Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

G.W.F.Hegel was born in Stuttgart, on 27 August 1770. His school years, according to his first biographer, K.Rosenkranz, had prepared him to absorb the general ideas of Enlightenment, on the one hand, and those of ancient philosophy, on the other. Having first toyed with the idea of joining the Jena literary circles, he instead, in 1778, became a student of Protestant theology at Tübingen. There he met Schelling and Friedrich Hölderlin, at the famous Stift, and the three formed a brief friendship and an alliance of giddy speculative Idealism, combined with ideas of freedom and a rejuvenated German state modelled on ancient Athens. The influence of Hölderlin and his all-pervading slogan of ‘Hen kai pan’ (one and all) should not be underestimated. The future poet- philosopher had already criticized Fichte’s theoretical attempts to transcend the limits of human consciousness, only to radicalize this position by assuming an ontological division of human nature that looked forever for unification. (What must come to mind here is of course RALPH WALDO EMERSON’S image of ‘man as a broken giant’.) For Hegel, Hölderlin’s view was a point of departure already in his early works, long before he began to build his grand systematic work on the logical necessity of unity. Having finished his studies at Tübingen, Hegel earned his living as a private teacher, first in Bern, then in Frankfurt. He won his first appointment as au βerordentlicher Professor in 1805 in Jena, and later worked as headmaster at the Gymnasium at Nuremberg. (The Napoleonic Battle of Jena had put a stop to the activities of the university.) Apart from his Differenzschrift (Difference between the Philosophical Systems of Fichte and Schelling, 1801), his first major publication was The Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807. Between the years 1812–16, his Science of Logic was published; there followed, in 1817, The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Science in Outline . In 1818 Hegel accepted an invitation to Berlin, where he occupied the chair of Philosophy and gained his reputation as Germany’s preeminent philosopher. He died in November 1831.

The break between Hegel and Schelling, students and friends in Tübingen and briefly colleagues at the University of Jena, became final with Hegel’s publication of his Phenomenology of Spirit . In his preface to the Phenomenology Hegel, who during the years in Tübingen was probably more influenced by Hölderlin than by Schelling, simply called the ‘absolute’ as construed by Schelling an ‘abyss’, and resolutely claimed that Schelling’s quest for ultimate unity could only lead into the night where distinctions were no longer possible. The necessary and yet tragic separation of the human mind and the divine spirit, as exemplified in nature, was something Schelling saw as the ultimate principle, from which the unfolding of history derived its dynamics. Reconciliation could only be achieved via the acceptance, however painful, of negation. Hegel, in his

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Phenomenology left the Romantics and especially their religious motivation behind, claiming the world of pure spirit for philosophy, a daring step to take. However, it was Hegel’s influence that would prevail, even though Schelling succeeded Hegel in Berlin where he tried to give his audience the impression that Hegel’s philosophy was a mere episode in the development of man’s thought that he would counter with his own Philosophy of Revelation (Philosophie der Offenbarung, published post-humously). It is not only ironic that Schelling did not manage to replace Hegel—because he did not have the right enemies, the so called left wing Hegelians (FEUERBACH, Ruge, DAVID STRAUSS, BRUNO BAUER), which kept the spirit of Hegel alive because of their criticism—but it is also characteristic of early nineteenth-century thought that philosophy was taking a definite political turn. In Continental Europe this turn had to be achieved against the overwhelming and highly diversified influence of German Idealism, which, unlike in Britain where political and economical thought had long ago achieved philosophical acceptance, did not really want to become involved practically in the political sphere. This turned out, in the end, to be the source of its final exhaustion, even though it could claim a considerable longevity in the field of aesthetics and literary theory. The popularization of German Idealism and its literary counterpart, Romanticism, by MME. DE STAËL in her widely read book De l’Allemagne (1810) would leave a profound impression in Britain, where CARLYLE picked up the main currents of German metaphysical Idealism and passed them on to US writer-philosophers like R.W.Emerson, and his circle of major and minor Transcendentalists.

