Hegel: A Very Short Introduction

by Peter Singer

Disastrous as the failure of the French Revolution was for those who suffered by it, there is a crucial lesson to be learned from it, namely that to build a state on a truly rational basis we must not raze everything to the ground and attempt to start again completely from scratch.

regards the French Revolution as a glorious failure,

Hegel’s answer is that history is nothing but the progress of the consciousness of freedom because history is the development of mind.

Hegel’s notion of self-consciousness is important; in different ways, it has influenced both Marxist and existentialist thinkers.

The chair, shoes, cloth, or whatever it is that the worker has produced belong to the capitalist. They enable the capitalist to profit, and thereby to increase his capital and strengthen his dominance over the workers. So the objectified essence of the worker is not merely lost to him; it actually turns into a hostile force that oppresses him.

The Stoic in chains is still free because chains do not matter to him. He detaches himself from his body and finds his consolation in his mind, where no tyrant can touch him.

The second misconception can only be eliminated by an explanation of Hegel’s position on the nature of ultimate reality. Hegel described himself as an ‘absolute idealist’. ‘Idealism’ in philosophy does not mean what it means in ordinary language: it has nothing to do with having lofty ideals or striving to be morally perfect. The philosophical term should really be ‘idea-ism’ rather than ‘ideal-ism’, for its sense is that it is ideas, or more broadly our minds, our thoughts, our consciousness, that constitute ultimate reality.

The opposed view is materialism, which contends that ultimate reality is material, not mental.

(Dualists believe that both mind and mat...

Now we can understand what all this meant: absolute knowledge is reached when mind realizes that what it seeks to know is itself. This point is the key to understanding the Phenomenology as a whole. It is probably the most profound of all the ideas of Hegel that I am attempting to convey in this book, so let us go over it again.

For Hegel there is only one reality, because, ultimately, there is only one mind.

said to be Hegel’s greatest discovery, the dialectical method.

Logic is therefore the study of this ultimate reality in its pure form, abstracted from the particular forms it takes in the finite minds of human beings or in the natural world.

From this breathtaking beginning the dialectic of the Logic moves forward. The first thesis, being, has turned into its antithesis, nothing. Being and nothing are both opposites and the same; their truth, therefore, is this movement into and apart from each other – in other words, it is becoming.

there are opposing elements which lead to the disintegration of what seemed stable, and the emergence of something new which reconciles the previously opposing elements but in turn develops its own internal tensions.

Whether it is successful in proving the necessity of absolute idealism is something I shall not consider here, but one would have to search hard to find a philosopher alive today who believes that Hegel succeeds.

does Hegel really believe that the universe as a whole, and everything in it, forms some kind of conscious entity? Is the absolute idea God?

Then is Hegel a pantheist, one who asserts that God is simply identical with the world?

panentheist. The term comes from Greek words meaning ‘all in God’ it describes the view that everything in the universe is part of God, but – and here it differs from pantheism – God is more than the universe, because he is the whole, and the whole is greater than the sum of all its parts.

Man creates God, and then imagines that God has created him.

Karl Marx came to the University of Berlin some six years after Hegel’s death. He soon attached himself to the Young Hegelians and joined in the prevailing criticism of religion.

As he grew older Marx used less Hegelian terminology, but he never abandoned the vision of communism he had reached through his transformation of Hegel’s philosophy.

Few of them could be as startled as Hegel would have been to see that the historical culmination of his philosophy has not been comprehension of the absolute idea, but a vision of a communist society that for more than a hundred years has inspired revolutionary movements around the world.