Hegel, GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH, was the last in a succession of four great writers, who during the later part of the 18th and the first quarter of the 19th century developed the idealistic philosophy of Germany; the other three being Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. He was born at Stuttgart on the 27th August 1770, and educated at the university of Tübingen, where he formed an intimate friendship with Schelling, his philosophical predecessor. Schelling was five years younger than Hegel, but very precocious. His rapid intuitive genius urged him to express his thoughts almost before they were ripe for expression, and he had begun to publish important contributions to philosophy even before his student-life had come to an end. Hegel, on the other hand, was slow in his intellectual development, and from a desire for systematic completeness and consistency he was unwilling to utter his thoughts till he had made all their relations clear to himself. Consequently he passed through the university without any special distinction, and it was not till six years after he left it—years during which he maintained himself by acting as a private tutor—that he began to seek academic work and to bring his views upon philosophical questions before the public.
In 1801, however, he entered upon his scholastic career at the university of Jena, publishing at the same time an essay on the difference between the philosophies of Fichte and Schelling, in which he on the whole placed himself on the side of the latter, though not without indicating some divergences of view. From 1801 to 1806 he continued to teach in the university of Jena, first as a privat-docent (or licensed lecturer), and then as a professor extra-ordinary, and in the early part of that period he joined with Schelling in writing a philosophical periodical called the Critical Journal of Philosophy. At this time the two philosophers were so closely identified in their views that there has been considerable dispute as to the authorship of some of the articles. In one of Hegel's latest contributions, however, the reasons for his subsequent separation from Schelling are clearly indicated. It was not till 1807 that Hegel published the Phenomenology of the Spirit, the first work in which he fully exhibited the depth and independence of his philosophic genius. By this time, mainly in consequence of Napoleon's victory over the Prussians, the university of Jena was for a time broken up, and Hegel was forced to find employment as the editor of a newspaper at Bamberg. In the following year he was appointed director of the gymnasium or public school of Nuremberg, where he remained during the next nine years. In 1811 he married, and in the following year he published the first volume of his greatest work, the Logic, a treatise which treats of what is ordinarily called Logic in connection with Metaphysic. It was not till 1816 that his growing fame as a writer secured his nomination to a professorship in Heidelberg; this, two years after, he exchanged for the chair of Philosophy at Berlin formerly occupied by Fichte. There he continued to teach till the 14th November 1831, when he was carried off by a sudden attack of cholera. During these years he published several works, of which the most important is the Philosophy of Right, and contributed several articles to the Philosophical Year-book, a journal which was mainly, though not exclusively, the organ of his disciples. His influence during this period was so great that he might also be said to have been the philosophical dictator of Germany. At his death a number of his friends combined to prepare a complete edition of his works, in which they included not only the books he had published during his lifetime, but also reports of courses of lectures delivered by him upon many departments of philosophy. Among these may be mentioned specially his lectures upon the Philosophy of Religion, the Philosophy of Art, the History of Philosophy, and the Philosophy of History.
It is impossible within our limits to characterise adequately the work of such an encyclopaedic mind as Hegel's, but it is possible in a few words to indicate the main tendencies of his philosophy. In the first place, Hegel was an Idealist. By this it is meant, however, not that he reduced the facts of the outward world to ideas, or held that there are no facts but the ideas of the individual mind. It is meant only that he held that we must ultimately explain the world as the manifestation of a rational principle. Kant had shown that all known or knowable objects are relative to a conscious subject, and that therefore we cannot legitimately treat them as things in themselves—i.e. as things that might exist by themselves even if there were no intelligent principle in existence to know them. He had shown, in other words, that existence means nothing unless it means existence for a self. Hegel carried the argument a step further, and maintained that the world of objects is not only related to an intelligence, but that it can be nothing but the revelation or manifestation of intelligence. In this way he sought not only with Kant to show the impossibility of a materialistic explanation of things, but to prove the necessity of an idealistic explanation of them. He did not therefore deny the reality of the material world, but maintained it to be an imperfect or incomplete reality which could not exist by itself without something else to supplement it. He attempted to prove that matter is the necessary object and counterpart of spirit, in which spirit reveals, and through which it realises, itself; and that indeed the material world only shows its ultimate meaning, when we regard it as the natural environment and basis for the life of spiritual beings.
In the second place, Hegel connected this idealistic or spiritualistic view of things with the great modern idea of Evolution or Development. That idea is often supposed to involve that the highest and most complex existences may be traced back to the lowest and simplest—that, for example, we may hope ultimately to explain the phenomena of life by mechanics and chemistry, and the phenomena of thought and will by the powers of nutrition and sensation which are manifested in the lowest forms of animal life. And in a similar way the idea of evolution is supposed to imply that we can explain the highest forms of religion as nothing more than refined reproductions of the crude superstitions of savages. Hegel, on the other hand, maintains that, as it is the developed form that first tells us what was in the germ, as it is only the life of the man that shows what was latent in the child, so under the idea of evolution we must take the man as explaining the animal, and the organic as exhibiting what is latent and obscure in the inorganic. Not, indeed, as if the special sciences of mechanics, chemistry, biology, &c. were not right in keeping to their own special principles. But, in the last resort, when we attempt, as it is the business of philosophy to attempt, to see all these spheres of existence in their relation to each other, as well as to the intelligence that knows them, we must regard nature as becoming self-conscious—i.e. as revealing its secret meaning only to and in man; and we must find the key to the secret of man's nature in the highest energies of his moral and intellectual life.
