The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
HEGEL, hā'gĕl, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich German philosopher: b. Stuttgart, 27 Aug. 1770; d. Berlin, 14 Nov. 1831. He attended the gymnasium of his native city, and in 1788 was matriculated at the University of Tübingen, where he studied theology, finishing his course of study in 1793. From 1793 to 1796 he was private tutor in Switzerland devoting his leisure, meanwhile, to theological and historical studies. In 1797 he accepted a private tutorship in Frankfort and remained there until 1800. During this period he wrote out the earliest sketch of his philosophical system, and, resolving to devote himself to philosophy, went, in November 1800, to the University of Jena, as privat docent. Here he lectured on philosophy until the troubles which followed the battle of Jena in October, 1806, interrupted for a time his scholarly work. During the years between 1800 and 1806 Hegel's philosophical teachings had assumed a much more highly organized form; he had published a number of important essays; and at the moment of the battle of Jena was just completing his first great systematic treatise, the ‘Phänomenologie des Geistes,’ i.e, the ‘Phenomenology of Mind.’ Unable to obtain, for the time, satisfactory opportunity as an academic teacher, Hegel thereafter passed a year as editor of a journal in Bamberg; and then obtained a position as director of a gymnasium in Nürnberg, in 1608. He married the daughter of a distinguished Nürnberg family in 1811. Thereafter, while still at Nürnberg, he wrote his most important and finished philosophical treatise, the ‘Logik,’ in the years 1812-16. In 1816 he was appointed to a professorship of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. In 1818 he accepted a call to the University of Berlin, where he rapidly won a position of the greatest influence, gathered about him many hearers and disciples, and became the head of a school of philosophy whose influence upon contemporary German thought was of the greatest. During his life he published, in addition to the works already mentioned, a summary statement of his whole system of philosophy entitled ‘Encyclopädie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften,’ and a treatise on the ‘Philosophy of Law.’ His lectures on the ‘Philosophy of Religion,’ on the ‘History of Philosophy,’ on ‘Æsthetics,’ and on the ‘Philosophy of History,’ were published posthumously. His complete works, including his letters, fill 19 volumes, which were edited by a group of his friends, in the years immediately following his death (excepting only the letters, which in their definitive edition, were published as Volume XIX of the works by his son, the historian, Karl Hegel, in 1887).
Hegel's philosophical position can only be understood in the light of his relation to Kant. Immanuel Kant (q.v.) (1724-1804) became by the publication of his ‘Critique of Pure Reason,’ in 1781, the leader in the movement at modern German philosophical thought. In an age when the guidance of “Reason” was especially glorified by all the leading liberal and progressive teachers and parties of the day, Kant undertook a systematic inquiry into the nature, the limits and the scope of the human reason. Previous philosophers, in the l7th and 18th centuries, had been especially divided in opinion regarding the question whether experience or reason is the source of our knowledge. Kant undertook to reconcile the conflicting views regarding this problem and at the same time to map out, in a systematic way, the whole field which is accessible to human science. His result was, in substance, as follows: Human knowledge depends upon two factors, experience and our own intelligence. Both factors are equally necessary for knowledge. Experience, when viewed apart from our intelligence, is a collection of mere data of sense, which are given, but which, in so far as they are merely given, are meaningless. The data of sense get their coherence solely through the active work of our intelligence. Our intelligence, whose manner of acting is spontaneous, is indeed awakened to reaction only through sense; and can give us knowledge only with reference to the facts of experience; but the data of sense get all their form, coherence, structure, meaning, only through the fact that our intelligence is guided in its activity by certain “categories,” and formative principles, in terms of which we interpret these data, view them as due to coherent “objects of experience,” and connect these objects so that the latter form the “world of experience.” Without the intelligence, then, with its “forms,” no coherent experience is possible. Sense shows us, by itself alone, no objects, no connections of objects, no laws, no facts, no world. That we appear to find, in our world of perception, connected things, subject to laws, is due to the more or less hidden work of our intelligence, which gives form to the otherwise incoherent sensations. That we all have the same phenomenal world to deal with is due to the fact that intelligence is common to us all, in the same forms.
