The Philosophy of
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

(from Radicalacademy.com)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I.
II.
III.

 Life and Works
Being and New Logic of the Concrete
Dialectical Process of Being

 

I. Life and Works

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (picture) was born in Stuttgart in 1770. He studied theology and philosophy, and at first gave his sympathies to the philosophy of the Enlightenment and to Kantian Criticism, only to turn to Romantic historicism and become attached to Fichte and Schelling. He lectured in various German universities, and ultimately at the University of Berlin, where he exercised great influence. He died in 1831.

Hegel's most representative philosophical works are: Phenomenology of Spirit; Logic; and Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. German Idealism and modern thought, generally speaking, reach the greatest heights of immanentism in the compact dialectic system of Hegel.

II. Being and the New Logic of the Concrete

The primordial Being, as it is conceived by Hegel, is the poorest and simplest unity. Indeed, so poor and simple is it that it blends with nothingness. Primitive and absolute Being is non-being. (Cf. the Being of Parmenides.) But this non-being-Being is a subject; it is perennial activity. Through this perennial activity, primitive absolute Being becomes intrinsically differentiated, constructing itself in an unlimited series of phenomena. That is to say, the "pure indeterminateness" (nothing) builds itself upon itself, passing from state to state, developing explicitly (in a series of determinate beings) what is implicitly contained in itself. In any passage of this kind (and such passages are continually occurring) the primordial indeterminateness becomes ever richer and more conscious.

The rhythm which makes possible this self-revelation and self-construction is that of the "coincidence of opposites." Because the development of Being is achieved with the intention of becoming what it is not, any link in this chain of development is characterized by a point of "coincidence" of being and non-being, united to affirm a higher entity. Being, affirming this higher entity, does not nullify the preceding entity, but revaluates it, together with its opposite (non-being), in a higher synthesis. Being, in other words, is characterized in its development by three stages: being (thesis), non-being (antithesis), becoming (synthesis). In other words, the preceding entity (being) is affirmed with its opposite (non-being) in a higher entity (becoming). It is in this that Hegel's system of triads consists.

This higher entity, at the same time it becomes being, is lacerated, so to speak, by its opposite (i.e., by non-being), and tends to affirm itself in a still higher entity, and so on ad infinitum. This activity of building and of tearing itself apart, with the intention of rebuilding itself ad infinitum, is the life of Being. To stop this activity would mean to destroy Being itself.

Hegel believed that he had found a confirmation of this dynamic development, in which nothing is nullified but everything is revaluated in a higher development, in the growth of our stable ego. At every moment of the development of our personality we pass from state to state, and yet the preceding reality is not nullified, but is affirmed in a richer and more conscious ego.

Another important characteristic of the primordial reality is its rationality. Primordial Being is essentially thought, idea, logos. Hence logic is the rule of the entire series of its developments; the entire unbroken series in which Being divides itself and recomposes itself in thesis, antithesis and synthesis is rational. In the primordial Being, thought is identified with reality, so that the order of ideas coincides perfectly with the order of beings. Hence Hegel's principle: Every real being is rational and every rational being is real.

This new concept of reality as the realization and overcoming of opposites (being, non-being, synthesis) requires a new logic, which Hegel calls the logic of the concrete, as opposed to that of Aristotle, which Hegel calls formal. According to Hegel, formal logic is founded on an abstract and static concept of being, a being which has been forcibly divorced from the dynamism that is the true life of reality. This abstract concept of being, drawn from reality, is understood as being always identical with itself.

According to Aristotle, the principle of identity could be formulated because the concept of being is always the same -- A is equal to A, and A cannot be its negation (non-A) at the same time and in the same respect. For Hegel, this logic is faulty because it misinterprets reality. For him reality is never identical with itself, but at every moment changes, passing from what it is to what it is not. Contradiction, therefore, is the life of concrete being.

Now, since the rhythm of logic is identical with the dynamic rhythm of reality, we need a new logic, which makes possible the reconciliation of the terms of the contradiction (being and non-being) in a higher reality. In other words, in any synthesis there must be present the terms of contradiction, the former reality and its negation (the opposite), being and non-being. Hegel maintains that this new logic of the concrete must take the place of the formal logic of Aristotle.

III. Dialectical Process of Being

According to Hegel, reality is a logical process developing in accordance with the law of coincidence of opposites. This process depends upon a fundamental triad: Idea (Logos), Nature, Spirit. This triad indicates a logical rather than a chronological succession, for the entire process is actuated within the primordial Spirit, in which all is immanent.

