1.
Hegel
2. What is real is rational
3. Subjective and Objective
mind
G.W.HEGEL
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (born August 27, 1770, Stuttgart, Württemberg
[Germany]—died November 14, 1831, Berlin), German philosopher who developed a
dialectical scheme that emphasized the progress of history and of ideas from thesis to
antithesis and thence to a synthesis.
He was the son of a government official. Although the family was poor, they were close and
affectionate. Hegel was born in an era of German intellectual giants such as composer
Ludwig van Beethoven; philosopher and writer Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, author of the
masterpiece Faust; and the philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Hegel was 19 years old when the
French Revolution began.
At that time, the starving lower
classes in France rose up against
the French aristocracy, sending
shock waves of social and political
upheaval across Europe. Hegel
welcomed the revolution as a new
age of freedom.
In 1799, Hegel’s father died, leaving him enough money to quit tutoring
and lecture without pay at the University of Jena.
He also coedited a philosophy journal. During those years, Hegel
concentrated on writing his own philosophy. At that time, French emperor
Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies were on the march in a conquest of Europe.
The same day that Hegel finished his first major work, The
Phenomenology of Mind, Napoleon attacked Jena and closed the university. Soon
after, Napoleon conquered Germany.
His inheritance gone, Hegel worked for a pro-
Napoleon newspaper, and then as principal of a high school
in Nürnberg.
While there, he met and married Marie von Tucher,
a woman half his age, with whom he had two sons. His
philosophical works brought him invitations to teach from
several universities.
He joined the faculty at Heidelberg in 1816 and then
accepted a position at the University of Berlin, where he
remained until he fell ill with cholera. He died at age 61 at
the height of his fame.
What is real is rational
Kant had said that we could never know
the ultimate reality of God, freedom, and
immortality, but we could and should think
about ultimate reality. Hegel disagreed.
The human mind is spirit just as
God is Absolute Spirit. Therefore, we can
know God. After all, he said, if we know there
is Absolute Spirit, which is ultimate reality,
then ultimate reality is knowable.
Reality is rational, and Hegel is noted for saying, “What is real is
rational and what is rational is real.” Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, and other
philosophers also saw reality as rational. Plato saw the physical world as always
changing, although true reality is permanent and never changing. Plato called the
physical world an appearance of reality, making it less real.
Hegel, however, argued that appearance is reality.
For him, Absolute Spirit is the
ultimate reality, and our world history
is the “world spirit” gradually
becoming conscious of itself through
the human mind, which is also spirit.
Humanity is moving toward greater
rationality and freedom, he said. Absolute
Spirit expresses itself through history via the
dialectic process of “thesis, antithesis,
and synthesis.”
Subjective and Objective mind
According to Hegel, Absolute Spirit is the synthesis of
reason and the senses, or the rational idea and nonrational
nature.
The dialectic process moves through
• subjective spirit or mind (thesis);
• objective spirit, or mind (antithesis);
• absolute Spirit (synthesis).
At first, Absolute Spirit expresses itself
in physical nature. Then, through our
subjective nature, it begins to become
conscious of itself in human beings.
Hegel called this type of consciousness
subjective spirit, or mind. It has three
characteristics:
(1) soul
(2) individual consciousness
(3) intelligence.
When the mind unites the soul and
individual, it reaches the highest truth of the
subjective spirit—the “free mind.” We reach
free mind when we learn to control our
desires with the reason.
When subjective spirit becomes conscious of the
family, society, and the state, it becomes objective
spirit. The objective spirit expresses itself when people
interact. The subjective mind looks inward while the
objective mind looks outward to the external world.
Through the objective mind, we enter public life
to create rules, institutions, and organizations. Just as
the subjective mind has three states, so does the
objective mind:
(1) laws and contracts,
(2) conscience,
(3) social morality.
At the first stage of laws and contracts, we create property systems,
economic organizations, and class distinctions. We set up rights of ownership
through buying and selling. The second stage takes us beyond physical possessions
to responsibility. Conscience means that we must, as Kant said, have goodwill.
The family, as the immediate
substantiality of mind, is specifically
characterized by love, which is the
mind’s feeling of its own unity. Hence in
a family, one’s frame of mind is to have
self-consciousness of one’s
individuality within this unity as the
[ab]solute essence of oneself, with the
result that one is in it not as an
independent person but as a member.