In consequence, what we know, and what our sciences of experience study, is neither a world of things simply given to us as brute facts from without, nor yet a world of mere sensations. On the contrary, what we know is the world of experience as our active intelligence inevitably interprets experience. Hence we know, not “things in themselves,” but “phenomena,” and not mere “data” of experience, but experiences as interpreted by the active constructive work of our intelligence.
Meanwhile, our intelligence, upon its higher levels, is indeed not content with this mere interpretation of the contents of sense, but — still in its own spontaneous way — defines ideals of objects and of laws which far transcend — according to our own conception — the facts of experience. The “Reason” proper, as distinct from the “Understanding” (that is, from the intelligence which merely interprets and renders coherent our experience), is the part or aspect of our intelligence which is concerned with these other and “transcendent” objects. The objects of the “Reason” proper, are objects which no human experience can reach or exemplify, and which we therefore conceive as lying beyond any possible experience. Such objects are God, the human ego itself, in its true nature, the cosmos in its entirety and the moral law. Such objects we cannot, in any scientific sense, “know,” just because our knowledge is limited to our interpretation of experience — an interpretation due to the functions and to the categories of our lower intelligence, i.e., of our “understanding.” Yet if the “transcendent” objects of the “pure Reason” cannot be “known,” they nevertheless can be and must be “postulated,” by virtue of a certain active and spontaneous “faith” which the Reason warrants. For these “transcendent” objects have for us a moral value and give a meaning to life.
We “know,” then, “phenomena.” Our “Reason,” meanwhile, gives us “faith” in certain “Ideas” which relate to the “transcendent” objects. This faith is not knowledge, but is rationally warranted. It is the office of philosophy to bring to consciousness the “categories” in terms of which we inevitably interpret phenomena, and so organize our experience and get our science. It is also the office of philosophy to discover and define the “Ideas” in terms of which we just as inevitably organize our moral conduct and give meaning to our practical life.
So, for Kant, this view of philosophy differs from the view of older philosophy in limiting our inquiries to the business of interpreting experience and organizing life. The philosopher then, is above all concerned with the universe, as the human Self, that is, as the Self which is, in type, the same in all of us, sees the universe, acknowledges it, and gives to it, in the form in which we experience its presence, the type of rational coherence. Any world which is not the world as the Self views it, is unknowable, and is a world of “things in themselves.”
Hegel, in common with the other post-Kantian German idealists, builds upon the basis of this Kantian analysis of knowledge and of reason. His dependence upon Kant is shown by the very fact of his frequent and persistent criticism of that philosopher's positions. That Hegel's results are in one sense far removed from those of Kant becomes obvious upon a very brief consideration. But that, however much Kant's doctrine is transformed in Hegel's system, it is still Kant whose views are the principal ones thus transformed, is also certain. The relation can be made more explicit by the following statement of the contrast between Kant and Hegel:
1. The result of Kant's philosophy is that the accessible world is the world as the rational nature of the human Self requires us to interpret it. This result lies at the basis of Hegel's doctrine. But Hegel transforms it by dropping out of consideration, the adjective “accessible,” as being superfluous. It is useless to talk of a world of unknowable or inaccessible “things in themselves,” as Kant does. The world of reason is simply the world. There is nothing to know except what the nature of our intelligence requires us to acknowledge. Discover the secret of reason and you have discovered the secret of the universe. This is the first characteristic thesis of Hegel's idealism. “Behind the curtain which is said to hide the inner nature of things,” says Hegel in the ‘Phenomenology,’ “there is nothing, unless we ourselves go behind that curtain.”
2. Kant furthermore divides the work of our intelligence between the activity of the “Understanding,” which interprets special experiences, and the “Ideas” of that “Reason,” which “postulates” our relations to ultimate reality. Hegel accepts this distinction as valid within its limits, but not as any absolute distinction. Our intelligence may and often does fix its attention upon fragments of knowledge. In that case it “abstracts” from the whole meaning of its own life, and thereby becomes ipso facto an “abstract thinking” or “understanding” of this or that object or law. Such abstractions are useful and inevitable. But they are not final. The truth, however, is in Hegel's phrase, simply “the whole.” Only that form of reason therefore which is concerned with the whole meaning of life is genuinely philosophical. But since this meaning is, after all, our own meaning, the meaning of the Self, it need not be simply a matter of “Postulates.” It can be known to us.