Idea or Logos is the system of the pure concepts which lie at the foundation of all reality. Nature is the self-extrinsication, the objectivation of the Idea. It is the Idea's becoming other than itself, or its self-extension in time and space. But it is the Universal Spirit which establishes itself in the series of phenomena extended in space and time, with the purpose of developing itself and revealing to itself with the intention of gaining consciousness of self. Indeed, nature reaches the acme of perfection in the human organism, and the human organism attains the acme of perfection in individual consciousness. With the attainment of this supreme stage of perfection there begins the return of nature to the Universal Spirit.

Indeed, individual consciousness (or the subjective spirit) is the first appearance of the Universal Spirit as rationality and freedom. But in the narrow limits of individuality, the Spirit can never reach the fullness of rationality and freedom, which are the consummation of the entire process of the Spirit. To realize this ultimate end (the fullness of rationality and freedom), the subjective spirit (individual consciousness) objectivates itself in many superindividual dorms; i.e., it constructs the ethical world. The first objectivation is the juridical order, right, which guarantees freedom to all in a measure compatible with the freedom of others.

Right can regulate only external conduct. The spirit which aspires to regulate the interior world also, objectivates itself in a higher form, i.e., in morality. Morality concretizes itself:

The state is the living God, who concretizes Himself in the spirit of the people (the "national spirit"). The living God incarnates Himself now in this, now in that nation, according as the nation realizes more perfectly than any other the ideal of civilization. This passing of the Spirit from one nation to another is what history is made of.

The Spirit is not limited, but circulates among the entire multitude of particular institutions. The passage of the Spirit from one nation to another, according to Hegel, is necessary, rational and progressive. So also conflict and war are necessary, rational and progressive. Hence, to the one chosen people another succeeds. The new chosen people possesses all rights over the former for the sufficient reason that it is the conqueror; similarly, the vanquished people are wrong merely because they have been vanquished.

History, therefore, is a tribunal before which all the injustices, evils and crimes with which the world is filled, find their rational justification. Such is the conclusion of a dialectic in which the real has been proclaimed the rational, and values have been leveled because all are equally necessary for the manifestation of the Spirit.

Although the state is the highest objectivation and manifestation of the Spirit, Hegel places the Universal or Absolute Spirit over the objective spirit. The Absolute Spirit -- through the last triad: art, religion and philosophy -- fully actuate the consciousness of its divine nature in a full equation with itself.

In art the Spirit apprehends its absolute essence as an idea expressing a sensible object: the beautiful is an idea sensibly concretized, in which the infinite is seen as finite.

In religion, on the other hand, there is the unity of the finite with the infinite. The infinite is immanent in the finite, but in a sentimental, imaginative, mythical form. In tracing the history of religion, Hegel places Christianity above all other religions because of the mystery of the Incarnation, in which the human spirit acquires a consciousness of its divine nature.

Above religion stands philosophy, which has the same content as religion, but with this difference -- that the content has been drawn up on logical, conceptual and rational form. In philosophy the Absolute Spirit reaches its full consciousness and rationality.

The Hegelian concept, in which the state is the living God and individuals but passing shadows, and in which, moreover, conflict and war are affirmations of the vitality of the state, has been put to the test in the German nation. The course which Germany followed -- with disastrous results -- in two world wars is rightly judged the consequence of such a concept. Needless to say, Hegel's concept of reality is immanentist, pantheistic and atheistic.

 

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2. from:

Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences
Part III: The Philosophy of Spirit
iii: Absolute Spirit

§ 553

The concept of the spirit has its reality in the spirit. If this reality is in completed identity with that concept as the knowledge of the absolute idea, then the necessary aspect is that the implicitly free intelligence liberates itself for its concept, in order for it to be a shape worthy of it. The subjective and the objective spirit can therefore be seen as the path on which this side of reality or existence forms itself (§ 304). Conversely, this path also has the significance that the subjective spirit is seen as the first entity which exists in its immediacy without the concept, grasps its essence and forms itself from there, and thereby reaches its free identity with the concept, its absolute reality.

§ 554

Since the subjective individuality in its free development is essentially a process that begins with immediate life, the highest identity which being has, and therefore observes all the determinate beings in the world as a nullity and entities to be sacrificed, the ethical substance has the significance of absolute power and the absolute soul, and contains the significance of the essence of nature and of the spirit.

