Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831)

The German philosopher Georg Hegel in middle age. Hegel's discussion of such concepts as ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ is often said to be extremely difficult to understand, although this may be a fault of translation. The title of his book Phänomenologie des Geistes, for example, may be translated into English as either The Phenomenology of Mind or The Phenomenology of Spirit.

German philosopher who conceived of mind and nature as two abstractions of one indivisible whole, Spirit. His system, which is a type of idealism, traces the emergence of Spirit in the logical study of concepts and the process of world history.

For Hegel, concepts unfold, and in unfolding they generate the reality that is described by them. To understand reality is to understand our concepts, and vice versa. The development of a concept involves three stages, which he calls dialectic. The dialectic moves from the thesis, or indeterminate concept (for example, a thing in space), to the antithesis, or determinate concept (for example, an animal), and then to the synthesis (for example, a cat), which is the resolution of what Hegel thinks is the contradiction between the indeterminate and determinate concepts. As logic, Hegel's dialectic is worthless. As an account of how intellectual and social development occurs, it is shrewd.

Hegel's works include The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817), and Philosophy of Right (1821).

Hegel was professor of philosophy at Heidelberg 1817–18 and at Berlin 1818–31.

To Hegel, Spirit has purposes and ends of its own, which finite spirits serve. It lives only through human beings, but is not identical with the human spirit. In his social and political philosophy, he uses his dialectic to comprehend what he sees as the rationality of what already exists, and so to justify the Prussian state and Lutheran Christianity of his day as the supreme social synthesis. Leftist followers, including Karl Marx, tried to use Hegel's dialectic to show the inevitability of radical change and to attack both the religion and social order of their times.

Of all the great philosophers, Hegel is the most difficult to understand. Even so, his influence has been immense: Marx and Ludwig Feuerbach in Germany; in Britain, the neo-Hegelians such as F H Bradley and J M E McTaggart; in the USA, Josiah Royce; in Italy, Benedetto Croce; and in France, Jean-Paul Sartre.