Born in 1770 in Stuttgart, Hegel spent the years 1788-1793 as a
theology student in nearby Tübingen, forming friendships there
with fellow students, the future great romatic poet Friedrich
Hölderlin and F. D. E. Schelling, who, like Hegel, would become
one of the major figures of the German philosophical scene in the
first half of the nineteenth century. These friendships clearly had a
major influence on Hegel's philosophical development, and for a while
the intellectual lives of these three were closely intertwined.
After graduation Hegel worked as a tutor for families in Bern then
Frankfurt, where he wrote early works on religious themes. In 1801 he
moved to Jena, the university town in the cultural hot-house of
Weimar, to which Schelling had earlier moved. There he was
"habilitated" and up until 1804 collaborated with Schelling. During
this time Hegel's philosophy was strongly influenced by that of
Schelling who in turn had been influenced by but was in the process of
breaking away from J. G. Fichte. In 1802 Hegel published his first
philosophical work, The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's
System of Philosophy in which he argued that Schelling's approach
succeeded where Fichte's failed in the project of systematising and
thereby completing Kant's transcendental idealism.
In 1807 Hegel published his Phenomenology of Spirit which
showed a divergence from his earlier more Schellingian
thought. Schelling, who had left Jena in 1803, interpreted a barbed
criticism in the Phenomenology's preface as aimed at him, and their
friendship abruptly ended. The occupation of Jena by Napoleon's troops
closed the university and Hegel left, working for a short time as an
editor of a newspaper in Bamberg, and then from 1808-1816 as the
headmaster and philosophy teacher at a "gymnasium" in Nuremberg,
during which time he wrote and published his Science of
Logic. In 1816 he took up a chair in philosophy at the University
of Heidelberg, then in 1818 the chair of philosophy at the University
of Berlin, the most prestigious position in the German philosophical
world. While in Heidelberg he published the Encyclopaedia of the
Philosophical Sciences, a systematic work in which an abbreviated
version of the earlier Science of Logic (the "lesser logic")
was followed by the application of its principles to the Philosophy
of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit. In 1821 in Berlin
Hegel published an expanded and developed version of a section of the
encyclopaedia Philosophy of Spirit dealing with political
philosophy, Elements of the Philosophy of Right. During the
following ten years up to his death from cholera in 1831 he continued
to teach at Berlin, and published subsequent versions of the
Encyclopaedia. After his death versions of his lectures on
philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and the
history of philosophy were published.
After Hegel's death, Schelling, whose reputation had long since been
eclipsed by that of Hegel, was invited to take up the chair at Berlin,
reputedly because the government of the day had wanted to counter the
influence that Hegelian philosophy had developed among a generation of
students. Since the early period of his collaboration with Hegel,
Schelling had become more religious in his philosophising and
criticised the "rationalism" of Hegel's philosophy. During this time
of Schelling's tenure at Berlin, important forms of later critical
reaction to Hegelian philosophy developed. Hegel supporters divided
into "left-" and "right-wing" factions; from out of the former circle,
Karl Marx was to develop his own "scientific" approach to society and
history which appropriated many Hegelian ideas into a materialistic
outlook. (Later, especially in reaction to orthodox Soviet versions of
Marxism, many "Western Marxists" re-incorporated further Hegelian
elements back into their forms of Marxist philosophy.) Many of
Schelling's own criticisms of Hegel's rationalism found their way into
subsequent "existentialist" thought, via thinkers such as Soren Kierkegaard
(who attended Schelling's lectures). Furthermore, the interpretation
Schelling offered of Hegel during these years itself helped to shape
subsequent generations' understanding of Hegel, contributing to the
orthodox or traditional understanding of Hegel as a "metaphysical"
thinker in the pre-Kantian "dogmatic" sense.
In academic philosophy, Hegelian idealism underwent a revival in both
Great Britain and the United States towards the end of the nineteenth
century. In Britain, where philosophers like T. H Green and
F. H. Bradley developed metaphysical ideas which they related back to
Hegel's thought, Hegel was seen as one of the main targets of attack
by the founders of the emerging "analytic" movement around the turn of
the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore. For most of
the twentieth century, interest in Hegel has been limited to his
relation to other more popular philosophical movements like
existentialism or Marxism, or to Hegel's social and political
thought. In France, a version of Hegelianism came to influence a
generation of thinkers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and the
psychoanalyst, Jaques Lacan, through the lectures of Alexandre
Kojève, an important precursor to the later "post-modern"
movement. A later generation of philosophers coming to prominence in
the late 1960s and after, tended to react against Hegel in an
analogous way to that in which early analytic philosophers had reacted
against the Hegel who had influenced their predecessors. In Germany,
important Hegelian elements were incorporated into the approach of
thinkers of the Frankfurt School, such as Theodor Adorno, and later,
Jürgen Habermas, and that of "hermeneutic" thinkers like
H. G. Gadamer. In the 1960s the philosopher Klaus Hartmann developed
what was termed a non-metaphysical interpretation of Hegel which has
played an important role in the revival of Hegelian philosophy over
the subsequent period.
