Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: biography of this philosopher.

A short biography of Georg Hegel, influential German philosopher.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, considered one of the great representatives of idealism in Germany.

His work, as well as that of other German philosophers of the time such as Immanuel Kant, exerted a great weight in thought, both in the Germanic country and in the rest of Europe, back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Let's take a look at their history through this biography of Georg Hegel in abridged format.

Biography of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, better known simply as Hegel, was born into a petit-bourgeois family on August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart, Prussia, present-day Germany.Prussia, present-day Germany.

Hegel was educated in a Protestant seminary in the city of Tübingen, where he met Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Hölderlin as fellow students. Later he would study at the university and, in 1793, he would get his doctorate.

From then on he worked as a private tutor in Bern and later in Frankfurt.. At this time, still young and not yet having marked the character of his philosophical thought, he wrote fragmentarily.

The texts that emerged from this period were to be published much later, in 1907, under the name "Theological writings of youth". The most notable of these texts are Sketches on Religion and Love, Life of Jesus, The Positivity of the Christian Religion, The spirit of Christianity and its destiny y Republican Fragments.

Travels in the Kingdom of Prussia

In 1801 he moved to Jena at the request and invitation of his colleague Schelling, which at the time had become the most important cultural center of all German culture. In Jena he taught until 1807 but, because of Napoleon's occupation, he was forced to flee, he was forced to flee and ended up, a year later, in Nuremberg, where he was to become rector and rector of the university.where he became rector and professor of philosophy at his Gymnasium (German high school).

Last decades

The pedagogical activity that he exercised in Nuremberg is compiled under the title of "Philosophical Propaedeutics". However, despite his interest in pedagogy, Hegel focused on his greatest work, the Science of Logicpublished in three volumes between 1812 and 1816.

Later he would be invited to work at the University of Heidelberg, to be able to exercise the chair of philosophy.. There he would publish his complete exposition of his philosophical system in "Encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences" (1817).

From 1818 until the date of his death, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would teach in the city of Berlin, where the famous Johann Gottlieb Fichte had held his chair.His last great work, Philosophy of Lawwas published in 1821. He died on November 14, 1831, from a cholera epidemic. He was 61 years old.

Hegel and the end of the Ancien Régime

Georg Hegel witnessed a historical changeHe saw how the Old Regime, unlibertarian and censorious of criticism of the established power, was faltering.

At the beginning of the French Revolution, Hegel, inspired by one of the greatest enlightened men, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, considered plausible the idea of the Greek polis, that is, the belief that cities could become sovereign states as a model of a harmonious society, with a patriotic spirit and a popular, non-dogmatic religion.

In his early days, Hegel, as a person living in the midst of the Enlightenment period, advocated the liberation of mankind, advocated the liberation of mankind from a past in which there had been oppression.Hegel, as a person living in the midst of the Enlightenment period, advocated the liberation of mankind from a past in which there had been oppression, both political, such as the Roman Empire or the medieval states, and religious, represented in the idea of Christianity.

However, after the French Revolution and with the arrival of Napoleon to power, Hegel changed his mind.. Seeing that, perhaps, this ideal of the creation of tiny states was not plausible because sooner or later some tyrant, of whatever ideal, would end up trying to establish his empire, he threw away this belief of being able to reach a society of ideal independent states. That is why, being already in Jena and Frankfurt, he took a more realistic attitude in politics and Christianity.

It was not that he was a fervent enemy of Napoleon, quite the contrary. He had great admiration for his work, since he had just destroyed the old and useless residues of feudalism, as well as the potential of what, in the course of time, would become modern political economy. This gave him a rather optimistic idea of the development of the bourgeois sense of society at the time.considering that he was living the beginning of a new historical stage.

But despite being critical of feudalism and even having written about republicanism, in 1815 Hegel was in favor of the Prussian monarchy. Although it was still a regime based on the medieval idea that power should be inherited, not elected, he considered the ideals of the Hohenzollern family to be those of reason and true freedom. It is then that Hegel moves to a conception that philosophy, rather than having the mission of announcing and preparing a new epoch, should become the recognition of the positivity of the present.

