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G.W.F. Hegel
was the last of the great philosophical-system builders of modern times. His
work, following upon that of Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and
Friedrich Schelling, thus marks the pinnacle of classical German philosophy. As
an absolute Idealist inspired by Christian insights and grounded in his mastery
of a fantastic fund of concrete knowledge, Hegel found a place for
everything--logical, natural, human, and divine--in a dialectical scheme that
repeatedly swung from thesis to antithesis and back again to a higher and richer
synthesis. His influence has been as fertile in the reactions that he
precipitated--in Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish Existentialist; in the Marxists,
who turned to social action; in the Vienna Positivists; and in G.E. Moore, a
pioneering figure in British Analytic philosophy--as in his positive impact.
(see also Hegelianism,
Absolute Idealism)
This article deals with the man and his
accomplishments as well as with the philosophical movement, Hegelianism, that
evolved from his thought.
Hegel--who was born in Stuttgart on
August 27, 1770, the son of a revenue officer--was christened Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich. He had already learned the elements of Latin from his mother by the
time he entered the Stuttgart grammar school, where he remained for his
education until he was 18. As a schoolboy he made a collection of extracts,
alphabetically arranged, comprising annotations on classical authors, passages
from newspapers, and treatises on morals and mathematics from the standard works
of the period.
In 1788 Hegel went as a student to Tübingen
with a view to taking orders, as his parents wished. Here he studied philosophy
and classics for two years and graduated in 1790. Though he then took the
theological course, he was impatient with the orthodoxy of his teachers; and the
certificate given to him when he left in 1793 states that, whereas he had
devoted himself vigorously to philosophy, his industry in theology was
intermittent. He was also said to be poor in oral exposition, a deficiency that
was to dog him throughout his life. Though his fellow students called him
"the old man," he liked cheerful company and a "sacrifice to
Bacchus" and enjoyed the ladies as well. His chief friends during that
period were a pantheistic poet, J.C.F. Hölderlin,
his contemporary, and the nature philosopher Schelling, five years his junior.
Together they read the Greek tragedians and celebrated the glories of the French
Revolution.
On leaving college, Hegel did not enter
the ministry; instead, wishing to have leisure for the study of philosophy and
Greek literature, he became a private tutor. For the next three years he lived
in Berne, with time on his hands and the run of a good library, where he read
Edward Gibbon on the fall of the Roman empire and De l'esprit des loix, by Charles Louis, baron de Montesquieu, as
well as the Greek and Roman classics. He also studied the critical philosopher Immanuel
Kant and was stimulated by his essay on religion to write certain papers
that became noteworthy only when, more than a century later, they were published
as a part of Hegels theologische Jugendschriften (1907). Kant had maintained
that, whereas orthodoxy requires a faith in historical facts and in doctrines
that reason alone cannot justify and imposes on the faithful a moral system of
arbitrary commands alleged to be revealed, Jesus,
on the contrary, had originally taught a rational morality, which was
reconcilable with the teaching of Kant's ethical works, and a religion that,
unlike Judaism, was adapted to the reason of all men. Hegel accepted this
teaching; but, being more of a historian than Kant was, he put it to the test of
history by writing two essays. The first of these was a life of Jesus in which
Hegel attempted to reinterpret the gospel on Kantian lines. The second essay was
an answer to the question of how Christianity had ever become the authoritarian
religion that it was, if in fact the teaching of Jesus was not authoritarian but
rationalistic. (see also religion, philosophy of)
Hegel was lonely in Berne and was glad
to move, at the end of 1796, to Frankfurt am Main, where Hölderlin had
gotten him a tutorship. His hopes of more companionship, however, were
unfulfilled: Hölderlin was engrossed in an illicit love affair and shortly
lost his reason. Hegel began to suffer from melancholia and, to cure himself,
worked harder than ever, especially at Greek philosophy and modern history and
politics. He read and made clippings from English newspapers, wrote about the
internal affairs of his native Wurtemberg, and studied economics. Hegel was now
able to free himself from the domination of Kant's influence and to look with a
fresh eye on the problem of Christian origins.
It is impossible to exaggerate the
importance that this problem had for Hegel. It is true that his early
theological writings contain hard sayings about Christianity and the churches;
but the object of his attack was orthodoxy, not theology itself. All that he
wrote at this period throbs with a religious conviction of a kind that is
totally absent from Kant and Hegel's other 18th-century teachers. Above all, he
was inspired by a doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
The spirit of man, his reason, is the candle of
the Lord, he held, and therefore cannot be subject to the limitations that Kant
had imposed upon it. This faith in reason, with its religious basis, henceforth
animated the whole of Hegel's work.
His outlook had also become that of a
historian--which again distinguishes him from Kant, who was much more influenced
by the concepts of physical science. Every one of Hegel's major works was a
history; and, indeed, it was among historians and classical scholars rather than
among philosophers that his work mainly fructified in the 19th century.
When in 1798 Hegel turned back to look
over the essays that he had written in Berne two or three years earlier, he saw
with a historian's eye that, under Kant's influence, he had misrepresented the
life and teachings of Jesus and the history of the Christian Church. His newly
won insight then found expression in his essay "Der Geist des Christentums
und sein Schicksal" ("The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate"),
likewise unpublished until 1907. This is one of Hegel's most remarkable works.
Its style is often difficult and the connection of thought not always plain, but
it is written with passion, insight, and conviction.
He begins by sketching the essence of
Judaism, which he paints in the darkest colours. The Jews were slaves to the
Mosaic Law, leading a life unlovely in comparison with that of the ancient
Greeks and content with the material satisfaction of a land flowing with milk
and honey. Jesus taught something entirely different. Men are not to be the
slaves of objective commands: the law is made for man. They are even to rise
above the tension in moral experience between inclination and reason's law of
duty, for the law is to be "fulfilled" in the love of God, wherein all
tension ceases and the believer does God's will wholeheartedly and
single-mindedly. A community of such believers is the Kingdom
of God.
This is the kingdom that Jesus came to
teach. It is founded on a belief in the unity of the divine and the human. The
life that flows in them both is one; and it is only because man is spirit
that he can grasp and comprehend the Spirit of God. Hegel works out this
conception in an exegesis of passages in the Gospel According to John. The
kingdom, however, can never be realized in this world: man is not spirit alone
but flesh also. "Church and state, worship and life, piety and virtue,
spiritual and worldly action can never dissolve into one."
In this essay the leading ideas of
Hegel's system of philosophy are rooted. Kant had argued that man can have
knowledge only of a finite world of appearances and that, whenever his reason
attempts to go beyond this sphere and grapple with the infinite or with ultimate
reality, it becomes entangled in insoluble contradictions. Hegel, however, found
in love, conceived as a union of opposites, a prefigurement of spirit as the
unity in which contradictions, such as infinite and finite, are embraced and
synthesized. His choice of the word Geist
to express this his leading conception was deliberate: the word means
"spirit" as well as "mind"
and thus has religious overtones. Contradictions in thinking
at the scientific level of Kant's "understanding" are indeed
inevitable, but thinking as an activity of spirit or "reason" can rise
above them to a synthesis in which the contradictions are resolved. All of this,
expressed in religious phraseology, is contained in the manuscripts written
toward the end of Hegel's stay in Frankfurt.
"In religion," he wrote, "finite life rises to infinite
life." Kant's philosophy had to stop short of religion. But there is room
for another philosophy, based on the concept of spirit, that will distill into
conceptual form the insights of religion. This was the philosophy that Hegel now
felt himself ready to expound.
Fortunately, his circumstances changed
at this moment, and he was at last able to embark on the academic career that
had long been his ambition. His father's death in 1799 had left him an
inheritance, slender, indeed, but sufficient to enable him to surrender a
regular income and take the risk of becoming a Privatdozent.
In January of 1801 he arrived in Jena, where Schelling
had been a professor since 1798. Jena, which had harboured the fantastic
mysticism of the Schlegel brothers and their colleagues and the Kantianism and
ethical Idealism of Fichte, had already seen its golden age, for these great
scholars had all left. The precocious Schelling, who was but 26 on Hegel's
arrival, already had several books to his credit. Apt to "philosophize in
public," Schelling had been fighting a lone battle in the university
against the rather dull followers of Kant. It was suggested that Hegel had been
summoned as a new champion to aid his friend. This impression received some
confirmation from the dissertation by which Hegel qualified as a university
teacher, which betrays the influence of Schelling's philosophy of nature, as
well as from Hegel's first publication, an essay entitled "Differenz des
Fichte'schen und Schelling'schen Systems der Philosophie" (1801), in which
he gave preference to the latter. Nevertheless, even in this essay and still
more in its successors, Hegel's difference from Schelling was clearly marked;
they had a common interest in the Greeks, they both wished to carry forward
Kant's work, they were both iconoclasts; but Schelling had too many romantic
enthusiasms for Hegel's liking; and all that Hegel took from him--and then only
for a very short period--was a terminology.
Hegel's lectures, delivered in the
winter of 1801-02, on logic and metaphysics, were attended by about 11 students.
Later, in 1804, with a class of about 30, he lectured on his whole system,
gradually working it out as he taught. Notice after notice of his lectures
promised a textbook of philosophy--which, however, failed to appear. After the
departure of Schelling from Jena (1803), Hegel was left to work out his own
views untrammelled. Besides philosophical and political studies, he made
extracts from books, attended lectures on physiology, and dabbled in other
sciences. As a result of representations made by himself at Weimar, he was in
February 1805 appointed extraordinary professor at Jena; and in July 1806, on
Goethe's intervention, he drew his first stipend--100 thalers. Though some of
his hearers became attached to him, Hegel was not yet a popular lecturer.
Hegel, like Goethe, felt no patriotic
shudder when Napoleon won his victory at Jena (1806): in Prussia he saw only a
corrupt and conceited bureaucracy. Writing to a friend on the day before the
battle, he spoke with admiration of the "world soul" and the Emperor
and with satisfaction at the probable overthrow of the Prussians.
At this time Hegel published his first
great work, the Phänomenologie des
Geistes (1807; Eng. trans., The
Phenomenology of Mind, 2nd ed., 1931). This, perhaps the most
brilliant and difficult of Hegel's books, describes how the human mind has risen
from mere consciousness, through self- consciousness,
reason, spirit, and religion, to absolute knowledge. Though man's native
attitude toward existence is reliance on the senses, a little reflection is
sufficient to show that the reality attributed to the external world is due as
much to intellectual conceptions as to the senses and that these conceptions
elude a man when he tries to fix them. If consciousness cannot detect a
permanent object outside itself, so self-consciousness cannot find a permanent
subject in itself. Through aloofness, skepticism, or imperfection,
self-consciousness has isolated itself from the world; it has closed its gates
against the stream of life. The perception of this is reason. Reason thus
abandons its efforts to mold the world and is content to let the aims of
individuals work out their results independently.
