Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

(1770–1831), German philosopher. He was born in Württemberg, but achieved his greatest influence in a Prussian context, while teaching at Berlin University from 1818 onwards. His complex metaphysics belongs to the “idealist” tradition, where “the external world” is deemed to be somehow created by the prior workings of mind. Hegel followed this approach in an endeavor to understand the whole of reality, manifest in the form of absolute Spirit ( Geist ) that covers growth in consciousness, reasoning, freedom, and morality. His demonstration of its progressive nature (see, for example, The Phenomenology of Mind dating from 1807) is linked to a dialectical method. This involves viewing each phenomenon as a thesis containing internal contradictions that are destined to manifest themselves as an antithesis . He then goes on to assert that the resulting conflict, within which both those elements become superseded and transcended, will eventually generate a higher synthesis – one that provides the starting-point for the next triadic progress. Historians have wrangled with such metaphysics mainly at the points where Hegel applied this dialectic to political processes and to the study of the past. The central theme in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821) was the enlargement of rationality reflected in the growth of the modern state, as a construct capable of transcending ... log in or subscribe to read full text