the few students (eleven in 1801, thirty by 1804) who came to hear him.

philosophies of Fichte and Schelling:

Schelling’s view was to be preferred.

Hegel began to prepare his first major work, The Phenomenology of Mind.

but to send off the manuscript – his only copy – amidst all the confusion caused by the arrival of the warring armies outside Jena. Luckily the manuscript travelled undisturbed and the work appeared early in 1807.

Their friendship was at an end.

He remained in this post for nine years, and made a success of it. In addition

At Jena he had fathered an illegitimate son, the mother being his landlady, who is recorded as having had two previous illegitimate children by other lovers.

1811, aged forty-one,

published his lengthy Science of Logic, which appeared in three volumes in 1812, 1813, and 1816.

Hegel accepted the offer with alacrity, and taught at Berlin from 1818 until he died in 1831.

He was not a good lecturer in the conventional sense, but he clearly captivated his students.

I was unable at first to find my way into either the manner of his delivery or the train of his thought.

Exhausted, morose, he sat there as if collapsed into himself, his head bent down, and while speaking kept turning pages an...

His constant clearing of his throat and cough...

Every sentence stood alone and came out with effort, cut in...

What distinguished Hegel’s mode of thinking from that of all other philosophers was the exceptional historical sense underlying it.

the latter is indeed supposed to be only the proof of the former.

for the undoubted parallel between the development of Hegel’s ideas and the development of world history to which Engels draws attention is sufficient justification for using Hegel’s understanding of world history as our way into his system of ideas.