The stage of Geist, however, reveals the consciousness no longer as isolated,
critical, and antagonistic but as the indwelling spirit of a community. This is
the lowest stage of concrete consciousness, the age of unconscious morality.
But, through increasing culture, the mind gradually emancipates itself from
conventions, which prepares the way for the rule of conscience. From the moral
world the next step is religion. But the idea of Godhead, too, has to pass
through nature worship and art before it reaches a full utterance in
Christianity. Religion thus approaches the stage of absolute knowledge, of
"the spirit knowing itself as spirit." Here, according to Hegel, is
the field of philosophy.
In spite of the Phänomenologie, however, Hegel's fortunes were now at their
lowest ebb. He was, therefore, glad to become editor of the Bamberger Zeitung (1807-08). This, however, was not a suitable
vocation, and he gladly accepted the rectorship of the Aegidiengymnasium in Nürnberg,
a post he held from December 1808 to August 1816 and one that offered him a
small but assured income. There Hegel inspired confidence in his pupils and
maintained discipline without pedantic interference in their associations and
sports.
In 1811 Hegel married Marie von Tucher
(22 years his junior), of Nürnberg. The marriage was entirely happy. His
wife bore him two sons: Karl, who became eminent as a historian; and Immanuel,
whose interests were theological. The family circle was joined by Ludwig, a
natural son of Hegel's from Jena. At Nürnberg in 1812 appeared Die objektive Logik, being the first part of his Wissenschaft
der Logik ("Science of Logic"), which in 1816 was completed by the
second part, Die subjecktive Logik.
This work, in which his system was first
presented in what was essentially its ultimate shape, earned him the offer of
professorships at Erlangen, at Berlin, and at Heidelberg.
He accepted the chair at Heidelberg. For
use at his lectures there, he published his Encyklopädie
der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1817;
"Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline"), an
exposition of his system as a whole. Hegel's philosophy is an attempt to
comprehend the entire universe as a systematic whole. The system is grounded in faith.
In the Christian religion God has been revealed as truth
and as spirit. As spirit, man can receive this revelation. In religion the truth
is veiled in imagery; but in philosophy the veil is torn aside, so that man can
know the infinite and see all things in God. Hegel's system is thus a spiritual monism
but a monism in which differentiation is essential. Only through an experience
of difference can the identity of thought and the object of thought be
achieved--an identity in which thinking attains the through-and-through
intelligibility that is its goal. Thus, truth is known only because error has
been experienced and truth has triumphed; and God is infinite only because he
has assumed the limitations of finitude and triumphed over them. Similarly,
man's Fall was necessary if he was to attain moral goodness. Spirit, including
the Infinite Spirit, knows itself as spirit only by contrast with nature.
Hegel's system is monistic in having a single theme: what makes the universe
intelligible is to see it as the eternal cyclical process whereby Absolute
Spirit comes to knowledge of itself as spirit (1) through its own
thinking; (2) through nature; and (3) through finite spirits and their
self-expression in history and their self-discovery, in art, in religion, and in
philosophy, as one with Absolute Spirit itself.
The compendium of Hegel's system, the
"Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences," is in three parts:
"Logic," "Nature," and "Mind." Hegel's method of
exposition is dialectical. It often happens that
in a discussion two people who at first present diametrically opposed points of
view ultimately agree to reject their own partial views and to accept a new and
broader view that does justice to the substance of each. Hegel believed that
thinking always proceeds according to this pattern: it begins by laying down a
positive thesis that is at once negated by its antithesis; then further thought
produces the synthesis. But this in turn
generates an antithesis, and the same process continues once more. The process,
however, is circular: ultimately, thinking reaches a synthesis that is identical
with its starting point, except that all that was implicit there has now been
made explicit. Thus, thinking itself, as a process, has negativity as one of its
constituent moments, and the finite is, as God's self-manifestation, part and
parcel of the infinite itself. This is the sort of dialectical process of which
Hegel's system provides an account in three phases.
The system begins with an account of
God's thinking "before the creation of nature and finite spirit"; i.e.,
with the categories or pure forms of thought, which are the structure of all
physical and intellectual life. Throughout, Hegel is dealing with pure
essentialities, with spirit thinking its own essence; and these are linked
together in a dialectical process that advances from abstract to concrete. If a
man tries to think the notion of pure Being (the
most abstract category of all), he finds that it is simply emptiness; i.e.,
Nothing. Yet Nothing is. The
notion of pure Being and the notion of Nothing are opposites; and yet each, as
one tries to think it, passes over into the other. But the way out of the
contradiction is at once to reject both notions separately and to affirm them
both together; i.e., to assert the
notion of becoming, since what becomes both is and is not at once. The
dialectical process advances through categories of increasing complexity and
culminates with the absolute idea, or with the spirit as objective to itself.
Nature is the opposite of spirit. The
categories studied in "Logic" were all internally related to one
another; they grew out of one another. Nature, on the other hand, is a sphere of
external relations. Parts of space and moments of time exclude one another; and
everything in nature is in space and time and is thus finite. But nature is
created by spirit and bears the mark of its creator. Categories
appear in it as its essential structure, and it is the task of the philosophy
of nature to detect that structure and its dialectic; but nature, as the
realm of externality, cannot be rational through and through, though the
rationality prefigured in it becomes gradually explicit when man
appears. In man nature rises to self-consciousness.
Here Hegel follows the development of
the human mind through the subconscious, consciousness, and the rational will;
then through human institutions and human history as the embodiment or
objectification of that will; and finally to art, religion, and philosophy, in
which finally man knows himself as spirit, as one with God and possessed of
absolute truth. Thus, it is now open to him to think his own essence; i.e.,
the thoughts expounded in "Logic." He has finally returned to the
starting point of the system, but en route he has made explicit all that was
implicit in it and has discovered that "nothing but spirit is, and spirit
is pure activity."
Hegel's system depends throughout on the
results of scientific, historical, theological, and philosophical inquiry. No
reader can fail to be impressed by the penetration and breadth of his mind nor
by the immense range of knowledge that, in his view, had to precede the work of
philosophizing. A civilization must be mature and, indeed, in its death throes
before, in the philosophic thinking that has implicitly been its substance, it
becomes conscious of itself and of its own significance. Thus, when philosophy
comes on the scene, some form of the world has grown old.
In 1818 Hegel accepted the renewed offer
of the chair of philosophy at Berlin, which had been vacant since Fichte's
death. There his influence over his pupils was immense, and there he published
his Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im
Grundrisse, alternatively entitled Grundlinien
der Philosophie des Rechts (1821; Eng. trans., The Philosophy of Right, 1942). In
Hegel's works on politics and history, the human mind
objectifies itself in its endeavour to find an object identical with itself. The
Philosophy of Right (or of Law)
falls into three main divisions. The first is concerned with law and rights
as such: persons (i.e., men as men,
quite independently of their individual characters) are the subject of rights,
and what is required of them is mere obedience, no matter what the motives of
obedience may be. Right is thus an abstract universal and therefore does justice
only to the universal element in the human will. The individual, however, cannot
be satisfied unless the act that he does accords not merely with law but also
with his own conscientious convictions. Thus, the problem in the modern world is
to construct a social and political order that satisfies the claims of both. And
thus no political order can satisfy the demands of reason unless it is organized
so as to avoid, on the one hand, a centralization that would make men slaves or
ignore conscience and, on the other hand, an antinomianism that would allow
freedom of conviction to any individual and so produce a licentiousness that
would make social and political order impossible. The state that achieves this
synthesis rests on the family and on the guild. It is unlike any state existing
in Hegel's day; it is a form of limited monarchy, with parliamentary government,
trial by jury, and toleration for Jews and dissenters. (see also law,
philosophy of)
After his publication of The
Philosophy of Right, Hegel seems to have devoted himself almost entirely to
his lectures. Between 1823 and 1827 his activity reached its maximum. His notes
were subjected to perpetual revisions and additions. It is possible to form an
idea of them from the shape in which they appear in his published writings.
Those on Aesthetics, on the Philosophy
of Religion, on the Philosophy of
History, and on the History of
Philosophy have been published by his editors, mainly from the notes of his
students, whereas those on logic, psychology, and the philosophy of nature have
been appended in the form of illustrative and explanatory notes to the
corresponding sections of his Encyklopädie.
During these years hundreds of hearers from all parts of Germany and beyond
came under his influence; and his fame was carried abroad by eager or
intelligent disciples.
Three courses of lectures are especially
the product of his Berlin period: those on aesthetics, on the philosophy of
religion, and on the philosophy of history. In the years preceding the
revolution of 1830, public interest, excluded from political life, turned to
theatres, concert rooms, and picture galleries. At these Hegel became a frequent
and appreciative visitor, and he made extracts from the art notes in the
newspapers. During his holiday excursions, his interest in the fine arts more
than once took him out of his way to see some old painting. This familiarity
with the facts of art, though neither deep nor historical, gave a freshness to
his lectures on aesthetics, which, as put together from the notes taken in
different years from 1820 to 1829, are among his most successful efforts.
The lectures on the philosophy of religion are another application of his method, and
shortly before his death he had prepared for the press a course of lectures on
the proofs for the existence of God. On the one hand, he turned his weapons
against the Rationalistic school, which reduced religion to the modicum
compatible with an ordinary worldly mind. On the other hand, he criticized the
school of Schleiermacher, who elevated feeling
to a place in religion above systematic theology. In his middle way, Hegel
attempted to show that the dogmatic creed is the rational development of what
was implicit in religious feeling. To do so, of course, philosophy must be made
the interpreter and the superior discipline.
In his philosophy
of history, Hegel presupposed that the whole of human history is a
process through which mankind has been making spiritual and moral progress and
advancing to self-knowledge. History has a plot, and the philosopher's task is
to discern it. Some historians have found its key in the operation of natural
laws of various kinds. Hegel's attitude, however, rested on the faith that
history is the enactment of God's purpose and that man had now advanced far
enough to descry what that purpose is: it is the gradual realization of human
freedom.
The first step was to make the
transition from a natural life of savagery to a state of order and law. States
had to be founded by force and violence; there is no other way to make men
law-abiding before they have advanced far enough mentally to accept the
rationality of an ordered life. There will be a stage at which some men have
accepted the law and become free, while others remain slaves. In the modern
world man has come to appreciate that all men, as minds, are free in essence,
and his task is thus to frame institutions under which they will be free in
fact.
