Week One

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,

Elements of the Philosophy of Right

With Kant, philosophy’s center of gravity shifted into German-speaking territory. Indeed, Kant and Hegel stand as the two greatest philosophers of the post-Catholic age. It was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s ambition to be the prophet-philosopher of the modern world, to realize in thought what was happening in history. His origins were not the likeliest for such ambition, as “Germany” did not yet exist as a nation. It was a philosophical backwater compared to England and France, the former being the driver of modernity until the French Revolution, which made France an ideological force in revolutionary modernism. Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770, the capital of the Duchy of W¨urttemberg in southwestern Germany, one of the more than 300 principalities and free cities into which “Germany” was fragmented (the federal system of territories of the Holy Roman Empire). Napoleon unleashed the forces of nationalism across Europe, not least by destroying that millennium-old empire—inspiring and practically facilitating the eventual consolidation of a smaller Germany (excluding Austria) under the hegemony of Prussia.

The question of Christianity’s relationship to modernity motivated Hegel from the start. During the early years of the French Revolution, he attended the Protestant seminary at T¨ubingen, where, remarkably, his roommates were the great poet H¨olderlin and the brilliant philosopher Schelling. As most young minds were, Hegel was fired by the principles of the Revolution. After seminary, he served as a house tutor, finally entering academia as unpaid lecturer at the University of Jena in 1801. It was there he wrote The Phenomenology of Spirit, as Napoleon triumphed over Prussian forces outside the city in 1806. Hegel ended up becoming headmaster of a prep school for eight years. Eventually he would succeed to the chair Fichte held at the University of Berlin in 1818, where he published Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821), holding this post until his death in 1831.

The expanding sense of the possibilities of modern life summoned the romantic demand for harmonic integration—of spirit and matter, self and society, history and nature. Hegel provides a metaphysics for such integration in the rationalist mysticism of his absolute idealism, an idealism that realizes itself through a process both logical and historical. Whereas “dialectic” in Kant was the generation of metaphysical illusion by pure reason’s overreach, it becomes in Hegel the process by which reason, in history, transcends partial viewpoints into self-consciousness as both subject and object: total comprehensiveness. While maintaining a kind of Trinitarianism, Hegel argues that the divine and the human spirit (Geist) are not different from each other. This collapse of the analogy of spirit enables Hegel to present human reason as master of the very processes of nature and history.