§ 555

The diremption of this general and pure substance of the spirit is therefore the judgment in itself and the knowledge for which it exists as such.

(a) The Religion of Art
§ 556

The immediate shape of this knowledge is that of the intuition and representation of the absolute spirit as the ideal.

§ 557

The significance of the ideal is the substantiality as the identical and concrete essence of nature and of the spirit, a concrete essence which is called God. The proof that this significance is the absolute truth is the mediation by which nature is suspended into the spirit, and the spirit suspends its subjectivity through its activity into the absolute spirit, thereby placing itself as its final ground in such a way that this mediation is in itself just as much the suspension of the mediation, of the antithesis (§ 72, 74, 105, and so on), and knows itself as the absolute first principle.

§ 558

As this consciousness of the absolutely first takes shape, its immediacy produces the factor of finitude in art, and is also the determinate shape of God for itself at first as the abstract of an immediate existence, of an elementary or concrete natural being, or of the opposite, pure thought.

§ 559

The truth, however, of that immediate shape and its shapeless negativity, of the here and now and of the beyond, is the concrete shape born from the spirit. In this ideal the natural immediacy appears only as the sign of thought, liberated from its contingency and transfigured through thought to express the idea, so that the shape shows it and it alone:— the shape of beauty.

§ 560

Insofar as beauty in general is the penetration of the intuition or of the image by thought, and exemplary thought, it is something formal, and the content of thought, as well as the material which it uses for its imagination, can in the first place be of the most various types.

§ 561.

Insofar, however, as the form has its true content, that penetration itself the spiritual substance in its absolute significance (§ 457), it is, however, for the sake of the immediacy in which this knowledge is intuition or imagistic representation, the shape, to a certain extent finite, as being is immediate and thereby external material, the content is partly therefore only a particular spirit of the people.

§ 562

That this existence is a product of the subject, which grasps the idea and brings it to external presentation, is not because of its finitude; for the subject is only purely formal activity, and the work of art is only then an expression of God when there is no sign of subjective particularity in it, and the indwelling spirit of the people is conceived and born into the world unmixed and unspotted by its contingency.— The mediation, which has gone through the pain and the activity of a subject and has taken shape, is immediately suspended. The work presents the substance of the subject, and the labour pains are precisely this absolute manifestation and negativity of the subjective particularity.

§ 563

Insofar, however, as the image of the God is at hand as immediate, thus the relation of the others, driven by their self-subsisting essences in the act of worship through devotion and the act of lowering in thoughts, relinquishes their own subjectivity, symbolically sacrifices their particular reality, and becomes conscious in the enthusiasm and in the enjoyment of their identity with the substance. Thus the relation loses its external shape and, to the same extent, transfers its subjectivity, which is inward in substance only as general knowledge, into existence.

§ 564

In world history, however, the absolute spirit suspends the finitude of its knowing reality and the limited existence of its idea in and for itself into generality, as well as the form of the intuition, of the immediate knowledge and existence, into self-mediating knowledge and an existence which is itself knowledge, and passes into revelation.

(b) Revealed Religion
§ 565

Absolute spirit at this level of the suspended immediacy of its shape, and its knowledge as well at the level of reflection, is, on the one hand, the general spirit of nature and of the spirit subsisting in and for itself; but on the other hand, it exists for the representation. lie subjectivity of knowledge, because it is reflection, lends independence to the moments of its life, whose totality it essentially is, making them presuppositions of each other, and phenomena which succeed each other; it makes a complex of events according to finite reflective categories.

§ 566

In this separation the reflection separates the form from the content, and in the form the different moments of the concept are separated into particular spheres or elements, in each of which the absolute content manifests itself.

§ 567

(1) In the moment of generality, the sphere of pure thought or the abstract element of the essence, it is therefore the absolute spirit which is in the first place the presupposed principle, and as a substantial power in the reflective determination of causality is creator of heaven and earth. But in this eternal sphere the spirit only generates itself as its son, whose generation or positing is equally, however, suspended and the eternal being of the concept; just as its determination to be different from the general essence eternally suspends itself and, through this mediation of the self-suspending mediation, the first substance is only concrete individuality — is the spirit.