Hegel did not believe, despite the
charge of some critics, that history had ended in his lifetime. In particular,
he maintained against Kant that to eliminate war is impossible. Each
nation-state is an individual; and, as Hobbes had said of relations between
individuals in the state of nature, pacts without the sword are but words.
Clearly, Hegel's reverence for fact prevented him from accepting Kant's
Idealism.
The lectures on the history of
philosophy are especially remarkable for their treatment of Greek philosophy.
Working without modern indexes and annotated editions, Hegel's grasp of Plato
and Aristotle is astounding, and it is only just to recognize that it was from
Hegel that the scholarship lavished on Greek philosophy in the century after his
death received its original impetus.
At this time a Hegelian school began to
gather. The flock included intelligent pupils, empty-headed imitators, and
romantics who turned philosophy into lyric measures. Opposition and criticism
only served to define more precisely the adherents of the new doctrine. Though
he had soon resigned all direct official connection with the schools of
Brandenburg, Hegel's real influence in Prussia was considerable. In 1830 he was
rector of the university. In 1831 he received a decoration from Frederick
William III. One of his last literary undertakings was the establishment of the
Berlin Jahrbücher für
wissenschaftliche Kritik ("Yearbook for Philosophical Criticism").
The revolution of 1830 was a great blow
to Hegel, and the prospect of mob rule almost made him ill. His last literary
work, the first part of which appeared in the Preussische Staatszeitung while the rest was censored, was an essay
on the English Reform Bill of 1832, considering its probable effects on the
character of the new members of Parliament and the measures that they might
introduce. In the latter connection he enlarged on several points in which
England had done less than many continental states for the abolition of
monopolies and abuses.
In 1831 cholera entered Germany. Hegel
and his family retired for the summer to the suburbs, and there he finished the
revision of the first part of his Science
of Logic. Home again for the winter session, on November 14, after one day's
illness, he died of cholera and was buried, as he had wished, between Fichte and
Karl Solger, author of an ironic dialectic.
In his classroom Hegel was more
impressive than fascinating. His students saw a plain, old-fashioned face,
without life or lustre--a figure that had never looked young and was now
prematurely aged. Sitting with his snuffbox before him and his head bent down,
he looked ill at ease and kept turning the folios of his notes. His utterance
was interrupted by frequent coughing; every sentence came out with a struggle.
The style was no less irregular: sometimes in plain narrative the lecturer would
be specially awkward, while in abstruse passages he seemed especially at home,
rose into a natural eloquence, and carried away the hearer by the grandeur of
his diction.
The early theological writings and the Phenomenology
of Mind are packed with brilliant metaphors. In his later works, produced as
textbooks for his lectures, the "Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical
Sciences" and the Philosophy of
Right, he compresses his material into relatively short, numbered
paragraphs. It is only necessary to translate them to appreciate their
conciseness and precision. The common idea that Hegel's is a philosophy of
exceptional difficulty is quite mistaken. Once his terminology is understood and
his main principles grasped, he presents far less difficulty than Kant, for
example. One reason for this is a certain air of dogmatism: Kant's statements
are often hedged around with qualifications; but Hegel had, as it were, seen a
vision of absolute truth, and he expounds it with confidence.
Hegel's system is avowedly an attempt to
unify opposites--spirit and nature, universal and particular, ideal and
real--and to be a synthesis in which all the partial and contradictory
philosophies of his predecessors are alike contained and transcended. It is thus
both Idealism and Realism at once; hence, it is not surprising that his
successors, emphasizing now one and now another strain in his thought, have
interpreted him variously. Conservatives and revolutionaries, believers and
atheists alike have professed to draw inspiration from him. In one form or
another his teaching dominated German universities for some years after his
death and spread to France and to Italy. The vicissitudes of Hegelian thought to
the present day are detailed below in Hegelianism.
In the mid-20th century, interest in the early theological writings and in the Phänomenologie
was increased by the spread of Existentialism. At the same time, the growing
importance of Communism encouraged political thinkers to study Hegel's political
works, as well as his "Logic," because of their influence on Karl
Marx. And, by the time of his bicentennial in 1970, a Hegelian renascence was in
the making. (T.M.K.)
Hegelianism is the name given to a
diversified philosophical movement that developed out of Hegel's monumental
system of thought. The term is here so construed as to exclude Hegel himself and
to include, therefore, only the ensuing Hegelian movements. As such, its thought
is focussed upon history and logic, a history in which it sees, in various
perspectives, that "the rational is the real" and a logic in which it
sees that "the truth is the Whole."
The Hegelian system, in which German Idealism
reached its fulfillment, claimed to provide a unitary solution to all of the
problems of philosophy. It held that the speculative point of view, which
transcends all particular and separate perspectives, must grasp the one
truth, bringing back to its proper centre all of the problems of logic,
of metaphysics (or the nature of Being), and of
the philosophies of nature, law, history, and culture (artistic, religious, and
philosophical). According to Hegel, this attitude is more than a formal method
that remains extraneous to its own content; rather, it represents the actual
development of the Absolute--of the all-embracing totality of reality--considered
"as Subject and not merely as Substance" (i.e., as a conscious agent or Spirit and not merely as a real
being). This Absolute, Hegel held, first puts forth (or posits) itself in the
immediacy of its own inner consciousness and then negates this
positing--expressing itself now in the particularity and determinateness of the
factual elements of life and culture--and finally regains itself, through the
negation of the former negation that had constituted the finite world.
Such a dialectical
scheme (immediateness-alienation-negation of the negation) accomplished the
self-resolution of the aforementioned problem areas--of logic, of metaphysics,
and so on. This panoramic system thus had the merit of engaging philosophy in
the consideration of all of the problems of history and culture, none of which
could any longer be deemed foreign to its competence. At the same time, however,
the system deprived all of the implicated elements and problems of their
autonomy and particular authenticity, reducing them to symbolic manifestations
of the one process, that of the Absolute Spirit's quest for and conquest of its
own self. Moreover, such a speculative mediation between opposites, when
directed to the more impending problems of the time, such as those of religion
and politics, led ultimately to the evasion of the most urgent and imperious
ideological demands and was hardly able to escape the charge of ambiguity and
opportunism.
The explanation of the success of
Hegelianism--marked by the formation of a school that, for more than 30 years,
brought together the best energies of German philosophy--lies in the fact that
no other system could compete with it in the richness of its content or the
rigour of its formulation or challenge its claim to express the total spirit of
the culture of its time. Moreover, as Hegelianism diffused outward, it was
destined to provoke increasingly lively and gripping reactions and to take on
various articulations as, in its historical development, it intermingled with
contrasting positions.
Four stages can be distinguished within
the development of Hegelianism. The first of these was that of the immediate
crisis of the Hegelian school in Germany during the period from 1827 through
1850. Always involved in polemics against its adversaries, the school soon
divided into three currents: (1) the right, in which the direct disciples of
Hegel participated, defended his philosophy from the accusation that it was
liberal and pantheistic (defining God as the All). These "old
Hegelians" sought to uphold the compatibility of Hegelianism with
evangelical orthodoxy and with the conservative political policies of the
Restoration (the new order in Europe that followed the defeat of Napoleon). (2)
The left--formed of the "young Hegelians,"
for the most part indirect disciples of Hegel--considered the dialectic as a
"principle of movement" and viewed Hegel's identification of the
rational with the real as a command to modify the cultural and political reality
that reactionism was merely justifying and to make it rational. Thus the young
Hegelians interpreted Hegelianism in a revolutionary sense--i.e.,
as pantheistic and then, consecutively, as
atheistic in religion and as liberal democratic in politics. (3) The centre,
which preferred to fall back upon interpretations of the Hegelian system in its
genesis and significance, with special interest in logical problems. (see also atheism)
In the second phase (1850-1904), in
which Hegelianism diffused into other countries, the works of the centre played
a preponderant role; thus in this phase of the history of the interpretation of
Hegel, usually called Neo-Hegelian, the primary interest was in logic and a
reform of the dialectic.
In the first decade of the 20th century,
on the other hand, there arose still in Germany a different movement, after Wilhelm
Dilthey, originator of a critical approach to history and humanistic
studies, discovered unpublished papers from the period of Hegel's youth. This
third phase, that of the Hegel renaissance, was characterized by an interest in
philology, by the publication of texts, and by historical studies; and it
stressed the reconstruction of the genesis of Hegel's thought, considering
especially its cultural matrices--both Enlightenment and Romanticist--and the
extent to which it might present irrationalistic and so-called
pre-Existentialist attitudes.
In the fourth stage, after World War II,
the revival of Marxist studies in Europe finally thrust into the foreground the
interest in Hegel-Marx relationships and in the value of the Hegelian heritage
for Marxism, with particular regard to political and social problems. This
fourth phase of the history of Hegelianism thus appropriated many of the
polemical themes of the earlier years of the school.
The earlier development of Hegelianism
can be divided, according to predominant concerns, into three periods: (1)
polemics during the life of Hegel (1816-31), (2) controversies in the religious
field (1831-39), and (3) political debates (1840-44), though discussions on all
of the problems continued through all three periods.
While Hegel was still living, discussion
was dominated by the master. It was not a matter of polemics within the school
but only one of objections against the system from various quarters: from
speculative theists; from Johann Herbart, a
prominent student of the philosophy of mind, and his followers; and from
disciples of Friedrich Schelling, an objective
and aesthetic Idealist, and of Friedrich Schleiermacher,
a seminal thinker of modern theology.
The substantive history of the school
stems from Hegel's later teaching at Berlin and from the publication of his Naturrecht
und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse (1821; Eng. trans., The
Philosophy of Right, 1942). This book was reviewed by Herbart, who
reprimanded Hegel for mixing the monism of the Rationalist Spinoza with the
transcendentalism of Kant, which had explored the conditions of the possibility
of knowledge in general. There were also certain critics who directed the
liberal press against Hegel for attacking Jakob Fries,
a psychologizing Neo-Kantian, in the introduction of The
Philosophy of Right. Some of the polemical writings of Hegel made a notable
impact--e.g., a preface that he wrote for a book by one of his earliest
disciples, Hermann Hinrichs, on the relation of faith to reason (1822). In this
preface, Hegel saw the two things as the same in content but different in
form--which for faith is the representation and for reason is the concept.
