Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831)

Life

• Early Life
  • Born 1770 in Stuttgart
  • Son of a revenue officer
  • Early education at the Stuttgart grammar school until 18
  • 1788: Studied classics and philosophy in Tübingen for 2 years
  • He was impatient with the orthodoxy of his teachers, and his certificate shows that, while dedicated to philosophy, less proficient in theology
  • Was said to be a poor orator
• Career
  • Wanting to study philosophy of Greek literature, he became a private tutor
  • Lived in Berne for three years with free time and access to a library
  • Reads Gibbon’s work on the fall of the Roman Empire and Charles Louis, baron de Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des loix
  • Studied Immanuel Kant, whose essay on religion inspired his early theological writings that were published after his death
  • End of 1786: Moves to Frankfurt am Main, his friend Hölderlin secured him a tutorship
  • Hegel suffered from melancholia and worked to cure himself: especially with Greek philosophy, modern history, and politics
  • After this, he diverges from Kantianism
  • Professor and lecturer at several Prussian universities
  • Traveled across Europe
• Aims
  • Make philosophy more accessible to the world
  • Develop a system to explain the historical development of the world (the Dialectic method)

Philosophy

Religion

• Kant’s view
  • Orthodoxy requires a faith in historical facts and doctrines reason alone cannot justify
  • It imposes a moral system of arbitrary commands
  • Jesus had taught a rational morality
• Emancipation
  • Accepted this teaching, but was more of a historian
  • Writes two essays: the life of Jesus interpreted on Kantian lines and the second on how Christianity had became authoritarian when the teachings of Christ were not authoritarian but rationalistic
  • Did not attack theology, but orthodox - inspired by a doctrine of the Holy Spirit
  • Faith in reason, with its religious bias
  • More of a Historian than Kant, he revested his early work
• Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal (The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate)
  • Negative view on Judaism, saw them as slaves to the Mosaic Law
  • Lives were unlovely compared to ancient Greeks, they were materialist
  • Jesus taught humans were not to be slaves of objective commands, but the law is to be theirs
  • God’s will should be wholeheartedly and single-mindedly carried out
  • It is a community, without tension, that is the Kingdom of God
  • This is the teaching of Christ, founded on a belief of the unity of the divine and human
  • Humans have spirit, and therefore can understand the Spirit of God, but are still flesh
  • His philosophy is rooted in these ideas

Freedom and right

• Philosophy of Right (PR) 1821
  • Existence of right is presupposed from his philosophical system
  • Rights are the existence of free will
  • Philosophy of right is necessarily a philosophy of freedom
  • Believed our comprehension of right was through the stages of Abstract Right, Morality, and Ethical Life
• Abstract Right (Property)
  • Intended as a ground to establish what constitutes free will
  • Property in this stage develops self-consciousness
  • Ownership of property is determined within the context of a common will between people
  • This mutual recognition about property ownership is named contract
  • Abstract Right is a hypothetical space of two persons, there is no exchange or money or sale
  • It is not written
  • Only the free will of an individual can ground the free will of another
• Abstract (Punishments)
  • Three kinds of wrong
  • Unintentional
  • Individuals are adhering to what they have mutually recognized, one is unwittingly incorrect
  • Unpunishable: both sides see the recognition of right as the universal and deciding factor
  • Deception
  • Both parties claim to appeal to right, one does so insincerely
  • More serious than unintentional
  • Crime
  • No appeal to right
  • Denies an appeal to right
  • Threat to mutual recognition, one partly acts regardless of right
  • It is an infringement of right, of mutual recognition
  • Punishment
  • The restoration of right for a crime
  • Theft sends a message to the thief and wider community that this crime should not have happened
  • Helps restore violated right
  • His theory of punishment is retributivist
  • Critical of deterrence and rehabilitation approaches since they take it for granted that punishment in and for itself is just
  • There is not judge or jury in Abstract Right to determine justice
• Morality
  • moral point of view is an abstract and hypothetical exercise
  • Focuses on the individual’s power of choice
  • We may intend to do good but our only guide is our individual conception of good
  • Criticizes Kant’s Formula of Universal Law: we should only act in accordance with the maxim through which we can use and will become a universal law
• Ethical law
  • More concrete and social context
  • Discusses institutions of family, civil society, and the state
• Ethical (Family)
  • in Ethical Life, family is a sphere where individuals form a bond
  • Not arbitrary family is a connection aims at a permanence
  • Marriages are not defined in contractual terms, but ethical terms
  • More substantive unity is created, since it is a more permanent bond
  • Foundation is feelings
  • Therefore opposes arranged marriages
  • Family achieves unity through creation of children
  • Men and women embody different features
  • Family is a relation of unity for natural law, creates the pursuit of the individual within the system of needs
• Ethical (Civil Society)
  • Place of work and law
  • Needs are met by the contribution in the market and natural division of labor
  • Described as second family, fosters brotherly love
  • Market relations are a foundation for the acquisition by free individuals of social identities including social solidarity
• Ethical (Law)
  • Link between morality and law, endorses a variety of natural law
  • Law may differ from right
  • Something can be lawful but unjust
  • Moral standard must proceed application of law
  • Understanding of law must be centered on the law itself and not extralegal considerations
  • Source of cognition of what is right is what is lawful
• The State
  • The state is the source of greater actuality
  • Concrete freedom is realized
  • Individuals are members of families, civil society, and the state
  • State enables individuals to flourish
  • Patriotic love towards the state
  • Seeks to unify aristocracy, democracy and monarchy
  • His state is headed by a hereditary monarch
  • Provides unity
  • Duty of a monarch was to represent the people, elected politicians are partisan or represent only the views of their voters
  • More of a symbolic role
  • Criticized UK monarchy since the King did not veto laws
  • Representative gov, with cabinet, would provide balance

