Hegelianism
from 1807
Contradiction is not a failure of thought but its engine, and history is the process by which spirit comes to understand itself.
- Active
- from 1807
- Where
- Berlin, then everywhere
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Modern European
The claim
Every determinate position generates its own opposite and is preserved in a larger position that includes both. Aufhebung — cancelling, preserving and lifting up at once — is the shape of every development.
What it held
Hegel's claim is that thinking, taken seriously, does not stay put. Any concept examined closely turns out to depend on what it excludes, and that dependence forces a move to a wider concept that holds both. Being and nothing collapse into becoming. Master and slave produce a reversal, because the master's recognition comes from someone he has defined as not counting.
That last passage, the struggle for recognition, is the most read thing he wrote and the most consequential. Recognition is not a courtesy but a condition of self-consciousness, and it cannot be extracted by force — a slave's acknowledgement is worthless precisely because it is coerced.
History is this process at scale: the development of freedom, moving through forms of life that each realise it partially and break on their own limitations.
The famous formula about thesis, antithesis and synthesis is not his. It comes from a summary by Chalybäus and has been attached to him ever since by people summarising what they have not read.
How it argued
Immanent critique — following a position's own logic until it breaks — rather than argument from external premises, which Hegel regarded as begging the question.
What it was arguing against
Kant's thing in itself, the fixed oppositions of the understanding, and any philosophy that judges from outside the position it examines.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether the dialectic is a method, a description or a mystification. Whether the system is conservative or revolutionary — the split into Right and Left Hegelians happened within a decade of his death.
Common misconceptions
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Hegel never uses the triad as a formula and the phrase is not in his work. And the line about the real being rational is not an endorsement of whatever exists; the German is more careful than the English.
How it began
A slow starter who published the Phenomenology at thirty-six, finishing it, according to the story, as Napoleon's army entered Jena.
What became of it
Living, after being pronounced dead several times. Anglophone philosophy dismissed him for a century and has been reading him seriously again since the 1970s.
Lasting influence
Marx, existentialism, critical theory, Lacan, and — via Pittsburgh — a substantial part of contemporary analytic philosophy of mind.
Why it still matters
The recognition argument is central to contemporary social philosophy, and the Pittsburgh school has made his account of concepts a live position in epistemology.
Put another way
A spiral staircase, which returns over the same ground at a different height.
Where to start
The Phenomenology's preface and the master-slave section, with a guide. Nobody reads Hegel unaided.
The surprising bit
He finished the Phenomenology of Spirit as Napoleon occupied Jena, and wrote to a friend that he had seen the world-soul on horseback riding out to reconnoitre.
In their own words
What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.
Self-consciousness exists in and for itself only in being acknowledged.
Connections
- Answers
- German Idealism, Fichteanism
- Opposed by
- Vienna Circle
The verdict
The hardest philosopher in the canon and the one most often summarised by people who have not read him.