Particularly significant were eight
articles in the Jahrbücher für
wissenschaftliche Kritik (founded 1827; "Yearbooks for Scientific
Critique"), a journal of the Hegelian right. Important among these were a
review by Hegel that was unexpectedly eulogistic about the thesis that
philosophy and evangelical orthodoxy are compatible and another review in which
Hegel responded indirectly to arguments of Herbart. Among Hegel's critics can be
distinguished speculative theists such as Christian Weisse of Leipzig and
Immanuel Fichte, the son of the more famous Johann Fichte, who reproached him
for his panlogism and proposed to unify thought and experience in the concept of
a free God, the Creator. Among the most loyal disciples of Hegel were Hermann
Hinrichs, his collaborator, and Karl Rosenkranz, who defended the Hegelian
solution of the faith-reason problem (which had asserted the identity of content
and difference of form), thus aptly defending the free rationality of religion.
The tone of these early polemics became
animated and embittered after the death of Hegel. But, inasmuch as conditions in
Germany, during the Restoration, inhibited the liberalization of political
discussions, the milieu of controversy shifted to the religious realm and became
related to problems of immortality, Christology, and general theology.
Shortly before Hegel's death, the
youthful Ludwig Feuerbach, who later became a
pioneer of naturalistic humanism, had published his Gedanken
über Tod und Unsterblichkeit (1830; "Thoughts on Death and
Immortality"), in which he contended that, from the Hegelian point of view,
death must be necessary in order for man to be transformed from the finite to
the infinite and it is thus a privilege for man preferable to empirical personal
survival. This work was held to confirm the charge of pantheism that orthodox
adversaries had directed at Hegel's system. On this point, at the appearance of
two volumes by Johann Friedrich Richter, a
pantheist and critic of religion, Hegel's disciples intervened, in an argument
employing not a few dialectical artifices, to conciliate Hegelian statements
with the traditional doctrine of immortality.
The polarization of historical positions
that the debate on immortality could not adequately express soon came into the
open with Das Leben Jesu kritisch
bearbeitet (1835-36; Eng. trans., The
Life of Jesus Critically Examined, 1846), of David
Friedrich Strauss, a biblical interpreter and radical theologian. This
work brought the problem of the nature of Christ up to date from the point of
view that had been reached by biblical criticism; i.e., Christology was no longer an issue of denominational dogma
but, rather, a problem of the interpretation and evaluation of the Gospel
sources and of their meaning in the historical development of civilization. In
this approach, the narrowly philological outlook was overcome by a
reconstruction in terms of a philosophy of history strangely suggestive of the
young Hegel. The thesis of the book was that the Gospel account is interwoven
with myths that are not the works of individuals but of the collective poetic
activity of the first Christian community, myths that resulted in part from
messianic expectations, in part from the memory of the historical figure of
Jesus, and in part from a transfiguration of the real elements. The aim of the
myths was to demonstrate that philosophy and religion are the same in content
and to offer, in an imaginative guise (as in parables), the meaning of the one
truth that Substance is unification of the divine nature and of the human, which
Christ symbolized and which is realized in the spirit of all humanity.
Strauss's work provoked a lively
reaction, to which he replied in his Streitschriften
(1837-38; "Controversial Writings"), proposing the image of a
Hegelian school split, like the French Parliament, into a right (Göschel,
and several others), a centre (Rosenkranz), and a left (Strauss himself). There
were responses from the right and centre and from Bruno
Bauer, a philosopher, historian, and biblical critic. From the
anti-Hegelian side there was, above all, Die
evangelische Geschichte (1838; "The History of the Gospels"), by
Weisse, who, conceding to Strauss the necessity to rationalize the Gospel story,
propounded a speculative interpretation of the Christ figure as an incarnation
of the Logos (Thought-Word), in contrast to the mystic and pantheistic views.
Meanwhile, Bauer shifted toward the left
in a polemic against the orthodox Ernst Hengstenberg,
a vehement accuser of the Hegelians, and in his Kritik der Geschichte der Offenbarung (1838; "Critique of the
History of Revelation"). In 1838 was founded the earliest journal of the
left, the Hallische Jahrbücher für
deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst ("Halle Yearbooks for German Science
and Art"), coedited by the activist philosopher Arnold
Ruge and T. Echtermeyer. At first, the journal maintained a moderate
tone, and Hegelians of the centre and right also contributed articles. In June,
however, it veered to the democratic-liberal side as Ruge struck out against an
accuser of the young Hegelians and as Feuerbach attacked earlier Hegelians.
Hegelianism, which marks the culmination of speculative philosophy, Feurebach
charged, does not demonstrate its own truth, because its contrast between
sensory reality and intellectual concept comprises an irresoluble contradiction.
Thus, its dialectic turns out to be a "monologue with itself," bereft
of authentic mediation with the world. Hegelian philosophy, he held, is a
"rational mystique," and what is needed is a return to nature, which,
as objective reason, ought to become a principle of philosophy and of art. Thus
an extensive examination of contemporary culture was conducted by the journal's
editors in an article that depicted Romanticism
as a movement degraded to a reactionary stance and extolled the spirit of reform
and of liberal (yet loyalist) Prussianism.
As for issues in the fields of logic and
metaphysics, after several polemical exchanges the interest of philosophers was
attracted to the publicist reawakening that came to Schelling, who reactivated
certain anti-Hegelian criticisms. These criticisms dealt with the impossibility
of building a valid philosophy upon the pure concept assumed as a point of
departure and endowed with autonomous movement. Such a philosophy would be
vitiated by presuppositions of what ought to be demonstrated and by
hypostatizations (i.e., the making of
an idea into an entity). Schelling proposed, on the other hand, that the real
itself be taken as the subject of development, to be grasped with a "lively
intuition"; and that, while accepting a "negative philosophy"
(such as that of Rationalism and Hegel) pointing to the conditions without
which one cannot think, one must also add a "positive philosophy"
delineating the conditions by means of
which thought and reality can exist, premised on the existence of a free
creative God.
The ensuing years marked one of the most
intense periods in the cultural life of modern Europe.
Advancing from Aristotelian
presuppositions, an important critique against the Hegelian logic was presented
by the classical philosopher and philologist Friedrich
Adolf Trendelenburg in his Logische
Untersuchungen (1840; "Logical Investigations"). In Hegel's view,
the passage from Being to Nothing and to Becoming can be posited as a pure
beginning "without presuppositions" of logic. In Trendelenburg's view,
however, this passage is vitiated by its spurious dependence upon the
surreptitious presupposition of the Empirical movement, without which support
neither the passage from Being to Nothing (and vice versa) nor the recognition
of Becoming as the "truth" of this primal opposition of concepts can
be justified. Secondly, he charged that Hegel confused (1) the logical
opposition or contradiction of A against
non-A with (2) the real contradiction
or contrariety of A against B.
Contradiction (1) consists in the mere repetition of the first term with a
negative sign; and from it no concrete movement can proceed. In contrariety (2),
however, the opposition of the second term to the first is concrete--thus the
second term cannot be deduced from the first and, instead, should be derived on
its own account from empirical experience. Thus Hegel constructed his entire
system, Trendelenburg charged, on an arbitrary dialectic of elements
intrinsically real (contraries), which he mistakenly treated as though they were
abstract opposites (contradictories) and were such by logical necessity.
Meanwhile, Schelling continued to teach
his "positive philosophy"--of mythology and of revelation (of a
personal God). Hence the philosophy of the later Schelling became the target of
all of the criticisms from the left and likewise exerted a notable influence on
the speculative theists. Meanwhile, the centre, on account of the critique of
Trendelenburg, oriented itself toward the future reforms of Hegelianism.
Among those who attended Schelling's
lectures was Søren Kierkegaard, the man who was
destined to become one of the founding fathers of Existentialism and whose
religious individualism represents the earliest major result of the diffusion of
Hegelianism outside of Germany. In all of his works--but above all in his Philosophiske
Smuler (1844; Eng. trans., Philosophical
Fragments, 1936) and his Afsluttende
uvidenskabelig Efterskrift (1846; Eng. trans., Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1941)--Kierkegaard
waged a continuous polemic against the philosophy of Hegel. He regarded Hegel as
motivated by the spirit of the harmonious dialectical conciliation of every
opposition and as committed to imposing universal and panlogistic resolutions
upon the authentic antinomies of life. Kierkegaard saw these antinomies as
emerging from the condition of the individual, as a single person, who, finding
himself always stretching to attain ascendance over his existential limitations
in his absorption in God and at the same time always thrust back upon himself by
the incommensurability of this relationship, cannot find his salvation except
through the paradoxical inversion of the rational values of speculative
philosophy and through the "leap of faith" in the crucified Christ.
Kierkegaard's claim that the nexus of problems characterizing man's condition as
an existing being is irreducible to any other terms lay at the very roots of Existentialism.
It was destined to condition the critical relationship of this current of
thought to Hegelianism throughout its subsequent history. Moreover,
Kierkegaard's thought, which Kierkegaard did not know--still more than that of
Strauss--seemed reminiscent of those problem areas explored in the young Hegel's
religious thought--issues that were destined to appear only later when Hegel
research would gain precise knowledge of the writings of Hegel's youth.
At this time the attitude of the centre
was oriented toward reforms of the Hegelian system in the field of logic and
historiography, as reflected especially in the emergence of Kuno
Fischer, one of the foremost historians of philosophy. In the fundamental
triad of the dialectic, as Fischer saw it, Being and Nothing are not equally
static and neutralizing. The real movement does not interpose itself into their
relationship because Being is here to be understood as the Being of thought,
which, to the degree that it is a thinking of Nothing, possesses that dynamic
surplus that becomes manifest in the moment of Becoming. It was in making
responses to this view that the forthcoming Neo-Hegelian movement in Europe
found some of its motivations.
In 1840 political conditions in Germany
changed with the succession of the young Frederick
William IV, whose minister began to repress the liberal press and
summoned to Berlin in an anti-Hegelian capacity both Schelling and the
conservative jurist F.J. Stahl, a stubborn critic of Hegel. Far from weakening
the movement, however, these actions radicalized its revolutionary
manifestations. Strauss, in Die
christliche Glaubenslehre (1840-41; "The Christian Doctrine of
Faith"), reaffirmed the opposition of philosophical pantheism to religious
theism as a means of reunifying the finite and the infinite; and Feuerbach
established a philosophical anthropology in his major work Das Wesen des Christentums (1841; Eng. trans., The Essence of Christianity, new ed.
