Hegel’s 250th birthday in 2020 was the occasion in the German-speaking world for several new publications on his life and times. One of those is Hegel: Der Weltphilosoph (2020) (Hegel: The World Philosopher) by Sebastian Ostritsch. Hegel is one of the most influential figures in “continental” philosophy. Through Marx and Engels, his philosophy of history is especially well known, though those two tried to draw a sharp distinction between their philosophy and Hegel’s. But there is a conservative trend of historical thought also associated with Hegel, such as Francis Fukuyama’s famous End of History thesis.
But his influence also shows up in diverse philosophies, from pragmatism (via the Young Hegelians) to existentialism (Heidegger, Sartre). Hegel is considered one of the major figures of the “classical” period of German philosophy whose leading figures included Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and Hegel himself. Hegel’s philosophy provided a strong impetus to the development of social theory and sociology.
The great value of Hegel’s approach for understanding history and politics in the present is that he combined an Enlightenment notion of historical progress with an understanding that such progress occurred via contradictions. This gave him a way to understand the immense messiness in both politics and history, in which progress in science or improvements in governing institutions could come together with negative and destructive developments.
We see that in Ostritsch’s account of one of the most famous incidents in Hegel’s life, in which he said after catching sight of Napoleon Bonaparte in the university city of Jena, he had seen the World Spirit riding on a horse. Hegel understood, as many of his contemporaries did, that Napoleon’s wars of conquest were simultaneously French nationalist power politics and also a powerful blow against feudal institutions that opened the way for the development of more republican forms of government, an outcome to which Hegel was very sympathetic.
At the same time, Napoleon’s soldiers ransacked Hegel’s own house and he narrowly avoided them roughing him up personally. Napoleon’s occupation of Jena in 1806 also coincided in time with Hegel’s sending his only manuscript of his first major publication, The Phenomenology of Spirit, to his publisher. Ostritsch quotes a contemporary’s observation that the book was literally completed under the “thunder of cannons in the battle of Jena.”
Ostritsch opens his biography with a description of dialectics, a concept heavily associated with Hegel but today especially with Marxism. It’s actually a much older concept in Western philosophy, with the pre-Socratic Heraclitus (540-480 BCE) typically credited with its origination. The most popular description of Hegel’s dialectic, as Ostritsch explains, is wrong: the notion of development as a process of Thesis-Synthesis-Antithesis. This triad more accurately describes Kant’s formal logic. But it was actually a philosophy professor named Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, who popularized it to describe Hegel’s dialectic and who directly influenced the thinking on the subject of, among others, Karl Marx.
Hegel’s actual dialectic was part of his working through the problems stemming from Kant’s transcendental philosophy while incorporating the contemporary scientific developments in electricity, chemistry, and magnetism into a philosophy of nature. It was not a concept of formal logic but an understanding of development in nature as a process of one state of being developing into another through negation of itself, and then being raised to a higher level in a way that both preserves and cancels the original state and its negation. (The latter step is called Aufhebung in German, “sublation” in English.)
This philosophy that proceeded from the notion of identity within contradictions came to be known as identity philosophy, a viewpoint developed in close collaboration between Hegel, Schelling, and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. The three had been roommates at the Tübingen Stiftung where they had their college-level education. Their shared philosophical perspective was based on the formula hen kai pan (Ἓν καὶ Πᾶν), a Stoic concept which for the three stood for Spinoza’s idea of the unity of everything.
Hegel’s career included stints as a private tutor; a professor in Jena; editor of a newspaper; work on scholarly journals; principal of a school (Gymnasium) in Nuremberg; a professorship in Heidelberg; and, finally, assuming the professorship at the University of Berlin previously held by Fichte, where he served from 1818 until his death in 1831.
Hegel is generally not understood as a political philosopher in the sense of Locke, Rousseau, or Jefferson. But the political elements of his philosophy were highly developed, if carefully formulated to minimize trouble with official censors. Hegel’s concept of Enlightenment progress saw it as a continuing unfolding of the consciousness of freedom, a further development of Kant’s philosophy that put freedom at its center. And Hegel understood this very much in the sense of the ideals of the French and American revolutions, with both of which he remained a sympathizer his whole life.
Ostritsch at least partially misses this aspect of Hegel’s outlook, describing him as “in political matters an ideology-free realist,” apparently assuming that being a “realist” about political affairs was incompatible with holding a distinct ideology. Yet he also gives Hegel well-deserved credit for risks he took during his Berlin years to support pro-republican dissenters.
But Ostritsch also rejects the notion, common in earlier Anglo-Saxon scholarship, of Hegel as an authoritarian reactionary. The 20th century German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt – a major figure among the Conservative Revolution thinkers of the 1920s, a supporter of the Third Reich and later an influential conservative in the West German Federal Republic – had a far better understanding of Hegel in his remark that when Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, “Hegel, so to speak, died.”
Hegel’s life and career was intertwined in many ways with that of Schelling. The younger Schelling emerged early as a philosophical whiz kid, pursuing a path heavily emphasizing natural philosophy that took up the challenges presented by Fichte’s philosophy. Hegel began as a partisan of Schelling’s philosophy and with the 1801 essay known as the Differenzschrift, he put what was basically his common position with Schelling at that time. But by 1807, after the publication of Hegel’s Phenomenology, Hegel and Schelling went in different philosophical directions which also coincided with a personal break between them.
There was also a political element in their differences. Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling in their youth were all enthusiasts for the democratic impulses of the French Revolution. Hölderlin later narrowly ducked a treason charge over his connection to French revolutionaries. But Schelling took a much more conservative turn, embracing the conservative bent of the Restauration period that followed the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15.
Several years after Hegel’s passing, the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV selected Schelling to take his place in Berlin, tasking him with rooting out the “dragon’s seed of Hegelian pantheism” that His Majesty imagined the deceased Hegel had been spreading to impressionable students in his realm.
In present-day terms, the king expected Schelling to “cancel” Hegel posthumously. It turns out in the long run that his success in that endeavor was fairly limited.
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