G W F Hegel (1770-1831)
Georg Hegel was a German "idealist" [1] philosopher who became one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century. At the same time, there can be little doubt that he was one of the most obtuse thinkers of his time - in Bertrand Russell's words "…the hardest to understand of all the great philosophers". 

His thought was adopted by many Protestant theologians and, with unfortunate consequences for many million victims, one of his disciples was Karl Marx.

Born in Stuttgart in 1770, the son of a civil servant, Hegel was brought up in an atmosphere of Protestant Pietism and became thoroughly acquainted with the Greek and Roman classics from an early age. 

Encouraged by his father to be ordained in the Lutheran Church, Hegel entered the seminary at the University of Tübingen in 1788. He became a private tutor until his father died in 1799. Hegel's future was temporarily assured by a financial legacy that was sufficient to free him from tutoring for the time being.

Having exhausted the legacy, Hegel eventually became a professor at the University of Berlin. He died in Berlin on November 14, 1831, during a cholera epidemic.

Hegel’s aim was to set forth a philosophical system so comprehensive that it would encompass the ideas of his predecessors and create a conceptual framework in terms of which both past and future could be understood philosophically. Such an aim would require nothing short of a full account of reality itself.

Thus, Hegel conceived the subject matter of his philosophy to be reality as a whole. This reality, or the total developmental process of "everything", he referred to as the "Absolute". According to Hegel, the task of philosophy is to chart the development of the Absolute.

This involves [1] making clear the internal rational structure of the Absolute; [2] demonstrating how the Absolute shows itself in nature and human history; and [3] showing the end or purpose towards which the Absolute is directed. This emphasis was, quite naturally, attractive to a number of Christian thinkers of the time, hard-pressed as they were to make sense of a growing gap between traditional theology and contemporary view of reality.

While Hegel's thinking does indeed encompass wide stretches of human experience, his critics probably have a good point when they say that his personal knowledge - of history and the philosophy of history for example - was in many respects woefully incomplete, resulting in highly dubious conclusions. But his style was persuasive and his arguments strong, so his impact was nevertheless great.

Concerning the rational structure of the Absolute, and following the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, Hegel argued that "what is rational is real and what is real is rational". If one steps back a little from this, it seems an obviously circular statement and a dubious one at that. Another way of putting it might be to say something like, "If we want to know what is real, then we have to think our way through to any conclusions. It's no good making assumptions and we shouldn't just pluck answers out of thin air." 

The prevailing Christian doctrine at the time (as it is today) was that there are such things as final or absolute truths "out there" which have been revealed by God to humanity. In this context, Hegel's assertion and his general methodology can be seen as an assertion of the contemporary stress on reason and the scientific method to work out knowledge about the world.

Hegel made a further claim that the Absolute must ultimately be regarded as pure Mind (Geist in German) which is in the process of self-development. Only Mind (i.e. rationality) is real. The so-called "facts" of empirical knowledge are "irrational" as long as they stand alone. They become "rational" only when they are perceived as aspects of the whole - the complex whole which is the "Absolute".

Idealism in relation to Hegel is the proposition that mind and "spiritual" values are fundamental in the world as a whole. That is, nothing is real except as a whole, which is itself a complex system. No true statement can be made about any one part of the universe (the Absolute) except insofar as it has a place in the whole. 

In assigning a place to one part of the whole, one automatically assigns a place to everything else, because knowing the place of one part of the whole implies knowing the place of all the other parts. That is, the only truth is the whole truth.

The logical method that governs this developmental process from the part to the whole is "dialectic" (or "give and take"). This dialectical method involves the notion that progress is the result of the conflict of opposites which, though false when standing alone, become more true when they are part of the whole. Dialectic, therefore, is the critical investigation of the process of change in which an entity merges with, and is made complete by, its opposite. 

It seems to me that Hegel was attempting to counter the tendency of his time to break every whole into its constituent parts. Only when all these parts are analysed, it was thought, is it possible to understand the whole. A problem was that the analytical process was sometimes not reversed and the components of the whole labelled "the truth".

Traditionally, the dialectical dimension of Hegel’s thought has been analysed in terms of three categories: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Although Hegel almost never used these terms, they are helpful in understanding his concept of the dialectic.

The thesis, then, might be that a concept is part of the structure of the Absolute (therefore part of "truth"). Such a concept contains within itself incompleteness that gives rise to opposition (antithesis), an apparently conflicting concept which is needed if the whole is to be restored. As a result of the conflict a third concept or form of consciousness arises (synthesis), which overcomes the conflict by reconciling at a higher level the truth contained in both the thesis and antithesis.