1957), in which man reappropriates his essence, which he had alienated from
himself by hypostatizing it in the idea of God. The essence of man
is reason, will, and love; and these three faculties comprise the consciousness
of the human species as a knowledge of the infinity that man must regain. Man
must thus reverse the theological propositions that express the spurious
objectification of his universality in God; for this objectification had been
effected through the individual consciousness in its effort to surmount its
limitations. Thus Feuerbach interpreted the Christian mysteries as symbols of
the alienation of human properties absolutized as divine attributes, and he
criticized the contradictions of theology that are found in such concepts as
God, the Trinity, the sacraments, and faith. Man's reappropriation of his
essence from such religious alienation is consummated in the "new
religion" of humanity, of which the supreme principle is that "man is
God to man."
To this period belong also the major
critiques of Bruno Bauer on the Johannine (1840) and Synoptic (1841-42) Gospels.
Differentiating his position from the pantheistic and mysticizing Substance of
Strauss, Bauer held that the Gospels were not the unconscious product of the
original community but a product of the self-consciousness of the Spirit in a
given stage of its development. There followed two works specifically concerning
Hegel, in which, feigning an orthodoxy from which he charged Hegel with atheism
and radicalism, Bauer maintained, in the form of a parody, the revolutionary
interpretation of Hegel that became customary in the current of the Hegelian
left.
In the years 1841-43, the repressive
measures of the government reached ever more decisive extremes: Bauer was
debarred from teaching; Feuerbach did not even attempt to teach; and Ruge was
enjoined to publish the Hallische in
Prussia instead of Leipzig. (Actually, he transferred it to Dresden and changed
its name to the Deutsche Jahrbücher.)
Here also appeared one of Ruge's major writings, "Die Hegelsche
Rechtsphilosophie und die Politik unserer Zeit" (1842; "The Hegelian
Philosophy of Right and the Politics of our Time"), in which Ruge denounced
Hegel's political conservatism, charging that his contemplative reason was
reduced to the acceptance of existing conditions, to the exclusion of every
effort to modify reality, and to the absolutizing of the Prussian state as the
model of an ideal state. Ruge's journal was suppressed early in 1843, but in
March he published in Switzerland his Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik ("Anecdotes
for the Latest German Philosophy and Political Journalism"), containing
articles by Bauer, Ruge, Marx, Feuerbach, and others. (see also political
philosophy)
Feuerbach's article developed the claim
that the method of speculative philosophy, which is the ultimate form of
theology, is to invert the subject and predicate--i.e., to substantialize the abstract and to treat concrete
determinations as attributes or "logical accidents" of hypostatized
abstractions. The inversion of speculative propositions, he held, leads to the
philosophical reappropriation of man's essence; the philosophy of the future
will achieve mastery through the negation of the Hegelian philosophy--and this
is exactly what he entitled his forthcoming book: Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (1843; "Basic
Principles of the Philosophy of the Future"). In place of the immediate
Absolute of Hegel, he argued, there must be substituted the immediate individual
existent--corporeal, sensible, and rational. Man's reappropriation of himself
will be possible whenever his need to transcend his own limitations finds
fulfillment in another person and in the totality of the human species:
"thus man is the measure of reason."
Meanwhile, a schism had been ripening in
the left wing: (1) On the one hand, there were the "Free Berliners"
(initially the young Friedrich Engels, later to become Marx's theoretician, the
radical anarchist Max Stirner, and the Bauer brothers), who, deeming themselves
faithful to Hegel, developed a philosophy of self-consciousness (understood in a
subjective and superindividualistic sense) directed toward treating social and
historical problems with aristocratic intellectual detachment. (2) On the other
hand, there was the group that included Ruge, the publicist Moses Hess, the
scholarly poet Heinrich Heine, and Karl Marx. Influenced in their theories by
Feuerbach, this group directed radicalism toward an experience deepened by the
classical Enlightenment and embraced the rising Socialism. They thus involved
Hegel in their critique of the political, cultural, and philosophical conditions
of the time. The most widely known result of the first trend was Stirner's book Der
Einzige und sein Eigentum (1845; "The Individual and His
Property"), in which the fundamental thesis of individualistic anarchism
can be discerned. The unique entity, in Stirner's view, is the individual, who
must rebel against the attempt made by every authority and social organization
to impose upon him a cause not his own and must be regarded as a focus of
absolutely free initiative--a goal to be reached by emancipating himself from
every idea-value imposed by tradition.
The years between 1840 and 1844,
however, saw the emergence of a figure incomparably more representative of the
crisis of German Hegelianism than any already cited, that of Karl Marx, who was
destined to guide the experience of this crisis toward a revolution of world
historical scope. Marx's study of Hegel dates from his university years in
Berlin, the earliest result of which was his doctoral dissertation with the
exceedingly important preparatory notes, in which he ventured an original
application of Hegelian method to the problem of the great crises in the history
of philosophy. At first a friend of Bauer, Marx clung closely, however, to the
democratic wing of the left. In 1843 he completed an important critical study of
Hegel's Philosophy of Right, in which
he reproached Hegel for having absolutized into an ideal state the Prussian
state of the time. Such absolutizing, he charged, lent itself to generalizations
of broad critical scope with respect to the idealistic procedure of
hypostatizing the Idea and brought about (as allegorical derivatives from it)
certain concrete political and social determinations, such as family, classes,
and the state powers. Not yet a Communist, Marx nonetheless completed, in his Kritik
der hegelschen Staatsrechts (written in the summer of 1843, published 1929;
"Critique of Hegel's Constitutional Law"), a criticism of the
erroneous relationship initiated in Hegel between society and the state, which
was destined to lead Marx from the criticism of the modern state to that of
modern society and its alienation.
It will be recalled that Hegel had
likewise proposed the concept of alienation, describing the dialectic as a
movement of the Absolute that was determined by its alienating and then
regaining itself (thus overcoming the self-negation). Already in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
(German ed., 1932; Eng. trans., 1959), Marx had enunciated a general
critique of the Hegelian dialectic that revealed its a priori nature, which, in
Marx's view, was mystifying and alienated inasmuch as Hegel did nothing but
sanction, by a method inverted with respect to real relationships, the
alienation of all the concrete historical and human determinations.
Marx then directed himself against his
former colleagues on the left--against Bauer in his Die heilige Familie (1845; Eng. trans., The Holy Family, 1956) and against Stirner in his Die
deutsche Ideologie (1845-46; Eng. trans., The
German Ideology, 1938), criticizing their "ideologism" (i.e.,
the illusion that Idealism can be carried into the revolutionary camp since
it is ideas that make history). The historical Materialism that Marx
counterposed against Idealism expressed the conviction that the basis comprising
the relations of production, both economic and social, conditions the
superstructure of political, juridical, and cultural institutions and that the
interchange among these spheres of production within the totality of an
historical epoch must be designed to overcome their contradictions. This
Materialism, though not belonging any more to Hegelianism, was destined
nonetheless to remain linked to it by continuing polemical relationships and
overlapping problem areas throughout the subsequent history of the movement.
Along with Marx must, of course, be
mentioned his colleague Friedrich Engels, who was more tied, however, to the
Hegelian conception of the dialectic--particularly regarding the dialectic of
nature--than Marx was.
In Germany, the second half of the 19th
century witnessed a decline in the fortunes of Hegelianism, beginning with the Hegel
und seine Zeit (1857; "Hegel and His Age"), by Rudolph Haym, a
historian of the modern German spirit. The decline was urged on by
Neo-Kantianism and Positivism as well as by the political realism of Bismarck.
Hegelian influences still appeared in the first representatives of historicism
(which urged that all things be viewed in the perspective of historical change).
The surviving Hegelians, however, such as Kuno Fischer and Johann Erdmann,
devoted themselves to the history of philosophy. Strauss and the Bauer brothers
were won over to conservatism, and even Ruge, returning from exile in England,
became a conservative.
The diffusion of Hegelianism outside of
Germany was oriented in two directions. With respect to its political and
cultural problems, the Hegelian experience developed in east European
philosophers and critics such as the Polish count Augustus Cieszkowski, a
religious thinker whose philosophy of action was initially influenced by the
left; and the theistic metaphysician Bronislaw Trentowski. Among the Russians
can be cited the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, the democratic
revolutionary writers Aleksandr Herzen and Nikolay Chernyshevsky, and certain
anarchists such as the Russian exile and revolutionist Mikhail Bakunin. And
among the French there were Hegelian Socialists such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
In the United States, the interest in
Hegelianism was stimulated by its political aspects and its philosophy of
history. Its two centres, the St. Louis and Cincinnati schools, seemed to
duplicate the German schism between a conservative and a revolutionary tendency.
The former was represented by the Hegelians of the St. Louis school: the German
Henry Brokmeyer and the New Englander William Harris, a pedagogue and
politician, and the circle that they founded called the St. Louis Philosophical
Society, which published an influential organ, The
Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Their legitimism, or support for
legitimate sovereignty, was expressed in the quest for a foundation, dialectical
as well as speculative, for American democracy and in a dialectical
interpretation of the history of the United States. The Cincinnati group, on the
other hand, gathered around August Willich, a former Prussian officer, and John
Bernard Stallo, an organizer of the Republican Party. Willich had participated
in the Revolution of 1848 as a democratic partisan in south Germany, and, as an
exile, had been in lively intercourse with Marx. He founded the Cincinnati
Republikaner, in which he reviewed Marx's Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1859) and endeavoured to
base the principles of social democracy upon the humanistic foundations of
Feuerbach. Stallo, on the other hand, tried to interpret the political
philosophy of Hegel in republican terms. The democratic community became, for
him, the realization of the dialectic rationality of the Spirit with a rigorous
separation of church and state.
The second trend in non-German
Hegelianism was directed, in Italy and in England, to problems of logic and
metaphysics. A vigorously speculative rethinking of the foundations of Hegel's Wissenschaft
der Logik was engaged in by the major liberal Italian philosopher Bertrando
Spaventa and his associates. Spaventa's Studi
sull' etica di Hegel (1869) consisted of a direct liberal translation of
Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Seeking to rediscover the connection between
the thinking of the Italians of the 16th century and that of the German
Idealists, Spaventa encountered the system of problems involved in the
relationship between Kant and Hegel. He adopted from Kuno Fischer the solutions
by which Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel had rendered Kant's transcendental ego
consummatively veritable. He thus proposed an epistemological (idealistic theory
of knowledge) interpretation of the Hegelian logic, according to which one
premise of the logic is the dialectic of consciousness described in Hegel's Phenomenology
of Mind, and the problems of the genesis of logic are resolved in the sense
that Being is, from first to last, Becoming; i.e.,
it is thought in action, which negates the objective residue of thought-out
Being and, for that reason, is confirmed as a creative process. From Spaventa,
whose intention was to vindicate the freedom and autonomy of thought against
denominational dogmatism, was derived the foundation for the subjectivistic
formalization of Hegelianism soon undertaken by Giovanni Gentile, an
early-20th-century Idealist.