Phenomenology of the Spirit

This is one of Hegel's best known works, and it is divided into six sections: consciousness, consciousness, consciousness, consciousness, consciousness, consciousness, consciousness, consciousness, consciousness, consciousness, consciousness and consciousness. is divided into six sections: consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion and absolute knowledge..

In the section on consciousness, Hegel criticizes various forms of realism, in addition to vindicating the constitutive function of thought as opposed to objectivity. In self-consciousness he speaks of the identity of opposites, such as the "I-subject" and the "I-object". They are really the same "I", but duplicated and apparently seen as opposites of each other.

In the section on the spirit he talks about epochs that were decisive for Western history and thought, starting with the ancient world, i.e. Greece and Rome, up to what, for him, was the modern French Revolution. Along the way, he tackled feudalism and monarchical absolutism that had served as the seed for the outbreak of the bourgeois revolutions of his time.

When he talks about religion, he indicates that Christianity has served as the creed that has tried to express the demand for conciliation between the divine and the human, through the dogma of the God-man, that is, Jesus.

Philosophy of nature

In Hegelian language, the word idea refers to the totality of rational categories.. In the real world, the idea is fragmented in accidentality. However, when speaking of the real, a differentiation must be made between nature and spirit.

The spirit is represented by the human being and his activities, and is the entity that is capable of realizing itself as absolute. Spirit is superior to nature, a statement that Hegel uses to argue against materialism and also the romantic descriptions of nature, very much inspired by pantheistic beliefs.

Hegel rejects empiricism and mechanicism, and takes a very exaggerated view of nature.and takes a very exaggerated view of the spirit, so much so that he reaches even animistic perspectives. For him, in nature the elements were arranged in successive degrees, going from the mechanical, passing through the physical and reaching the organisms, with greater or lesser complexity.

Philosophy of the spirit

With his philosophy of the spirit he develops more deeply the ideas of the absolute and the idea. For Hegel, the spirit manifests itself in three phases: subjective spirit, objective spirit and absolute spirit.

1. Subjective spirit

The subjective spirit corresponds to the individual soul.. Emerging from nature, it is what would be understood as the individual, man himself. The evolutionary process of the idea of subjective spirit occurs in three phases: anthropology, phenomenology and psychology.

In anthropology, the subjective spirit is observed in its beginnings, in its emergence from the natural world, linking itself to a body. This idea was shared by the ancient Greeks, especially when speaking of the sensitive soul. Phenomenology corresponds to the step in which the subjective spirit becomes conscious of itself. It has identity. In the phase of psychology, the spirit acquires reason, imagination, intuition and other internal processes. This brings the spirit to a higher level: it is the free spirit.

2. The objective spirit

When the spirit reaches the last degree of subjectivity, it is expanded. It manifests itself in works that other individuals can see, grasp, feel.. It manifests itself through concepts such as law, morality and ethicity. Laws are established that allow the free existence and equality of spirits in the same world, composing the legal foundations of a society.

3. The absolute spirit

The absolute spirit is the unity of the characteristics of the subjective and the objective. This spirit goes through three higher stages of subjectivity or objectivity: art, religion and philosophy.

Art, which would be an objective manifestation, although of subjective basis, is the representation of the ideal of what is beautiful. It is the way in which the spirit manifests itself to others, giving birth to all kinds of art.It is the way in which the spirit manifests itself to others, giving birth to all kinds of art which, although objectively found in the real world, each one gives it a free interpretation.

Religion is conceived, according to Hegel, as something rationalistic.He explains that it has manifested itself throughout history in three stages. In Eastern religions, it was nourished by concepts that referred to the infinite; in classical Greece and Rome, it referred to the finite. Finally, in Christianity, there is a synthesis between the Eastern and Greco-Roman visions.

Philosophy is the definitive step of the absolute spirit, reaching its complete state. The intuition of the absolute spirit in art and its representation in religion is surpassed by philosophy. The spirit is self-conscious through philosophy.