This synthesis in turn may become a new thesis that generates another antithesis, giving rise to a new synthesis - and in such a fashion the process of metaphysical or historical development is continually generated. Hegel thought that our understanding of the Absolute itself (that is to say, the sum total of reality) is continually developing in this dialectical fashion towards an ultimate end or goal. One author puts it like this:

... each time an event occurs in the material world (Hegel calls it a "thesis"), spirit generates an opposed event (an "antithesis"), which tries to correct it. The tension between these two is then resolved by yet a third event (the "synthesis") , which serves to blend elements of both, only to serve as the new thesis for yet another sequence or opposition and resolution. 

For Hegel, therefore, reality is understood as the Absolute unfolding dialectically in a process of self-development. As the Absolute undergoes this development, it manifests itself both in nature and in human history. Nature is the Absolute objectifying itself in material form. 

Our finite minds and the human history we generate are the process of the Absolute manifesting itself in that which is most like itself, namely, mind or consciousness.

In The Phenomenology of Mind (1807) Hegel traced the stages of this manifestation in its various forms from the simplest consciousness of objects, through self-consciousness, rational consciousness, and the various forms of ethical and religious consciousness, to "absolute knowledge" - that form of consciousness in which the subject recognizes itself as fundamentally identical with the Absolute.

So, for example, the thesis might be that which is "pure being" - which just is, without any qualities. But the antithesis would be that anything pure has no qualities; and that which has no qualities can't be described; therefore pure being is in reality "not being". But when we put thesis and antithesis together into synthesis, we find that the union of "being" and "not-being" is "becoming". Therefore the "Absolute is Becoming". 

Thus the thesis and antithesis are not superseded but completed by the synthesis. It's therefore possible to build thesis, antithesis and synthesis in layers towards a final truth. This often seems to me a stilted, mechanical way of drawing conclusions. But it should be remembered that today's capacity to recognise the relativity of all knowledge was derived in part initially from Hegel's dialectic. 

The goal of the dialectical process can be most clearly understood at the level of reason. As finite reason progresses in understanding, the Absolute progresses towards full self-knowledge. Indeed, the Absolute comes to know itself through the human mind’s increased understanding of reality (the Absolute). Hegel analysed this human progression in terms of three levels: art, religion, and philosophy.

Art grasps the Absolute in material forms, interpreting the rational through the sensible forms of beauty.

It is conceptually superseded by religion, which grasps the Absolute by means of images and symbols. The highest religion for Hegel is Christianity, for in Christianity the truth that the Absolute manifests itself in the finite is symbolically reflected in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.

Philosophy, however, is conceptually supreme, because it grasps the Absolute in terms of the concepts that structure it. Once this has been achieved, the Absolute has arrived at full self-consciousness - in Hegel’s terms, at "Absolute Mind" - and the cosmic drama reaches its end and goal. Only at this point did Hegel identify the Absolute with God. "God is God," Hegel argued, "only in so far as he knows himself."

In the process of analysing the nature of the Absolute, Hegel made significant contributions in a variety of philosophical fields, including the philosophy of history, ethics, and political philosophy. 

With respect to history, his two key explanatory categories are reason and freedom. As a rational process, history is the "progress of the consciousness of freedom". That is, it is the progressive realization on the part of the human spirit (or "finite mind") that its own essential nature is freedom, and thereby the realization of that freedom.

For Hegel, every historical civilization expresses a certain underlying conception of the human mind through the customs, ethical practices, and social and political institutions it establishes. It is only once these practices and institutions have been established and become familiar, that the people of that civilization can go on to make this underlying conception explicit through its art, religion, and philosophy.

However, by so making this underlying conception explicit, the people come to experience it as contradictory, and as inadequate to its sense of what the human spirit really is. As a result, people gradually lose their loyalty to the established practices and institutions, and the civilization begins to decay.

Eventually a figure appears who leads the way in overthrowing the old instruments and replacing them with a new set that more adequately expresses the real nature of the human spirit as free. Hegel calls such figures "world historical individuals" and gives Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon as examples. One wonders what he would have made of Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin.

The whole historical process of the rise and fall of civilizations is thus a process through which the human spirit gradually comes to self-knowledge and freedom. Hegel assigns the highest role in the historical process to the Germans. "The German mind is the mind of the new world. Its aim is the realisation of absolute truth …" His argument is quite plainly without foundation, especially with hindsight. 

He offers no explanation or evidence why later history should embody categories "higher" or "better" than any earlier categories - unless, in Bertrand Russell's words, "… one were to adopt the blasphemous supposition that the universe was gradually learning Hegel's philosophy". 

Russell's comment, I think, puts a finger on an important weakness of Hegel's thought. It is that any philosophical system can be created from a priori axioms - statements which make internal sense when carried through properly to completion. 