As in Italy, so also in England,
interest in Hegel arose from the philosopher's need to round out his experience
of classical German thought by tracing its vicissitudes since the time of Kant;
and this interest was directed toward the fields of epistemology and logic and
in this instance was applied to problems of religion and not of politics. The
pioneer in English Hegelianism was James Hutchison Stirling, through his work The
Secret of Hegel (1865). Stirling reaffirmed the lineage of thought that
Fischer had traced "from Kant to Hegel," endeavouring to penetrate the
dialectic-speculative relationship of unity in multiplicity as the central point
of the dialectic. Toward Hegelianism as a unifying experience the ethics scholar
Thomas Hill Green, the foremost representative of Hegelianism at
Oxford, applied himself, though with more original attitudes; and the brothers
John and Edward Caird dedicated themselves to
right-wing interpretations of religious subjects--Edward in a well-known
monograph entitled Hegel (1883).
At this point, the development of
Hegelianism branched out in two directions: one of which, in England and Italy,
pursued the tendencies of the Neo-Hegelians of the preceding decades, while the
other, in Germany and France, accomplished the philological interpretative
renewal known as the Hegel renaissance.
With respect to the first tendency,
there appeared in England at the turn of the century various outstanding works
on Hegel's logic by authors who were partly Hegelian in spirit. These scholars,
toiling through the system of problems that they shared--which focussed on
establishing a criterion for the unification of the multiplicity of
experience--ended up in diverse positions: those of Bernard Bosanquet and John
Ellis MacTaggart, for example, who were translators and commentators of Hegelian
works; but above all that of the foremost spiritualistic philosopher then in
England, F.H. Bradley, author of the renowned Appearance
and Reality (1893), whose development led him to positions more and more at
odds with the absolute panlogism of Hegel. His affirmation of the dualism of
appearance and reality was the result of a critique of the category of
relations, which, by introducing contradictions between the qualities of the
thing, utterly shattered the unity of experience in which it might seem that
true reality could be reached--a reality that in Bradley's view it is not given
to thought to attain.
The echoes of this Idealistic system
were not long in being felt in the United States by one of its most profound
philosophers, an absolute Idealist, Josiah Royce,
who, in The World and the Individual (1900-01),
discussed the skeptical Idealism of Bradley in order to overthrow its
consequences in favour of a conception of the infinite as a self-representative
system and of the world (or the All) as an individualized realization of the
intentional aims of the Idea copresent in a superior eternal consciousness. In
Anglo-Saxon Neo-Hegelianism, the Hegelian experience has always been merely an
episode--which fact serves to refine, by contrast, the methods of
experimentalism that are more congenial to the Empirical tradition in England.
In Italy, on the other hand, the
Neo-Hegelianism of the 20th century took the form of a spiritualistic reaction
to the spread of Positivism that had followed upon the unification of Italy.
This reaction developed in two directions: that of the historicism of Benedetto
Croce and that of the actualism of Giovanni
Gentile, two scholars who divided the realm of philosophy between
themselves and occupied it--rather heavy-handedly--for four decades. The Crocean
reform of Hegelianism dates from his volume Ciò
che è vivo e ciò che è morto della filosofia di Hegel (1907;
"What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel") and from
the systematic works of his so-called "philosophy of the spirit."
Croce accepted the dialectic from Hegel as a requirement for the unification of
opposites; but he rejected its system, in which Hegel would put in opposition
and treat dialectically certain intellectual forms that are not really opposite
but only distinct--such as the beautiful, the true, the useful, and the good,
each of which has its dialectical opposite over against itself that it has to
overcome within the purview of each grade. Consequently, renouncing the
possibility of a philosophy of nature or of history, Croce formulated a
development of so-called "distinct grades" according to the spiritual
forms of art, of philosophy, of economics, and of ethics and contended that the
comprehensive meaning of the development of the Spirit is given by history
"as thought and as action" and a realization of freedom.
Gentile, on the other hand, accentuated
the opposition of subject and object by considering every objective factuality
as surpassed by the living dialectical development of the act--i.e.,
the becoming of the Spirit in its own self-making, proceeding from an
originating self-establishment, or autoktisis,
of the Spirit itself. From this position he derived an absolute subjectivism
that exploited all the possibilities for dialectically transforming every fixed
position into its opposite, a downright sophistry of disengagement. Gentile's
pro-Fascist stance, however, condemned his actualism to collapse.
Already from the beginnings of the
century, however, there had been in Germany a change in Hegelian interpretation
instigated by Wilhelm Dilthey's re-examination, in 1905, of the youthful
manuscripts of Hegel and by the publication by one of Dilthey's principal
disciples, Herman Nohl, of Hegels
theologische Jugendschriften (1907; "The Theological Writings of
Hegel's Youth"). Inasmuch as there had been heretofore only fragmentary
notices on these unpublished literary remains, the effect of this rereading of
the texts was to place them in contrast with the works of his maturity; they
thus emerged as dealing, for the most part, with various problem areas in
ethics, religion, and history; as lacking systematic preoccupations; and as rich
discourse, tending to the mystic, which invited their comparison with the severe
technical uniformity of his major works. Hermeneutical interest, however,
centred especially on the problem of the beginnings of the philosophy and
dialectic of Hegel, of which the first formulations were investigated in order
to collate their meanings with those of the major works and of the Phenomenology,
which was a key work of the Hegelian evolution inasmuch as it participated
both in the romanticized colouring of the youthful writings and in the
systematic demands of the Encyklopädie
der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1817; "Encyclopaedia
of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline").
Scholars were soon led to investigate
the historical matrices of Hegel's intellectual culture--the late Enlightenment
and dawning Romanticism--a direction of inquiry that yielded imposing
contributions rich in discussions that continue to this day. These studies began
with Dilthey's monograph, which pointed out the irrationalistic and vitalistic
aspects of Hegel's youthful writings. In addition, a basic work by Franz
Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Staat (1920),
genetically reconstructed the political thought of the young Hegel in relation
to its historical sources and concluded that the influence of Rousseau prevented
Hegel from becoming the genuine "national philosopher of Germany."
Jean Wahl, a French metaphysician and historian of philosophy, wrote on the
"wretched conscience," interpreting Hegel existentially. Further, the
German philosopher Richard Kroner studied the development from Kant to Hegel
integrating it with the contributions of early Romanticism. And Hermann
Glockner, a Bavarian aesthetic intuitionist, saw following one another in the
development of Hegel a so-called "pantragistic" phase up to the Phenomenology
and, subsequently, an opposing "panlogistic" phase that betrayed
the most lively and concrete instances of the preceding phase--a work that
approached the efforts at interpreting Hegel that were made by the Nazis.
Today one has to speak not of the
presence of Hegelianism as an operating philosophical current but only of
studies on Hegel and of an experience of the Hegelian philosophy, to which,
however, almost none of the present-day orientations in philosophy is foreign.
The repeated encounter of Western culture with Marxist thought after World War
II has brought to the fore the political, ethical, and religious implications of
Hegelianism; and a marshalling into opposing camps analogous to that of the
earlier crisis of the school is taking shape. Today there are no orthodox
Hegelians, but there are denominational critics of Hegelianism, especially
Catholic, whose cognizance of Hegel's painful development invokes, despite their
differences, a certain fellow feeling with him.
In the centre are found scholars of a
liberal and radical frame of mind but with varying orientations with respect to
historical interpretations. Karl Löwith, a German philosopher of history
and culture, sees Hegel as the initiator of the "historicist" crisis
in modern thought, culminating in Marx and in Kierkegaard; and to this he
contrasts the metahistorical perspective reflected in the Nietzschean motif of
the "eternal return," based on the ideal of a Goethean serenity. In
France, Alexandre Kojève, noteworthy for his effort to harmonize Hegel
with Martin Heidegger, proposes a reinterpretation of the Phänomenologie as a manifesto of the emancipation of "man
the servant" from all alienations. Jean Hyppolite, author of an outstanding
commentary on the Phänomenologie, usually
presents a restrained humanistic interpretation of the Hegel of Jena. This
renaissance of the study of Hegel has conditioned the thought of some of the
major thinkers of France. Particularly notable, however, is the Hegelian
conditioning of German philosopher-sociologists such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse.
The former is sometimes regarded as the most Hegelian thinker of the mid-20th
century because he sought to bring again to the fore Hegel's dialectic,
understood in a new anti-intellectualistic sense, as a method for the solution
of present-day social problems. Marcuse, a partisan of a Diltheian
interpretation, approaches the position of the first Hegelian left, ending up in
what critics see as a neoromantic anarchism. The major merit of both of these
thinkers lies in their incisive analyses of aspects of modern consumer
societies, especially American--though their proposed remedies remain uncertain.
The major interest, however, in the
contemporary interpretation of Hegel is displayed by the Marxist camp. Marxist
interpretation of Hegel had permeated the entire history of Hegelianism
(notwithstanding the fact that the critical activity of young Marx against Hegel
had been vehemently conducted and had led to various effects). This
interpretation had settled upon the distinction made by Friedrich Engels between
the method and the system of Hegel's philosophy--i.e., between the dialectic considered as a revolutionary
"principle of movement" that achieves fulfillment in human culture,
and the system, regarded, on the other hand, as reactionary because idealistic
and conservative. With varying emphases on critical issues, this interpretation
was continued in subsequent Marxist thinkers--from the Russians Georgy Plekhanov
and Lenin to Mao Tse-tung and Joseph Stalin--the latter of whom affirmed the
complementariness of historical and dialectical Materialism.
Today many Marxist scholars, especially
in the countries of eastern Europe, remain favourable to the traditional line of
Engels; and above all György Lukács,
a Hungarian philosopher and literary critic and author of a volume on the young
Hegel, does so. With the intention of revealing the romantic and irrationalistic
presuppositions of Naziism, Lukács reevaluates, in German culture, the
tendency of the Enlightenment and of democracy, which he recognizes in the young
Goethe, in Schiller, in Hölderlin, and in the young Hegel--in whom he sees,
however, a reactionary involution.
A secondary tendency, which is drawing
attention in France, with the work of Louis Althusser, draws Marx close to Structuralism,
a recent school that seeks through a "human science," to probe the
systematic structures evinced in cultural life. In this school Marx's humanism
is viewed as a temporary, Feuerbachian phase, surpassed by commitment to the
scientific observation of the structure of bourgeois society. Such
Structuralistic interpretation of Marxism thus runs the risk of departing from a
due emphasis on the historical substance
of Marxian Materialism.