Finally, in attempting to work out this idea of evolution Hegel teaches us to regard it as a progress by antagonism. While, therefore, there is a unity of principle in all things that exist, yet, in order to develop, this principle must differentiate itself, must manifest itself in different forms, and these forms must inevitably come into conflict with each other. In truth, however, the forms which have thus come to be opposed are really complementary or necessary to each other, and therefore their conflict is limited by the unity which they express, and which ultimately must subordinate them all to itself. This idea may be most easily illustrated by reference to the unity of the social organism, which manifests itself in a division of labour between its members. In developing their powers these members are brought into antagonism with each other; but if their conflict and competition is not to destroy the society, it must be subordinated to their co-operation. That the organic unity of the society should maintain itself means, therefore, that there should be such community between its members that all their conflict and competition should only lead to a better distribution of functions between them, and should thus contribute to direct and improve the life of the society as a whole. This illustration may give some clue to the principle which Hegel works out in application to all spheres of the life of nature and of man. On it is based Hegel's ultimate division of philosophy into the three departments—logic, or the science of thought in its pure unity with itself; the philosophy of nature, in which the ideal principle, which is supposed to exist in all things, is shown to underlie even the externality of the material world; and the philosophy of spirit—i.e. of the life of man as a self-conscious being, standing in relation to a material world, which seems to be altogether external to him, and yet subordinating it to his own life. But these words are the indication of ideas which it would take many pages fully to explain.
Hegel's collected works, edited by a number of friends and disciples, appeared after his death in 18 vols. (1832–45). On his life and philosophy, see Rosenkranz, Hegels Leben (1844), Apologie Hegels (1858), and Hegel als Deutscher Nationalphilosoph (1870); Haym, Hegel und seine Zeit (1857); Köstlin, Hegel (1870); the histories of this period of German philosophy by Michelet (1838), Chalybäus (5th ed. 1860), and especially Erdmann (vol. iii. 1848–53); Hutchison Stirling, Secret of Hegel (2 vols. 1865); Wallace, translation of the Logic from the Encyclopädie, with prolegomena (1874); E. Caird, Hegel (in 'Philos. Classics' series, 1883); Seth, The Development from Kant to Hegel (1882); Hegel's Aesthetic, by Kedney, Hegel's Logic, by W. T. Harris, Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, by A. M. Fairbairn, Hegel's Philosophy of History and the State, by G. S. Morris (Chicago, 1886–90). There are translations of Hegel's Philosophy of History, by Sibree (1857), of the Philosophy of Right, by Dyde, of the Philosophy of Art, by Hastie and by Bosanquet, of the Philosophy of Religion, by Speirs and Sanderson, and of the History of Philosophy (3 vols. 1892–96), by Miss Haldane.
At the time of Hegel's death his philosophy was dominant in Germany; and at that time there seemed to be a consensus among his pupils as to its interpretation.
But division soon arose between those who, following the apparent tendency of their master, interpreted the principles of Hegelian philosophy in an orthodox and conservative spirit, and those who emphasised its negative dialectic, and used it as a weapon of attack against the existing order of church and state. After the appearance of Strauss's Leben Jesu (1835) the school may be regarded as having broken up into 'Old Hegelians,' or 'the Right'—Hotho, Gabler, Erdmann, Daub, Marheinek, Göschel; 'the Centre'—Rosenkranz, Gans, Vatke, Conradi; and 'the Left,' the 'Young Hegelians'—Strauss, Michelet, Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Ruge, Karl Marx—of whom some even maintained that the legitimate development of the philosophy was found in atheism, materialism, and communism. The result of these controversies was that the Hegelians almost ceased to exist as a definite school; but the ideas of Hegel still retain their power, and form one of the most important elements in modern culture. Many who cannot be regarded as in any strict sense Hegelians have owed their main philosophic stimulus to Hegel—such as F. C. Baur, Schwegler, Zeller, Kuno Fischer; and the so-called 'pseudo-Hegelians'—I. H. Fichte, Weisse, Chalybäus, Ulrich, Carrière. Hegelianism is the most important element in the philosophy of the popular pessimist Von Hartmann. Out of Germany, Hegelianism is represented more or less directly by Heiberg and Martensen in Denmark; in France, by Leroux, Prévost, and others; in Italy, by Vera and Mariano; in Britain, by Hutchison Stirling, J. Caird, E. Caird, Wallace, Green, and Bradley; in America, by W. T. Harris and others.—Hegel's eldest son, Karl (born 1813), became distinguished as an historian, and was professor of History successively at Rostock and Erlangen.—Another son, Immanuel (1814–91), held high administrative offices under the Prussian government, and was leader of the Conservative and High Church party.