ABSTRACT
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was born and schooled in Stuttgart and, as we have seen, attended the seminary (“Stift”) in nearby Tübingen where he formed friendships with Schelling and Hölderlin. When he joined Schelling at the University of Jena in 1801, the glory days of the first wave of post-Kantian idealism were coming to an end. Fichte had been banished, and the early romantic circle was fragmenting. The local view of Hegel seems to have been that he was little more than a spokesperson for his friend Schelling’s excursions into idealism and nature philosophy, an assessment that Hegel apparently struggled against for a large part of his career and which is still extant in some circles today. At Jena, up until the closure of the university in 1807, when Napoleon’s
troops invaded and occupied the town, Hegel experimented with various ways of conceiving the structure of his idealistic system. He was completing his first great work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, during the occupation of the town that brought the first part of his career to a standstill. Deprived of a university position for the next decade, Hegel worked as the editor of a newspaper and as the headmaster of a high school, but nevertheless published his three-volume Science of Logic. In 1816 he was appointed to an academic post at the University of Heidelberg, during which time he published the first edition of his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and in 1818 he was appointed to the chair of philosophy that Fichte had occupied at the University of Berlin. During Hegel’s twelve years in Berlin his influence and fame grew. His
Elements of the Philosophy of Right appeared in 1820, as a handbook to accompany his lectures. Also from his Berlin period we have records of his course of lectures on philosophy of religion, philosophy of history, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy. Hegel died in 1831 during a cholera epidemic, although perhaps not of cholera, as has traditionally been assumed. After his death, Hegel’s followers split over the interpretation of his attitude to religion, the “left Hegelians” taking Hegel’s philosophy as fundamentally a form of humanism, their “right” opponents seeing it as a philosophical defence of Christian theism.