But that doesn't guarantee that the entire philosophical system itself has any relationship to the physical world. 

An analogy might be the elaborate psychological schema invented by Sigmund Freud. His system depended almost entirely upon the concept of the Ego. But it has proved impossible to demonstrate that any human behaviours are the result of either a "thing" in human brains which might be called the Ego, or even how the bio-chemical human system might be linked with human behaviour.

The concept of the State which Hegel developed is plainly what was later to be known as fascist - that is, the doctrine that the State exists for itself, not for the individual. Hegel justified tyranny and war as means of preserving "… the moral health of peoples". 

This idea proved to be an exceedingly poisonous plant in the fertile soil of European upheavals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Hegel saw the ethical practices and the social and political institutions of modern society (such as the nuclear family and the market economy) and of the modern state (for example, an impartial system of law, a system of representation, and a constitutional monarch) as effectively the final stage in the evolution of social and political institutions. It's tragic that Hegel did not have available the insights of psychology. If he had, he might have placed the individual rather than the State at the centre of his social system.

In supposing that humanity was discovering itself in the Absolute, Hegel was in harmony with other European thinkers who supposed that the human race was in a process of becoming better - a supposition to be rudely destroyed by the excesses of the First World War.

In Europe, in the wake of the French Revolution, it appeared to some that the "end of history" had been reached. Accordingly, Hegel thought of these social and political institutions as fully expressing the freedom that is the defining character of the human mind. In The Philosophy of Right (1821) he attempted to show how these institutions embodied freedom in all its aspects, and so to justify them.

In particular, he tried to show how they unite two different kinds of ethical outlook, which he called "morality" and "ethical life".

At the level of morality, right and wrong are matters of individual reason and individual conscience. At the level of ethical life, duty is a matter of allegiance to the social wholes of which one is a member - one’s family, one’s social class or "estate", and one’s country. Since individuals are only complete through their social relationships within the whole, morality alone is inadequate and one must move beyond it to the level of ethical life.

Thus the State is the expression of the most inclusive social whole to which one can belong - one’s own country - so when there is a conflict of duties, one’s duties to the State override all others. Obedience to the general will, which is manifested in a properly constituted state, is the proper act of a fully free and rational individual. 

Hegel could not perhaps have foreseen the terrifying social expression of his approach in the militaristic doctrines of the political movements which arose in Europe some decades later. The German fascist Adolf Eichmann perhaps epitomised the idea that it is moral to commit even genocide if ordered to by a duly constituted authority.

In terms of the human reasoning process, if all phenomena can't be "true" until they are perceived as part of the whole, then Hegel must say how he knows this. For he can't know any truth, not even this, unless he first knows the entire whole - in this case the physical universe. But Hegel can't know the entire universe. This difficulty is enough to indicate that a truly fundamental mistake lurks somewhere in his thinking.

Hegel's assertions about the Absolute clearly land us in absurdities We end up in a situation in which not only can't we know anything, but in which language itself - the only vehicle we have to express knowledge - becomes meaningless.

For example, the word "truth" means, according to Hegel, "all truth" or the "whole truth". But this is a circular proposition, since the word "truth" is included in the defining phrase "all truth". In this way, language ceases to be a way of expressing truth since we need to know the entire meaning of all words in order to know the meaning of only one.

Hegel's error was indeed fundamental, and his impressive philosophical edifice accordingly impressively wrong as is demonstrated, with hindsight, by the almost absurd errors he made in relating his philosophy to real life and in particular to  corporate life embodied in the modern nation-state..

The fundamental error was therefore that if what is known about one thing is so complete that it can be absolutely marked off from all others, then all its properties are known - a conclusion which Hegel himself fails to demonstrate in relation to anything. 

However watertight this argument may seem, it is plainly impossible to know everything about even a few things, never mind about everything. Hegel's poor logic can't be excused by the interesting consequences to which it gives rise.

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[1] Idealism - To understand this term, it's helpful to very briefly consider some associated terms:

Naturalism - The proposition that what we call "mind" or "spirit" are intangible phenomena which nevertheless ultimately emerge from, and are reducible to, material things or processes.

Realism - The conclusion that material things exist independently of our perception. When we cease to perceive something, it does not cease to exist (though what is perceived is not necessarily uniform for all perceivers).

Metaphysical idealism - Idealism which is not realist.

Objective idealism - Realism which is not naturalist.

Theism - In this context, the idealist perception that God is a perfect, uncreated spirit or mind.

Pantheism - Nothing exists except God (Absolute Being) and his modes or attributes. Therefore the material world is an aspect of God the Spirit.

See also Idealism.

[2] Eight Theories of Religion, Daniel L Pals, OUP, 2006

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