The latter motive is, on the other hand,
the essential aim of a third Marxist current, in Italy, initiated by Galvano
della Volpe, a critical aesthetician who discusses the relationship between
bourgeois and Socialist democracy and champions, in aesthetics, a critical and
antiromantic Aristotelianism. This current has been continued by Mario Rossi,
who asks one to read again in full the texts of Hegel and Marx, to reconstruct
the related movements, and to compare the Materialistic conception of history
with more recent philosophical currents such as Structuralism, present-day
sociology, and the logic of the sciences.
A conclusion of a theoretical-systematic
nature concerning Hegelianism has today become not only impossible but also
inopportune, because its possible interest has been effectively replaced by that
of the sheer history of the movement. The latter has shown how the substantial
ambiguity of the philosophy and dialectic of Hegel can be resolved only when its
claim to be able to solve all problems on a theoretical level and to achieve a
"circular" decisiveness in its arguments--which violates the
conditioning specificity of historical facts--is refuted. It is then the
scholar's task to explore the limits of Hegel's thought as well as its
conditioned inadequacies--but also its merits, which are above all those of
having expressed and documented the major part of the cultural problems of
modern civilization. (M.R.)
|
헤겔 (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel). 1770. 8. 27 슈투트가르트~1831. 11. 14
베를린. 독일의 철학자.
초기생애
헤겔은 게오르크 빌헬름 프리드리히로 세례를 받았다.
어머니에게 라틴어를 배우고 슈투트가르트 문법학교에
들어가 18세까지 공부했다. 그는 고전 저자들에 대한 주석,
신문기사들, 당시 대표적인 저작들의 도덕과 수학에 관한
논문들을 발췌하고 정리하는 습관을 들였다. 1788년 튀빙겐
신학교에서 2년간 철학과 고전을 배우고 1790년 졸업했다.
그뒤 신학과정을 밟았지만 교수들의 따분한 정통파 교리
강의에 싫증을 냈다. 1793년 졸업증서에는 철학공부에
열심이었지만 신학에는 소홀했으며 표현력이 빈약하다고
기록되어 있다. 동료 학생들이 그를 '늙은이'라고 불렀지만
친구와 술을 좋아해 '바코스의 제물'이 되기를 즐겨 했다.
그의 주요한 친구는 동년배로 범신론적 시인 J.C.F. 횔덜린과
5세 아래인 자연철학자 셸링이었다. 그들은 서로 어울려
그리스 비극작품을 읽었고 프랑스 혁명에 환호했다.
대학을 마치고 성직자가 되지 않고 철학과 그리스 문학을
공부할 수 있는 여유를 갖기 위해 사강사가 되길 원했다.
그뒤 3년간 베른에 있으면서 에드워드 기번의 〈로마 제국
쇠망사 The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire〉,
몽테스키외의 〈법의 정신 De l'esprit des lois〉, 그리스·로마
고전들을 읽었다. 또 비판철학자 이마누엘 칸트를
연구하면서 종교에 관한 그의 논문에 자극을 받았다. 칸트는
정통파들이 역사적 사실과 교의에 대한 믿음을 요구하고
자의적인 명령들로 이루어진 도덕체계를 강요하는 데
반대했다. 그리스도가 처음부터 이성적 도덕을 가르쳤다고
보았으며 이 도덕이 자신의 윤리저작들과 화해할 수 있으며
종교가 모든 사람의 이성에 어울린다고 생각했다. 헤겔은
이런 가르침을 받아들였다. 그러나 헤겔은 칸트보다 더
역사적인 성격의 두 논문을 썼는데, 하나는 칸트의 맥락에서
복음을 재해석한 그리스도의 생애이며, 또 하나는
그리스도의 가르침이 실제로 권위주의적인 것이 아니라
이성주의적인 것이었다면 어떻게 해서 그리스도교가
권위주의적인 종교가 되었는가에 답하는 것이다. 베른에서
혼자 지내던 헤겔은 1796년말 횔덜린이 강사자리를 얻어준
프랑크푸르트암마인으로 갔다. 그곳에서 더 폭넓은 교제를
바랐으나 횔덜린은 불륜의 애정관계에 휘말려 이성을
잃어버렸다. 헤겔은 감상에 시달렸으나 열심히
공부함으로써 자신을 치유했다. 그리스 철학, 근대사,
정치학을 공부했고 신문을 읽고 스크랩했으며 고향
뷔르템베르크의 정치에 관한 논평을 쓰고 경제학을
공부했다. 그는 칸트의 영향을 벗어날 수 있었고
그리스도교의 기원에 관해 새로운 안목을 가질 수 있었다.
초기 신학 저작들은 그리스도교와 교회에 관한 강한
주장들을 담고 있다. 그는 신학 자체가 아니라 정통파를
공격했다. 그는 인간의 정신·이성은 주(主)의 촛불이므로
칸트가 부과한 한계에 예속될 수 없다고 보았다. 이성에
대한 이러한 신뢰는 헤겔의 전저작에 넘쳐 흐른다. 1798년
그는 이전에 쓴 신학적 글들을 새로운 관점에서 바라보면서
가장 주목할 만한 저작의 하나인 〈그리스도교
정신과 그 운명 Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal〉(1907)을
썼다. 이 논문에서 유대인들이 고대 그리스인과 달리 삶을
사랑하지 않는 모세 율법의 노예들이며, 젖과 꿀이 흐르는
땅의 물질적 충족에 만족한다고 주장했다. 그런데 인간은
객관적 명령(율법)의 노예가 아니며 법(도덕)은 인간을 위해
만들어진 것이고 신의 사랑으로 '충만'해야 한다고 설명했다.
또한 신의 의지를 충심으로 받아들이는 신앙인의 공동체가
신의 왕국이며 바로 그리스도가 가르친 왕국인데, 이 왕국은
신성한 것과 인간적인 것의 일치에 대한 믿음 위에
세워지지만 인간이 영혼뿐만 아니라 육체를 지니고 있기
때문에 결코 인간세계에 세워질 수 없다는 내용이다. 이
논문에는 헤겔 체계의 중요한 개념이 들어 있다. 칸트는
인간이 현상의 유한한 세계에 관한 지식만을 가질 수 있다고
주장했다. 그리고 인간의 오성(悟性)이
이 영역을 넘어서서 무한하고 궁극적인 실재를 파악하려
하면 해결될 수 없는 모순에 빠진다고 보았다. 그러나
헤겔은 사랑을 대립물의 통일, 이를테면 무한자와 유한자의
모순이 포괄되고 종합되는 통일체로서 정신의 원형으로
보았다. 그는 이 사랑을 '정신'으로 표현했다. 칸트의 오성은
사고상의 모순을 피할 수 없지만, '정신'이나 '이성'의
활동으로서 사고는 그 모순을 해소하는 종합을 만들 수 있다.
이무렵 헤겔은 오랫동안 바랐던 대로 학계에 진출했다.
1801년 1월 셸링이
1798년 이래 대학교수로 있던 예나에 도착했다. 예나는 이미
황금기를 맞았고 슐레겔 형제의 신비주의, 칸트주의,
피히테의 윤리적 관념론 등이 성행했다. 헤겔이 도착했을 때
26세였던 셸링은 이미 몇 권의 저서로 신망을 얻고 있었으며,
혼자 칸트의 우둔한 추종자들에 맞서 논쟁을 벌이고 있었다.
헤겔은 그의 친구를 돕기 위해 불려온 것이었다. 헤겔의 예나대학교
강사 취직 논문이자 첫번째 출판물인 〈피히테와 셸링의
철학체계의 차이 Differenz des Fichte'schen und Schelling'schen Systems
der Philosophie〉(1801)에는 셸링의 자연철학의 영향이 나타나
있다. 그러나 이 논문은 물론이고 후속 논문에서도 셸링과
헤겔의 차이는 뚜렷하게 나타난다. 두 사람은 그리스에
관심을 가졌고 칸트의 작업을 밀고 나가려 했고
우상파괴주의자였다. 그러나 셸링은 헤겔에 비해 너무
낭만적이었다. 헤겔은 1801~02년에 논리학과 형이상학을
강의했는데, 이때 수강생은 11명이었다. 그는 점차 자신의
체계를 완성해가고 있었다. 1803년 셸링이 예나를 떠난 뒤
헤겔은 자신의 견해를 자유롭게 펼칠 수 있었다. 그는 철학·정치학
뿐만 아니라 생리학 강의에 참여했고 다른 분야에도 손을
댔다. 1805년 예나대학교 교수로 임명되었고, 수강생들이
점점 늘어났지만 여전히 주목받는 교수는 아니었다.
괴테와 마찬가지로 헤겔은 프로이센의 부패한 관료제도를
싫어했기 때문에 나폴레옹이 예나 전투에서 승리를 거둔
것을 환영했다. 그 전투가 있기 얼마 전에 헤겔은
프로이센을 무너뜨리고 있는 '세계정신'(나폴레옹)을
칭송했다. 이무렵 헤겔은 첫번째 저서 〈 정신현상학
Phänomenologie des Geistes〉(1807)을 출판했다. 이것은 아마
헤겔의 가장 훌륭하고 또 어려운 책으로, 인간 정신이
어떻게 단순한 의식에서 자기의식·이성·정신·종교를 거쳐
절대지(絶對知)로 상승하는가를 기술하고 있다. 존재에 대한
인간의 소박한 태도는 감각에 의존하지만 반성해보면 외적
세계에 원인을 두고 있다고 여겨지는 실재는 지식에 의해
개념화된 것임을 알 수 있다. 만일 의식이 외부에 있는
대상을 탐구할 수 없다면 자기의식은 주체성을 가질 수 없다.
스토아주의·회의주의를 거쳐 자기의식은 세계로부터
고립된다. 이성은 세계에 대립해서 그것을 극복하려는
태도를 바꿔 대립된 대상과 자신의 동일성을 자각한다.
그러나 '정신'의 단계에서 의식은 더이상 고립되고 비판적·적대적인
것이 아니라 공동체에 거주하는 자신을 받아들인다. 이것이
구체적 의식의 가장 낮은 단계인 무의식적 도덕성의
시기이다. 그러나 문화가 증진되면서 정신은 점차 관습에서
해방된다. 도덕적 세계의 다음 단계는 종교이다. 신성함의
이념은 자연숭배와 예술을 거쳐 그리스도교에서 충만함에
이른다. 그래서 종교는 절대지, 즉 정신의 단계에 가까이
간다. 헤겔에 따르면 이곳이 진리의 장이다.