The real drama of the Hegelian movement, however, occurred when Karl Marx broke away from the notorious Doktorklub of the left-wing Hegelians under the aegis of his radical position that Hegel’s philosophy had to be turned upside down, to be put on its feet as he put it, because the task of philosophy was to change the world and not to interpret it. Karl Marx, whose reputation has suffered immensely from his adoption and vulgarization as the official representative of ‘scientific socialism’ in the communist countries of the world, should not be underestimated because of this adoption. He himself would have not considered any of the states that claimed to practise Marxism, including the Soviet Union as it existed up to its collapse, even remotely socialist or communist. Karl Marx (1818–83) first reacted against Hegel’s theory of the state and then proceeded to attack metaphysical Idealism on the basis that any theory worth its while had to be practical. Having written his Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts in the early 1840s, a critique of Hegel’s concept of the state as the ultimate expression of the objective spirit, Marx proceeded to lay the foundation for his political ideas in his Parisian Manuscripts, written in exile in 1844. He was influenced at that time not only by Moses Hess (Über das Geldwesni) and by his friend Friedrich Engels’s Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie, but also through his association with other German radicals in exile, as well as with French socialists like PROUDHON and BLANC, and the Russian anarchist-revolutionary BAKUNIN. Up to a certain point Karl Marx was still thinking in Hegelian terms, especially when it came to implicit epistemological implications of his anthropology. But the more he became personally involved in the socialist movements of his time, the further he removed himself from his former friends and collaborators, as for example from Bruno Bauer. His definite break with the remnants of theoretical Idealism came with the publication of The Holy Family (Die heilige Familie), a sarcastic criticism of everything the left-wing or Young Hegelians stood for, in this case Bruno Bauer,

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Anselm Feuerbach and MAX STIRNER. In 1847 Marx published another polemic, this time an answer to Proudhon’s Philosophy of Misery, which bore the ironic title The Misery of Philosophy . The way of polemically breaking away from theoretical Hegelianism, in the case of Karl Marx, has something forced about it, especially because

he always adhered to the dialectical aspects of Hegelianism, even if he considered this particular part of Hegel’s philosophy not as a method of inquiry but immanent in the very nature of reality. Marx, without Hegel, to be blunt, can only be a fearful misconception. Throughout all of their writings both Marx and Engels adhered to the idea of the Hegelian concept of negation as the fundamental element of progress, even at the cost of some fairly scholastic intellectual constructs, such as that of the proletariat as the natural avantgarde of revolutionary progress, albeit in need of guidance by intellectuals, a question incidentally over which the First International, which Marx helped to organize, would eventually break up. Marx himself, exiled over and over again, from Germany to Paris to Brussels, back to Germany, where the short-lived revolution of 1848 was being crushed by Prussian troops, back to Paris again, having given up his Prussian citizenship and threatened once more with exile, finally settled in England. There he began to work systematically on what would later become Das Kapital, of which he himself only saw the first volume in print. Karl Marx did not leave a school of followers to pursue his work, which in the light of its origins as an effort to combine negative Hegelianism with historical materialism and the economic theories of his time is not really surprising. His influence would manifest itself indirectly, in the variety of the interpretations of his work, whether in the dogmatic readings of his economics in Eastern Europe, in the debates of critical theorists like Max Horkheimer, Th.W.Adorno and Walter Benjamin, or in the French reception of his work as part of an ongoing discussion between neo-Marxists and phenomenologists. One aspect in both Hegel’s thought and in the work of Karl Marx should not be forgotten. Both saw themselves obliged to fundamental ideas about the morality and reasonability of the individual, as first expounded by Kant. It is equally true that both Hegel and Marx diverged widely from Kant’s original outline, which left neither room for the movement of the spirit to its self-fulfilment (Hegel) nor to utopian self-realization of the proletariat (Marx).