3. Kant limited our knowledge to “phenomena.” But this “limitation” loses its significance if once we see that there are no “things in themselves” to know. The world is for us a world of mere “phenomena” only in so far as we do not grasp the principle of which our experience is the expression. But, for Hegel, this principle is simply the absolute principle which lies at the basis of our own nature. As this absolute principle is not foreign to the Self the Self can grasp the principle. When it does so, it sees phenomena as the inevitable expression of the meaning of its own life. And then its phenomena become once more “actualities,” as real as any finite facts could be. What we know then is not a mere world of phenomena. It is a world of absolute Truth.
4. Our ethical ideals form, for Kant, a world of their own which we can never know to be real, but which we can, and must, believe to be real. This contrast of ideal and real, of knowledge and faith, Hegel believes to be founded only in a historical difference of certain stages of our own self-development. Faith, if once brought to a clear self-consciousness, becomes a knowledge as to what the absolute Self is and determines. And this knowledge philosophy can attain. Such a knowledge is ipso facto a knowledge of truth. For all truth is in and of the true Self, i.e. the Absolute.
5. Kant, in trying to define the categories which lie at the basis of our interpretation of the world, had simply accepted those categories which he observed to be in use in our daily thinking, and in science. He treated them as a fixed set of principles. Regarding the origin and the mutual relations of these categories he has no extended theory. The categories are, for him, ultimate facts of our intelligence, determining its constitution, but of unknown source. Hegel, on the contrary, regards it as one of the principal tasks of philosophy to show why and how we come by just these categories which we use in the interpretation of experience, and in the ordering of life. His principal work, the ‘Logic,’ is devoted to such a treatment of the categories. And in fact, since, from Hegel's point of view, the world of “Thought” is the only real world, or, in other words, since the constructions of that absolute process which embodies itself in our thought and in our life are constitutive of all truth, this Logic, which is to show the true genesis and nature of the Categories, takes the place of all that, in the older philosophical systems, had been called Metaphysics. For the theory of the absolute constructive process which expresses itself in our experience and in our thinking is simply the theory of the universe. There is no other world to know than this world which thought constructs, which experience observes, and which constitutes our life and its meaning.
6. For Kant, nothing absolute is knowable. All our knowledge is relative. For Hegel, absolute knowledge is possible; for whoever knows the principles that determine the true nature of our thought and of our life, finds these principles, as the expression of the true Self, absolute
This contrast of the positions of Kant and of Hegel may help to give the Hegelian philosophy its proper historical setting, without which it inevitably appears to be a presumptuous attempt to transcend the natural limits of human reason. For Hegel, these limits are not what they seem. That is, they are not absolute limits. For what we have to consider, when we philosophize, is not a foreign world, but is rather the whole truth with regard to the meaning of the very life which we ourselves are experiencing and are living.
In his first great work, the ‘Phänomenologie,’ Hegel gave an account of the various successive stages through which the human mind, as it appears in history, passes, in its transition from a naïve dependence upon the senses to the stage of philosophical reflection. In his ‘Logik,’ as has just been stated, Hegel undertakes to describe the way in which philosophical reflection leads us to the categories. The categories themselves are successive stages or phases of our interpretation of absolute truth. Their succession itself is determined by a certain “dialectical” procedure, whereby the lower categories are, through an imminent development, transformed into the higher categories. In the system of Hegel, as he planned the order of its parts, the ‘Logik’ is next followed by the ‘Naturphilosophie,’ or ‘Philosophy of Nature.’ The only connected treatment which this portion of the system ever received is the mere compend contained in the second part of Hegel's ‘Encyclopädie.’ The ‘Naturphilosophie’ consequently remained, from Hegel's point of view, imperfectly worked out. The third portion of the system was the ‘Philosophy of Mind.’ This also was left without adequate working out by the philosopher, although in his ‘Rechtsphilosophie,’ in the third section of his ‘Encyclopädie,’ and in his posthumously published lectures, there is a very extended treatment of various parts of this concluding portion of his undertaking. Under the ‘Philosophy of Mind’ Hegel included, first the whole range of psychology, and the philosophical theory of the relations between nature and mind; secondly, ethics and the philosophical theory of the state; thirdly, philosophical æsthetics, or the theory of the beautiful; and finally the philosophy of religion.