§ 568

(2) In the moment of particularity, however, as judgment, in which individuality in general is included or becomes itself again in the moment of reflection, it is this concrete eternal essence which is presupposed. Its movement is the actual creation or disintegration of the eternal moment of mediation, of the only son, who is divided into the independent antithesis. On the one hand, namely, are heaven and earth, elemental and concrete nature, and on the other hand, standing in relation to such nature, the spirit, which therefore is finite. That spirit, as the extreme of self-subsisting negativity, completes its independence until it becomes wickedness, becomes directly an extreme through its relation to an opposing nature and through its own naturalness thus posits it.

§ 569

(3) In the moment of individuality as such, namely, of subjectivity and of the concept itself in which the antithesis of general and particular has sunk to its identical ground, the place of presupposition (a) is taken by the general substance, as actualised out of its abstraction into an individual self-consciousness. This individual is also as such identical with the essence, and thereby evil in and for itself is suspended. Further, this immediate concreteness expires in the absolute pain of negativity, in which it, as concreteness, is identical with itself and thus, as absolute return from that negativity and as general unity of the general and individual essentiality for itself has realised its being as the idea of the spirit, eternal, but living and real.

§ 570

(b) This totality, since it exists in the sphere of reflection, is the self-subsisting totality or presupposition, and in opposition to this totality stands the division and finite immediacy of individual subjectivity. For this subjectivity the initial presupposition and its movement are at first an other and an object of contemplation; the intuition of its self-subsisting truth, through which this finite subject, on account of its immediate nature, at first determines itself as nullity and evil. It is, therefore, according to the example of its truth, the movement to relinquish its immediate natural determinacy and its own will, and to unify itself with that example in the pain of negativity, in general abstraction. In this way the subject recognises itself as identical with the essence, which (c) through this mediation brings about its own dwelling in self-consciousness, and is the real, general spirit.

§ 571

The revelation of the absolute, whose life is presented in a cycle of concrete shapes of representation, follows from its separation into independent parts with a temporal and external sequence, and in this last result it gathers itself as the true and the real in the general, simple, and eternal spirit. In this form of truth, truth is the object of philosophy.

(c) Philosophy
§ 572

Philosophy is the unity of art and religion, as the simple intuition and substantial production of art are elevated to self-conscious thought through the separation into parts and the mediation of religion. In this element the self-conscious idea purifies itself just as much from its first immediacy as from the appearance of the event, from the contingency, the externality, and the sequential nature which its content has in religion. This knowledge is thus the concept of art and religion in which the diverse elements of the content are recognised as necessary, and this necessity and immediacy are recognised as free.

§ 573

This recognition of the necessity in the content of the absolute representation, as well as of the necessity of both forms, on the one hand, immediate intuition and its poetry, and on the other hand, the presupposed representation, the objective and external revelation, and the subjective retreat and inner identification of faith with representation. This recognition of the content and the form and the liberation of these forms completes itself when philosophy in the end grasps its own concept, that is, looks back on its knowledge.

§ 574

This concept of philosophy is the self-thinking idea, truth aware of itself (§ 183), or logic with the significance that it is generality preserved in concrete content. In this way science returns to its beginning, with logic as the result. The presupposition of its concept, or the immediacy of its beginning and the aspect of its appearance at that moment, are suspended.

§ 575

This initial appearance is formed by the syllogism, which has logic basically as its starting point, with nature for the middle term and is linked ultimately to spirit. Logic becomes nature, and nature becomes spirit. Nature, which stands between the spirit and its essence, divides itself though not to the extremes of finite abstraction. For the syllogism is in the idea and nature is essentially determined as a transition point and negative moment. But the mediation of the concept has the external form of transition, and science takes the form of being.

§ 576

In the second syllogism this appearance is suspended, for the spirit is the mediating factor. This is a syllogism which is already the standpoint of the spirit itself presupposes nature and joins it with logic. It is the syllogism of reflection on the idea; science appears as subjective cognition.

§ 577

These appearances are suspended in the idea of philosophy, which has self-knowing reason, the absolutely general, for its middle term a middle which divides itself into spirit and nature, with the former as its presupposition, and the latter as its general extreme. Thus immediate nature is only a posited entity, as spirit is in itself not a presupposition, but rather totality returning into itself. In this way the middle term, the self-knowing concept, has as its reality primarily conceptual moments and exists in its determinacy as general knowledge, persisting immediately by itself.

Absolute Spirit is Section three of The Philosophy of Spirit, Part III of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and this text comes from the early 1817 version, translated by Steven A. Taubeneck, published by Continuum 1990.