GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
THE LIFE OF GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
Assistant in Philosophy, Harvard University
Among students of philosophy the mention of Hegel's name arouses at once a definite emotion. Few thinkers indeed have ever so completely fascinated the minds of their sympathetic readers, or have so violently repulsed their unwilling listeners, as Hegel has. To his followers Hegel is the true prophet of the only true philosophic creed, to his opponents, he has, in Professor James's words, "like Byron's corsair, left a name 'to other times, linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes.'"
The feelings of attraction to Hegel or repulsion from him do not emanate from his personality. Unlike Spinoza's, his life offers nothing to stir the imagination. Briefly, some of his biographical data are as follows: He was born at Stuttgart, the capital of Würtemberg, August 27, 1770. His father was a government official, and the family belonged to the upper middle class. Hegel received his early education at the Latin School and the Gymnasium of his native town. At both these institutions, as well as at the University of Tübingen which he entered in 1788 to study theology, he distinguished himself as an eminently industrious, but not as a rarely gifted student. The certificate which he received upon leaving the University in 1793 speaks of his good character, his meritorious acquaintance with theology and languages, and his meagre knowledge of philosophy. This does not quite represent his equipment, however, for his private reading and studies carried him far beyond the limits of the regular curriculum. After leaving the University he spent seven years as family tutor in Switzerland and in Frankfurt-on-the-Main. Soon after, in 1801, we find him as Privat-Docent; then, in 1805, as professor at the University of Jena. His academic activities were interrupted by the battle of Jena. For the next two years we meet him as an editor of a political journal at Bamberg, and from 1808 to 1816 as rector of the Gymnasium at Nuremberg. He was then called to a professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg. In 1818 he was called to Berlin to fill the vacancy left by the death of Fichte. From this time on until his death in 1831, he was the recognized dictator of one of the most powerful philosophic schools in the history of thought.
It is no easy task to convey an adequate idea of Hegel's philosophy within the limits of a short introduction. There is, however, one central thought animating the vast range of his whole philosophic system which permits of non-technical statement. This thought will be more easily grasped, if we consider first the well-known concept of permanence and change. They may be said to constitute the most fundamental distinction in life and in thought. Religion and poetry have always dwelt upon their tragic meaning. That there is nothing new under the sun and that we are but "fair creatures of an hour" in an ever-changing world, are equally sad reflections. Interesting is the application of the difference between permanence and change to extreme types of temperament. We may speak loosely of the "static" and the "dynamic" temperaments, the former clinging to everything that is traditional, conservative, and abiding in art, religion, philosophy, politics, and life; the latter everywhere pointing to, and delighting in, the fluent, the novel, the evanescent. These extreme types, by no means rare or unreal, illustrate the deep-rooted need of investing either permanence or change with a more fundamental value. And to the value of the one or the other, philosophers have always endeavored to give metaphysical expression.
Some thinkers have proclaimed change to be the deepest manifestation of reality, while others have insisted upon something abiding behind a world of flux. The question whether change or permanence is more essential arose early in Greek philosophy. Heraclitus was the first one to see in change a deeper significance than in the permanence of the Eleatics. A more dramatic opposition than the one which ensued between the Heracliteans and the Eleatics can scarcely be imagined—both schools claiming a monopoly of reason and truth, both distrusting the senses, and each charging the other with illusion. Now the significance of Hegel's philosophy can be grasped only when we bear in mind that it was just this profound distinction between the permanent and the changing that Hegel sought to understand and to interpret. He saw more deeply into the reality of movement and change than any other philosopher before or after him.
Very early in his life, judging by the recently published writings of his youth, Hegel became interested in various phases of movement and change. The vicissitudes of his own inner or outer life he did not analyze. He was not given to introspection. Romanticism and mysticism were foreign to his nature. His temperament was rather that of the objective thinker. Not his own passions, hopes, and fears, but those of others invited his curiosity. With an humane attitude, the young Hegel approached religious and historical problems. The dramatic life and death of Jesus, the tragic fate of "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome," the discrepancies between Christ's teachings and the positive Christian religion, the fall of paganism and the triumph of the Christian Church—these were the problems over which the young Hegel pondered. Through an intense study of these problems, he discovered that evil, sin, longing, and suffering are woven into the very tissue of religious and historical processes, and that these negative elements determine the very meaning and progress of history and religion. Thereupon he began a systematic sketch of a philosophy in which a negative factor was to be recognized as the positive vehicle in the development of the whole world. And thus his genius came upon a method which revealed to him an orderly unfolding in the world with stages of relative values, the higher developing from the lower, and all stages constituting an organic whole.
The method which the young Hegel discovered empirically, and which the mature rationalist applied to every sphere of human life and thought, is the famous Dialectical Method. This method is, in general, nothing else than the recognition of the necessary presence of a negative factor in the constitution of the world. Everything in the world—be it a religious cult or a logical category, a human passion or a scientific law—is, so Hegel holds, the result of a process which involves the overcoming of a negative element. Without such an element to overcome, the world would indeed be an inert and irrational affair. That any rational and worthy activity entails the encounter of opposition and the removal of obstacles is an observation commonplace enough. A preëstablished harmony of foreseen happy issues—a fool's paradise—is scarcely our ideal of a rational world. Just as a game is not worth playing when its result is predetermined by the great inferiority of the opponent, so life without something negative to overcome loses its zest. But the process of overcoming is not anything contingent; it operates according to a uniform and universal law. And this law constitutes Hegel's most central doctrine—his doctrine of Evolution.
In order to bring this doctrine into better relief, it may be well to contrast it superficially with the Darwinian theory of transformation. In general, Hegel's doctrine is a concept of value, Darwin's is not. What Darwinians mean by evolution is not an unfolding of the past, a progressive development of a hierarchy of phases, in which the later is superior and organically related to the earlier. No sufficient criterion is provided by them for evaluating the various stages in the course of an evolutionary process. The biologist's world would probably have been just as rational if the famous ape-like progenitor of man had chanced to become his offspring-assuming an original environment favorable for such transformation. Some criterion besides the mere external and accidental "struggle for existence" and "survival of the fittest" must be furnished to account for a progressive evolution. Does the phrase "survival of the fittest" say much more than that those who happen to survive are the fittest, or that their survival proves their fitness? But that survival itself is valuable: that it is better to be alive than dead; that existence has a value other than itself; that what comes later in the history of the race or of the universe is an advance over what went before-that, in a word, the world is subject to an immanent development, only a comprehensive and systematic philosophy can attempt to show.
The task of Hegel's whole philosophy consists in showing, by means of one uniform principle, that the world manifests everywhere a genuine evolution. Unlike the participants in the biological "struggle for existence," the struggling beings of Hegel's universe never end in slaying, but in reconciliation. Their very struggle gives birth to a new being which includes them, and this being is "higher" in the scale of existence, because it represents the preservation of two mutually opposed beings.