The range and general intention of the Hegelian doctrine are thus suggested although owing to the vast range of his undertaking, this can here be done only in a very inadequate way. Further characteristics of the philosopher are especially (1) his “dialectical method,” and (2) his theory of the Absolute.
By the dialectical method Hegel means a procedure of which some of the dialogues of Plato give us classical instances, and which Kant's “Antinomies” as well as Fichte's method of procedure in philosophy had exemplified, although the systematic use of the method in Hegel's way is due to his own initiative. Truth, according to Hegel, comes to us, in the first place, through the medium of “immediate” experience. Without such experience, we could indeed proceed no further on the way toward insight; and this is the permanent justification for “empiricism” in philosophy, if only we observe that this barely immediate experience, although indispensable, remains meaningless unless we transform experience through the activity of our thought. Thought begins by observing that immediate experience, taken merely as it comes, is, so far, not yet intelligible. The first work of our thought is therefore to classify, to divide, to fix upon distinct aspects of facts, to form generalizations and so to convert what comes to us as immediate into the abstract form of our various Gedanken, or conceptual constructions. This is, so far, the work of “the Understanding.” Such work first results in our regarding truth as something which, on the one hand, is fixed, universal, and abstract, while, on the other hand, this world of truth also appears to us to be a world of infinitely various special truths, which relate now to this and now to that individual thing, or fact, or law. So far as our understanding dwells upon the fixity, the universality, the abstract generality of its truths, it finds, or endlessly seeks to find unity in the world. But so far as the understanding, even in this very effort to discover unity, singles out now this and now that fact or law, it is confronted by the variety of the results which it reaches. There results the well-known problem of “the One and the Many.” In consequence, the understanding is involved in contradictions which are simply inevitable. In the world of the understanding, “everything is self-contradictory,” and is so just because the understanding makes formal consistency the one test of truth, even at the very moment when it expresses its search for truth in the form of an effort (1) to divide what is inseparable, and (2) to substitute abstractions for life.
The forms which the resulting contradictions assume are well known in the history of philosophy. The interest in abstract unity is shown in extreme form in the Eleatic reduction of the whole world to a simple One Being, by contrast with which all variety is illusory. The Atomistic thesis, which reduces all the qualitative variety of nature to quantitative differences, the material substance of Descartes, whose only attribute is extension, the sole substance of Spinoza, — these are also consequences of the tendency to understand variety by reducing it to an abstract and lifeless unity. On the other hand an equally abstract pluralism, in all the earlier stages of philosophical thought, has emphasized variety, with the result of making it inconceivable how the facts, when regarded as thus mutually isolated, could conspire to make a world at all. Views of one type have, by their very contradictions, led over to views of the opposed type.
The solution of all such difficulties lies in reducing the contradictions to their “ground,” which lies in the very “movement” of thought itself. For the truth of such views lies in their synthesis, not in their mere conflict. Such a synthesis is furnished by the discovery that the search for unity and the interest in diversity and variety are but “aspects” or “moments” of that life of self-comprehension in which the very nature of reason consists. When thought, by virtue of a deeper reflection upon the contradictions of the understanding, has reached this higher stage of the reason proper, it therefore views the successive opposing views as inevitably one-sided expressions of different aspects of our rational interest. Our world is indeed one; and in order to bring this fact to our consciousness, we have, upon the stage of the understanding, to emphasize this very aspect of Being and of the life of our own thought to such an extent as to isolate, by our abstraction, the unity upon which we then dwell, from the very variety of which it is the unity. Now unless we pass through the stage of doing this we should never bring the unity of things to light at all, but should leave this aspect of the “immediate” lost in the original obscurity in which, apart from thought, all experience is involved. But so long as we remain upon this stage of abstract reflection, we nevertheless inevitably contradict both experience and ourselves. For experience is of the many, as well as of the unity. And an abstract unity, which is the unity of nothing, is indeed a self-contradiction.
