Dialectic
Every concept and every form of life contains its own negation, and contradiction drives it toward a higher unity. The truth is the whole, the result of the process.
The Nineteenth Century · 1770 – 1831
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
黑格尔
The completer of idealism: reality is Absolute Spirit coming to know itself through contradiction and sublation, history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom, and philosophy is its own time grasped in thought.
German IdealismBirthplace: Stuttgart
The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
Source: Philosophy of Right, preface
Hegel was born in Stuttgart to a revenue official and studied at the Tübingen seminary with Schelling and Hölderlin. After seven years as a tutor he emerged far later than Schelling, going to Jena in 1801 as an unsalaried lecturer and being taken at first for Schelling's follower. On the eve of the battle of Jena in October 1806 he finished the last pages of the Phenomenology of Spirit to the sound of cannon, and the next day saw Napoleon ride through the town: 'the world-spirit on horseback', he wrote.
With the university closed by war he edited a newspaper for a year and then ran a secondary school in Nuremberg for eight, writing the Science of Logic meanwhile. In 1816 he became professor at Heidelberg and in 1818 took Fichte's chair in Berlin, where for thirteen years he was the official philosopher of Prussia, his students spread across Germany, and his lectures, delivered with a stammer, coughing and rummaging through notes, held audiences spellbound. He died in 1831 of cholera or a stomach ailment and was buried beside Fichte.
The Phenomenology traces consciousness from the simplest sense-certainty through perception, understanding, self-consciousness (the struggle of master and slave), reason, spirit and religion to absolute knowing, each stage driven by its inner contradiction to the next. The Logic shows the categories themselves in motion: being and nothing pass into becoming, the finite into the infinite, each concept containing its opposite and being 'sublated' in a higher unity, at once negated and preserved. This is dialectic.
The Philosophy of Right moves from abstract right through morality to ethical life, whose three moments are family, civil society and state, the rational state being the realisation of freedom. The Lectures on the Philosophy of History say world history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom: the East knew that one is free, Greece and Rome that some are free, the Germanic world that all are free. After his death the school split: the right conservative, the left (Feuerbach, Marx) turning dialectic against religion and the state. Analytic philosophy began in revolt against him at the start of the twentieth century and returned to him a century later.
Key Ideas
Sublation (Aufhebung)
Negation is not discarding: the surpassed stage is cancelled yet preserved and raised. History loses nothing.
Master and slave
Self-consciousness needs recognition by another self-consciousness. The slave, transforming the world through labour, ends freer than the master.
History as the progress of freedom
World history has a rational direction, and the cunning of reason uses individual passions to accomplish universal ends.
The actual is rational
Philosophy cannot leap beyond its age; the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk. Its task is to comprehend the actual, not to prescribe it.
Ethical life (Sittlichkeit)
Freedom is not abstract individual right but concrete life realised in the institutions of family, civil society and state.
Influenced by
- Immanuel Kant
He accepted Kant's critical turn but rejected the thing in itself and fixed categories: contradiction is not reason's failure but its life.
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte
- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
His old roommate; he turned Schelling's Absolute from 'a night without differences' into a Spirit that has a history, labours, and advances by negation.
- Baruch Spinoza
- Aristotle
- Heraclitus
He said there was no proposition of Heraclitus that he had not taken into his Logic.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Adam Smith
From Smith he learned the logic of civil society and the division of labour, and built it into the Philosophy of Right as a moment beneath the state.
Influenced
- Ludwig Feuerbach
He heard Hegel lecture for two years, then turned his teacher over: not Spirit alienating itself into nature and man, but man alienating his own essence into Spirit and God.
- Søren Kierkegaard
He wrestled with Hegel's system all his life: the system explains everything except the single individual who is living now and must choose.
- Karl Marx
He said he had turned Hegel's dialectic right side up: not ideas but material production drives history, yet the method of contradiction, negation and totality was kept whole.
- Friedrich Engels
He extended Hegel's dialectic to nature itself in three laws: quantity into quality, the unity of opposites, the negation of the negation.
- Wilhelm Dilthey
- Charles Sanders Peirce
- John Dewey
A Hegelian in youth, he later said Hegel left 'a permanent deposit' in his thinking: totality, process, the refusal of dualisms.
- Max Horkheimer
- Herbert Marcuse
Reason and Revolution rescued Hegel from the charge of fascism, arguing that negative thinking is Hegel's central legacy to critical theory.
- Hans-Georg Gadamer
- Karl Popper
- Theodor W. Adorno
Negative Dialectics is a struggle with Hegel: keep the dialectic, refuse reconciliation and totality, 'the whole is the false'.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
Hegel as taught by Kojève, above all the master–slave dialectic, shaped his theory of the look of the Other and of conflict.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Simone de Beauvoir
The axis of The Second Sex comes from the master–slave dialectic: man posits himself as subject and absolute and woman as Other, and woman is asked to consent.
- Paul Ricoeur
- John Rawls
Late in life he acknowledged Hegel's 'reconciliation': one task of political philosophy is to let citizens see their institutions as reasonable and so be reconciled to their social world.
- Alasdair MacIntyre
- Jürgen Habermas
- Jacques Derrida
- Richard Rorty
- Alain Badiou
- Slavoj Žižek
His whole work can be summed up as reading Hegel through Lacan and Lacan through Hegel: Absolute Spirit is not the completion of totality but contradiction itself recognised as the structure of the real.
- Judith Butler
Her dissertation traced Hegel's reception in France; desire and recognition in the master–slave dialectic underlie all her theory of the subject.