History

• Dialectic method
  • Meant to explain the development of history
  • History is the development and evolution of ideas through conflict and confrontation
  • Every thesis has an antithesis, the ideas are merged into a synthesis
  • Synthesis needs a new antithesis
  • Through this confrontation, ideas are improved
  • People became freer and wiser: wisdom is freedom
• Example of France
  • L’ancien regime: response was the French revolution
  • Outcome: Napoleon, the synthesis of the ancien regime and new world
  • Subsequent revolutions, second revolution
  • Hegel would see this as development of mankind
• Zeitgeist
  • The spirit of the age
  • We are trapped in the spirit of the time (values, culture, religion)
  • It is important to consider the zeitgeist of a period being studied
  • Three forms of spirit
  • Subjective spirit: spirit, conscious, value system of the individual
  • Volksgeist: spirit of the group, their values and will
  • Absolute spirit: divine or world spirit, perhaps the final stage of development, world embraces common values, only reachable with the development and enlightenment of all mankind
• Nationalism
  • People are untied and connected by common ideas, history, nation, culture
  • Theory of recognition: there is a permanent struggle for recognition of their identity and dignity
  • Also look for recognition of how their group was victimized

Doctrine of the State

• The state
  • Strong state enabled freedom
  • It is not a product of the social contract, but a divine product of a conflict
  • People are a product of the state
  • Perhaps a response to his hectic period (French Rev)
  • Romanticism and Enlightenment - he was an idealist
• Transformation (not his ideas)
  • fall of l’ancien regime had profound effect
  • State needed to bind people together, state needed to become the new religion
  • It was guiding, moral, omnipotent authority
  • It provides salvation and solutions
• Organization
  • Monarch reigned under constitution
  • Highly educated civil servants should serve - prevented majority rule
  • No power for women
  • Democracy leads to anarchism
  • Antithesis of state is other states, leads to war
  • Fond of war, they lead to progress while peace leads to stagnation
  • States went to war more easily in Hegel’s time, it was not as destructive
  • “War is simply the continuation of politics by other means” - Von Clauswitz
• Need for the state
  • Keep people free
  • Strong states will take away freedoms
  • Freedom of right of self-determination was his vision of freedom
  • Wanted a united German state
  • Therefore considered one of the founding fathers of nationalism

Impact

• Split

  • His students split into right and left, who argued over whether he was conservative or progressive

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• The Phenomenology of Mind

  • More popular in the U.S and UK

• Karl Marx

  • Influenced Marx, who studied and criticized his Philosophy of Mind
  • Marx did not like its idealization the Prussian state
  • Also inspired Hitler

• Nationalism

  • Inspired the type of nationalism that created the World Wars, heightened sense of identity
  • Some philosophers attribute his work to inspiring totalitarianism in the 20th Century

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