김나지움 교장
〈정신현상학〉을 쓴 뒤에도 헤겔의 경제 사정은 별로
나아지지 않았다. 그래서 그는 〈밤베르거 차이퉁 Bamberger
Zeitung〉의 편집을 맡다가 뉘른베르크에 있는 에기디엔
김나지움의 교장직을 맡았다(1808. 12~1816. 8). 이 직책으로
적기는 하지만 수입이 안정되었다. 그는 1811년 마리 폰
투헤르와 결혼했고 결혼생활은 행복했다. 그들 사이에는 2명의
아들, 즉 역사가로 유명해진 카를과 신학에 흥미를 가진
이마누엘이 있었고 예나 시절의 사생아 루트비히도 함께
살았다. 1812년 뉘른베르크에서 〈논리학 Wissenchaft der Logik〉의
제1부인 〈객관논리학〉이 나왔고, 1816년 제2부인
〈주관논리학〉으로 완성되었다. 헤겔의 체계가 처음
본격적·궁극적 형태로 제시된 이 저작으로 에를랑겐·베를린·하이델베르크에서
교수직 요청이 들어왔다.
대학교수 시기
하이델베르크 시기
헤겔은 하이델베르크대학교의 교수직을 수락했다. 강의를
위해 〈 철학강요 Encyklopädie der philosophishen
Wissenschaften im Grundrisse〉(1817)를 출판했는데 이 책은 그의
체계 전반을 정리해서 설명하고 있다. 헤겔 철학은 전우주를
체계적으로 평가하려 한다. 그의 체계는 정신적 일원론이지만
차이를 중시하는 일원론이다. 헤겔에 따르면 사고는 차이를
경험해야만 사고와 그 대상의 '동일성'(同一性)을 이룰 수
있다. 따라서 진리는 오류가 경험되고 진리가 승리할 때에만
인식된다. 그리고 유한자가 한계를 지닌 것이고 신이 이
한계를 극복하기 때문에 신은 무한하다. 마찬가지로 인간이
도덕적 선에 이르려면 인간의 타락은 필수적이다. 정신은
자신을 자연과 대비해야만 자기자신을 인식한다. 헤겔이
우주를 파악가능하다고 보는 것은 우주를 절대정신이
자기자신을 정신으로 인식하게 되는 영원한 원환과정이라고
여기기 때문이다. 이런 자기파악은 ① 정신 자신의 사고를
통해서, ② 자연을 통해서, ③ 유한한 정신이 역사에서
자기를 표현하고 예술·종교·철학에서 자기를 발견함으로써
이루어진다.
헤겔 체계의 개요인 〈철학강요〉는 논리학·자연철학·정신철학의
3부분으로 이루어져 있다. 논리학은 사고의 순수한 범주
또는 형식을 다루는데, 이것은 모든 물리적·지성적 생명의
구조를 이룬다. 헤겔에 따르면 우리는 '순수한 존재'(모든
것의 가장 추상적인 범주)에 관해 생각하려 하면 그것이
단순히 텅빈 것, 즉 무(無)임을 알게 된다. 그래서 무는 '존재한다'.
순수존재 개념과 무의 개념은 대립적인 것이지만
상호이행한다. 여기에서 2가지 계기는 부정되면서 동시에
긍정되어 생성된다. 생성하는 것은 존재함과 동시에
존재하지 않는다. 이러한 변증법적 과정은 점차 복잡한
범주들을 거치면서 절대이념 또는 자기 자신에게 객관적인
정신에 도달한다.
자연은 정신에
대립된 것이다. 논리학에서 탐구된 범주들은 서로 내적인
관계를 맺고 있다. 이와 달리 자연은 외적 관계의 영역이다.
'공간'의 부분과 '시간'의 순간은 서로를 배제한다. 그리고
자연의 모든 것은 공간과 시간 안에 있고 그래서 유한하다.
그러나 자연은 정신에 의해 창조되고 그 창조자의 표지를
지니고 있다. 범주들은 자연 안에서 그 본질적인 구조로
나타난다. 자연 철학의 과제는 이 구조와 변증법을 탐색하는
것이다. 그러나 외면성의 영역인 자연은 비록 자연에
잠재되어 있는 이성이 점차 분명하게 드러나긴 하지만
철저하게 이성적일 수는 없다. 인간 안에서 자연은
자기의식으로 성장한다. 정신철학에서 헤겔은 무의식, 의식,
이성적 의지를 통해 인간 정신의 발전을 따라간다. 정신은
이 의지의 구현 또는 객관화인 인간의 제도와 역사를 거치며
마지막으로 예술·종교·철학을 거쳐 궁극적으로 인간은
자신을 정신으로, 절대적 진리를 지닌 것으로 인식한다.
따라서 이제 인간에게는 그 자신의 고유한 본질을 생각하는
길이 열린다. 마지막에 헤겔은 체계의 출발점으로
되돌아가서 그 출발점에 내포되어 있던 것을 분명하게
밝히는데, 그것은 '정신만이 존재하며, 정신은 순수한
활동성'이라는 사실이다. 이러한 헤겔의 체계는 철저한
과학적·역사적·신학적·철학적 탐구 결과에 의지한다.
베를린 시기
1818년 헤겔은 피히테가 죽은 뒤 비어 있던 베를린대학교
철학과 교수직 제의를 수락했다. 베를린에서 학생들에 대한
그의 영향력은 컸으며, 〈자연법과 국가학 개요 Naturrecht und
Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse〉(다른 제목으로는 〈법철학강요
Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts〉, 1821)를 출판했다.
〈법철학강요〉는 3부분으로 나뉜다. 첫부분은 법과 권리
일반에 관한 것이다. 인격은 법의 주체이다. 법은 추상적·보편적인
것이기 때문에 인간 의지의 보편적 기반에서만 정의가
작용한다. 그런데 개인은 법뿐만 아니라 양심적 확신과
일치해서 행동하지 않으면 만족하지 않는다. 따라서 근대
세계의 문제는 이러한 요구를 충족하는 사회와 정치 질서를
구성하는 것이다. 그리고 이렇게 이성의 요구를 충족하는
정치질서는 한편으로 인간을 노예로 만들거나 양심을
무시하도록 만드는 권력의 집중을 피하고, 다른 한편으로는
모든 개인에게 확신의 자유를 허용하고, 사회적·정치적
질서를 불가능하게 만드는 적대관계를 피해야 한다. 국가는
가족과 직업단체에 의존해서 이런 종합을 이룬다. 헤겔의
이러한 국가 개념은 당시 존재했던 어떤 국가와도 비슷한
점이 없었다. 헤겔이 생각하는 국가는 제한된 군주제이고,
의회를 갖춘 정부이며, 배심원에 의한 판결을 하며,
유대인과 반대자들에 관대한 정치 형태이다.
〈법철학강요〉를 출판한 뒤 헤겔은 강의에 진력했다. 1823~27년에
그의 활동은 최고조에 달했다. 미학·종교철학·역사철학·철학사에
관한 책이 편집·출판되었는데, 주로 수강생들의 노트에
기초한 것이었다. 그리고 논리학·심리학·자연철학에 관한
내용은 〈철학강요〉에 이해하기 쉽게 설명을 덧붙였다. 이
시기에 수백 명의 수강자들이 독일 전역과 외국에서
몰려들었다. 그의 명성은 열성적인 제자들에 의해 해외로
퍼졌다.
베를린 시기에 특히 미학· 종교철학·역사철학에
관한 강의가 이루어졌다. 종교철학에 관한 강의는 종교에
그의 방법을 적용한 것이다. 헤겔은 종교를 일상의 세속적
정신과 양립할 수 있는 사소한 것으로 축소한
합리주의학파를 비판했다. 또 감정을 체계적 신학 위에 있는
종교의 지위로까지 끌어올린 슐라이어마허 학파도 비판했다.
헤겔은 중도적 방식으로 교조적 신조가 종교적 감정에
내포된 것이 합리적 발전임을 보여주려 했다. 물론 그렇게
하기 위해 철학은 종교에 대한 해석자이자 더 우월한 분야가
되어야 했다. 헤겔은 역사철학에서 인간 역사 전체가 정신적·도덕적
진보를 이루어가고 자기인식으로 나아가는 과정이라고
전제했다. 그는 역사가 신의 목적을 연출하는 것이며 인간은
그 목적이 무엇인지를 식별할 수 있을 정도로 진보해왔다고
믿는다. 그 목적은 인간 자유의 점진적 실현이다. 그 첫
단계는 노예적인 자연의 삶에서 질서와 법의 상태로
이행하는 것이다. 국가는 힘과 폭력에 의해 세워진다.
질서잡힌 생활의 이성적 성격을 받아들일 만큼 정신적으로
진보하기 전에는 법을 지키게 하는 것 외에 다른 길이 없다.
많은 사람이 노예로 머무르는 반면 몇몇 사람이 법을
받아들이고 자유로워지는 단계가 있다. 근대 세계에서는
모든 인간이 본질적으로 자유롭다. 인간의 과제는 인간이
실제로 자유로워질 수 있는 제도를 만드는 것이다.
이무렵 헤겔
학파가 형성되기 시작했다. 이 가운데는 똑똑한 학생들도
있었지만 우둔한 모방자들과 철학을 서정적인 것으로
바꿔놓으려는 낭만주의자들도 있었다. 비록 그가
브란덴부르크의 학교들과 공식적인 연계를 거절했지만
프로이센에서 그의 실질적 영향력은 매우 컸다. 1830년 그는
대학 총장이 되었으며 1831년 프리드리히 빌헬름 3세로부터
훈장을 받았다. 그의 최후의 학문적 시도 가운데 하나는
베를린의 〈과학적 비판을 위한 연보 Jahrbücher für
wissenschaftliche Kritik〉를 만드는 것이었다. 1830년 혁명으로
헤겔은 충격을 받고 몸져 누웠다. 그의 최후 저작은 1832년의
영국 개혁법안에 관한 논문으로, 의회의 새 의원들의 성격과
그들이 도입할 새 법안이 지닐 효과에 관한 것이었다. 1831년
독일에 콜레라가 퍼졌다. 헤겔과 가족은 여름에 교외로
휴가를 갔는데, 거기서 〈논리학〉의 첫부분을 수정하는
작업을 마쳤다. 11월 14일 겨울 학기를 위해 집으로
돌아왔다가 하루를 앓고 난 뒤 콜레라로 죽었다. 자기가
원했던 대로 피히테와 풍자적 변증론자인 카를 졸거 사이에
묻혔다.
T. M. Knox 글
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