G. W. F. Hegel

Finishing a book as Napoleon rode in

In January 1801 Hegel moved to Jena, where Schelling was already teaching, and began as an unsalaried lecturer, a Privatdozent. His first book there compared the systems of Fichte and Schelling, and in 1802–03 he and Schelling edited the Critical Journal of Philosophy together. He was made a professor in 1805, but did not receive a salary until the end of 1806.

The book that made his name was finished in a war. In October 1806 Hegel was posting the manuscript in instalments to his friend Friedrich Niethammer, who was dealing with the publisher for him, and was afraid the pages would be lost as the French army closed in. On 13 October, the day the French occupied Jena, he wrote to Niethammer: “I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance.” The battle of Jena was fought the next day. The occupation disrupted the university, and the Phenomenology of Spirit appeared in 1807.

That winter also brought a private reckoning. In February 1807 the wife of Hegel’s Jena landlord, who had been abandoned by her husband, gave birth to his son, Ludwig. Hegel soon left Jena for work elsewhere. The boy was boarded out, with Hegel paying for his keep, until he joined his father’s household at about the age of ten. Terry Pinkard’s biography tells the story at length, and its reviewers singled it out as the hardest ethical question in Hegel’s private life.

The Phenomenology follows a series of “shapes of consciousness”, each with its own standard for what counts as knowing. Hegel takes each one at its word until that standard produces contradictions that undermine it. In chapter IV the shape is a self that wants to be certain of itself, and Hegel’s starting point (§178) is that self-consciousness exists for itself “only by being acknowledged or ‘recognized’” by another self. So two selves meet, and each wants the other to confirm it without confirming the other in return. Each risks its life to show that it is more than a living thing: “they prove themselves and each other through a life-and-death struggle” (§187). But a dead opponent recognises no one, so “this trial by death” defeats its own purpose (§188). One of them gives way and lives on as bondsman, and the other becomes lord (§189).

Then comes the reversal. The lord is acknowledged, but only by someone he does not treat as an equal, so the recognition he wanted is “one-sided and unequal” (§191). The bondsman has “felt the fear of death, the sovereign master” (§194), and he works on things for someone else. Work, Hegel writes, is “desire restrained and checked, evanescence delayed and postponed” (§195). The worker does not consume the object. He shapes it into something that lasts, and in the thing he has made he sees his own power (§196). Hence the startling sentence of §193: “The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the consciousness of the bondsman.” The section is a stage, not a verdict. Hegel had already described the goal as two selves who “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another” (§184), and the chapter moves on to Stoicism, Scepticism and the “unhappy consciousness”. The quotations here come from the older English translation on Hegel-by-HyperText, whose paragraph numbers match most modern editions.

A newspaper desk, a schoolroom and the Logic

With the university at Jena disrupted, Hegel took the work he could find. He edited the Bamberger Zeitung, a daily paper in Catholic Bamberg, apparently with success, though he disliked journalism. In 1808 he became headmaster of a Gymnasium in Nuremberg, where he also taught philosophy to the pupils, and he stayed until a university finally called him in 1816. In 1811 he married Marie von Tucher, from a well-established Nuremberg family and about half his age. Their daughter died soon after birth; their sons Karl and Immanuel were born in 1813 and 1814.

In these schoolmaster’s years he wrote the Science of Logic, published in three parts in 1812, 1813 and 1816. It begins with the emptiest thought there is, pure being, and finds that something with no content at all cannot be told apart from nothing. The way out is a third category, becoming, which holds both. The whole book moves in that rhythm: a category is set up, collapses under a contradiction it produces itself, and gives way to a richer one. This is the engine of Hegel’s system and its steepest climb. The shorter Encyclopaedia Logic of 1817 is the more manageable second step after the Phenomenology.

Civil society: strangers who need one another

In 1816 Heidelberg offered Hegel a professorship. There, in 1817, he published the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, a compact outline of logic, nature and spirit written as a textbook for his lectures. Ludwig came to live with the family at about this time. In 1818 the Prussian minister von Altenstein brought Hegel to the University of Berlin, where he stayed for the rest of his life. There he wrote the Elements of the Philosophy of Right; he sent a copy to the Prussian chancellor Hardenberg in 1820, and the book is dated 1821.

The book follows freedom from property and contract, through morality, into what Hegel calls ethical life: the family, civil society and the state. Civil society, the modern world of work, markets and courts, is the best place to begin reading. Its first principle (§182) is the concrete person pursuing his own aims. Its second is that he can reach them only through other people. Together these form “a system of complete interdependence” (§183). In the “system of needs”, Hegel agrees with Adam Smith that the division of labour turns private interest into public service: “subjective self-seeking turns into a contribution to the satisfaction of the needs of everyone else” (§199).

Then he refuses the happy ending. The same market leaves a whole class trapped in poverty, and creates “a rabble of paupers” (§244). An Addition compiled from students’ lecture notes adds that what makes a rabble is not poverty alone but the inner revolt against society that comes with it. Charity and public relief can soften the problem, but “despite an excess of wealth civil society is not rich enough” to check it (§245), and Hegel points to England as the large-scale example. So civil society is driven “to push beyond its own limits and seek markets” abroad, and to found colonies (§§246–248). Hegel’s own institutional answer is the Corporation, an association of members of a trade or profession that acts “like a second family for its members” (§252) and is “the second ethical root of the state” (§255). Whether that answer is enough is disputed. The Stanford Encyclopedia’s account of his political philosophy judges that he has no convincing solution short of changing the economic system, and Marx later built on the diagnosis. The quotations follow the older English translation on Hegel-by-HyperText.