Two Common Misconceptions About Hegel’s Philosophy
Problems with Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis and The Real is Rational
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There are very few philosophers who can be said to have had such a decisive influence as to revolutionize philosophical debate. We could mention Plato, Aristotle, René Descartes, and Immanuel Kant. If we were to add one more name, it would be Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
All these world-class philosophers are considered difficult, but Hegel was the most inscrutable of all of them. In fact, if you read some of the most famous works of Aristotle, Descartes, and even Kant, you will get an idea of what they are talking about.
Read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and you will be lost after a few pages.
Not only is he a difficult philosopher to understand, but for people living today, many preconceptions of Hegel’s philosophy pollute the understanding of even the most attentive reader.
In the following story, after (1) a general presentation of Hegel’s life and work, I would like to correct two common misconceptions about Hegel’s philosophy: (2) the thesis-antithesis-synthesis structure attributed to his philosophy, and (3) the idea of a rationality of everything that makes up reality, even the worst things.
Hegel’s Life and Work
Born in Stuttgart in 1770, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel received a classical education at the Royal High school before enrolling at a theological seminary in Tübingen, where he studied both philosophy and theology. During this time he formed important friendships with Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich von Schelling, both of whom played a significant role in shaping Hegel’s early intellectual development. After graduating, Hegel worked as a tutor in Bern and then Frankfurt, focusing on religious and social topics.
Around 1800, under the influence of Hölderlin and Schelling, Hegel’s interests shifted to critical philosophy, particularly the ideas of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In 1801, Hegel moved to Jena, where Schelling was already a university professor, and published The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy, favoring Schelling’s system in the project of systematizing Kant’s transcendental idealism.
For a time, Hegel and Schelling worked together, editing the Critical Journal of Philosophy, but Hegel gradually distanced himself from Schelling’s ideas, culminating in his first major work, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). This marked a divergence in their friendship, which ended when Schelling perceived in the book a critique of his own philosophy.
After the occupation of Jena by Napoleon’s armies, Hegel left academia and worked as a newspaper editor in Bamberg before becoming the headmaster and teacher of philosophy at a high school in Nuremberg from 1808 to 1815. During this time, he wrote his Science of Logic.
In 1816, Hegel returned to university life with a professorship at the University of Heidelberg, where he published his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Two years later, he accepted a chair at the University of Berlin, one of the most prestigious positions in German philosophy at the time.
At the University of Berlin, Hegel achieved great fame and influence. He continued to publish, including his work on political philosophy, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821), and gave lectures on various topics such as history, religion, and aesthetics. His influence spread through his many students, and after his death in 1831, several collections of his lectures were published, further cementing his intellectual heritage. Hegel’s philosophy became central to debates about metaphysics, logic, and political thought during his lifetime and well beyond.
His ideas greatly influenced Karl Marx and other leftist thinkers, and his work was fundamental to the development of German Idealism, Existentialism, and the Frankfurt School. Hegel’s influence was also crucial in the phenomenological debates in France, as well as in the philosophy of the Kyoto School in Japan.
Misconception #1 — Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis
For most commentators, Hegel’s dialectic has three stages:
Thesis.
Antithesis.
Synthesis.
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