But while our world is indeed also many, and while, in order to bring this aspect of things to light, we must emphasize pluralism, yet the resulting views, taken in their abstraction, are as contradictory as are those of mere monism. The many could never co-operate in one world were they not also one.
Thus we cannot reach truth without passing through contradictions. For the truth is a synthesis of various points of view. No one of these can be appreciated unless it has first been emphasized. If once emphasized it becomes, however, in its isolation, self-contradictory, just because it has its truth not in its isolation, but in its relations to the other points of view. But in order to be able to see that these very relations are necessary, and are not merely adventitious and empirical, we must see how the isolated point of view contradicts itself. The sequence of these isolations of special categories (followed by the resulting contradictions, and by the necessary synthesis), constitutes the “dialectic movement of thought,” by which the “immediate” experience, with which we begin, is transformed into the system of truth, wherein all the elements appear in necessary interrelations to one another. The principle of this method is what Hegel calls the “Negativity” of thought. The denial, or sublation of imperfect stages of insight is the only means whereby the perfect stage earn be made explicit. This is the principle of the dialectical method.
The Hegelian theory of the Absolute is the correlate of this theory of the process whereby truth is acquired. For the dialectical method is not only a method of acquiring insight; but, since thought is, in principle, identical with the very life of the universe, the method by which we come to insight is also the very method by which the life of the world is developed. Man is simply the world come to self-consciousness, — the Spirit explicitly aware of its own life. This is the obverse aspect of the thesis that the true Self is the world. Viewed objectively, the Hegelian doctrine accordingly is that the world-ground, or “the Spirit,” also called the Absolute, has a life, or activity, whose forms are expressed in the categories of the ‘Logic.’ Thia life has first to manifest itself in experience as a world of immediate facts. This immediately given outer world constitutes what we call Nature. Such a world has to exist, and to be found by us, in order that the forms of thought should be, not mere forms, but forms expressed in a concrete and immediate way. In life, and especially in rational beings, the thought which is everywhere present in nature reaches a still higher expression, which at last becomes identical with our own insight, as this insight developes through the historical evolution of humanity. The entire world-process is therefore the complete expression of a rational spirit, which indeed eternally possesses self-consciousness, but which, when viewed historically, appears to us as attaining such self-consciousness, in individual form, in the religious and in the philosophical consciousness of man.
This must suffice as an outline of Hegel's main thoughts. Owing to the interest which he had in viewing the entire course of human history as a series of movements determined by the dialectical processes of which all our life, according to him, consists, Hegel took great interest in the philosophy of history. The influence of his school has been, in consequence, of great importance in affecting the spirit of a great number of modern historical inquiries. The highly ambiguous relations of the Hegelian system to traditional theology proved very momentous for the development of the critical study of religious dogma, and of religious history, during the generation after his death. While the original Hegelian school ultimately lost its direct influence in Germany, the indirect influence of the Hegelian system still remains very great, and is especially noticeable in English and American thought since 1865.
Bibliography. — Stirling, "Secret of Hegel"; Edward Caird, "Hegel" in Blackwood's "Philosophical Classics" (1883); Kudo Fischer, "History of Modern Philosophy," (Vol. VIII, trans. into Eng. by T. P. Gordy 1887); Rosenkranz, K., "Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Leben" (Berlin 1844); Haym, R., "Hegel und seine Zeit" (ib. 1857); McTaggart, "A Commentary on Hegel's Logic" (Cambridge 1901); and for brief summaries, the various histories of philosophy by Windelband, Thilly, Höffding and Weber.
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GEORGE WILLIAM FRIEDRICH HEGEL