title: Gremlins

text: In contrast to Galligan, many of the supporting actors and actresses were better known. Veteran actor Glynn Turman portrayed the high school science teacher whose study of a newborn "mogwai" leads to his death after it forms a cocoon and emerges as a vicious gremlin. Dick Miller, who was a regular in Dante's films, was another experienced actor on the set, playing a World War II veteran who first refers to the creatures as gremlins. Rand was played by Hoyt Axton, who was always the filmmakers' preferred choice for the role even though it was widely contested by other actors. Axton's experience included acting as the father in "The Black Stallion" (1979), and he was also a country music singer-songwriter. After an introductory scene to "Gremlins" was cut, Axton's voice earned him the added role of the narrator to establish some context. Mr. Wing was played by Keye Luke, a renowned film actor, whose film career spanned half a century. Although in reality he was around 80 at the time of filming, and his character was very elderly, Luke's youthful appearance had to be covered by make-up.


title: Gremlins

text: Corey Feldman, who up to that time had primarily been in commercials, played Pete Fountaine, establishing his early credentials as a child actor. Polly Holliday, an actress best known for her role in "Alice", played Mrs. Deagle. Dante considered the casting fortunate, as she was well-known and he considered her to be talented. Two other well-known actors, "Fast Times" Judge Reinhold and character actor Edward Andrews, received roles that were significantly reduced after the film was edited; they played Billy's superiors at the bank.


title: Gremlins

text: Some of the performances were shot on the Courthouse Square and Colonial Street sets of the Universal Studios Lot in Universal City, California (Mrs. Deagle's house was one such set as well as the opening street scenes in Chinatown, which were filmed on the Warner Bros. Studios backlot). This required fake snow; Dante also felt it was an atmosphere that would make the special effects more convincing. As the special effects relied mainly on puppetry (an earlier attempt to use monkeys was abandoned because the test monkey panicked when made to wear a gremlin head), the actors worked alongside some of the puppets. Nevertheless, after the actors finished their work for good, a great deal of effort was spent finishing the effects. Numerous small rubber puppets, some of which were mechanical, were used to portray Gizmo and the gremlins. They were designed by Chris Walas. There was more than one Gizmo puppet, and occasionally Galligan, when carrying one, would set him down off camera, and when Gizmo appeared again sitting on a surface it was actually a different puppet wired to the surface. These puppets had many limitations. The Gizmo puppets were particularly frustrating because they were smaller and thus broke down more. While Walas recommended making the "mogwais" larger to make their creation and functioning easier for the special effects team, Dante insisted on keeping their size small to enhance the cuteness of the creatures. Consequently, to satisfy the crew, a scene was included in which the gremlins hang Gizmo on a wall and throw darts at him. This was included on a list that the crew created known to them as the "Horrible Things to do to Gizmo" list.


title: Gremlins

text: A few marionettes were also used. Other effects required large "mogwai" faces and ears to be produced for close-ups, as the puppets were less capable of conveying emotion. Consequently, large props simulating food were needed for the close-ups in the scene in which the "mogwai" feast after midnight. An enlarged Gizmo puppet was also needed for the scene in which he multiplies. The new "mogwai", who popped out of Gizmo's body as small, furry balls which then started to grow, were balloons and expanded as such. Walas had also created the exploding gremlin in the microwave by means of a balloon that was allowed to burst.


title: Gremlins

text: Howie Mandel provided the voice for Gizmo, and prolific voice actor Frank Welker provided the voice for Stripe. It was Welker who suggested Mandel perform in "Gremlins". The puppets' lines were mostly invented by the voice actors, based on cues from the physical actions of the puppets, which were filmed before the voice work. When developing the voice for Gizmo, Mandel explained, "[Gizmo was] cute and naive, so, you know, I got in touch with that... I couldn't envision going any other way or do something different with it". The majority of the other gremlins' voices were performed by Michael Winslow and Peter Cullen, while the remaining voices were done by Bob Bergen, Fred Newman, Mark Dodson, Bob Holt, and Michael Sheehan.


title: Gremlins

text: The film's score was composed by Jerry Goldsmith, who won a Saturn Award for Best Music for his efforts. The main score was composed with the objective of conveying "the mischievous humor and mounting suspense of Gremlins". Goldsmith also wrote Gizmo's song, which was hummed by a child actress and acquaintance of Goldsmith, rather than Mandel himself. Goldsmith also appears in the film, alongside Steven Spielberg, in the scene where Rand calls home from the salesman's convention.


title: Gremlins

text: The soundtrack album was released by Geffen Records as a specially priced mini-album on LP and cassette (Goldsmith's music comprised all of side two) and reissued on compact disc in 1993 only in Germany.


title: Gremlins

text: In 2011, "Film Score Monthly" issued a two-disc release of the soundtrack, with the complete score on disc one and the original soundtrack album on disc two (representing the latter's first North American CD issue); this was the label's final Jerry Goldsmith album.


title: Gremlins

text: Financially, "Gremlins" was a success. Produced on an $11 million budget, it was more expensive than Spielberg had originally intended but still relatively cheap for its time. The trailer introduced the film to audiences by briefly explaining that Billy receives a strange creature as a Christmas present, by going over the three rules, and then coming out with the fact that the creatures transform into terrible monsters. This trailer showed little of either the "mogwai" or the gremlins. In contrast to this, other advertisements concentrated on Gizmo, overlooked the gremlins, and made the film look similar to Spielberg's earlier family film "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" (1982).


title: Gremlins

text: "Gremlins" was released into North American theaters on June 8, 1984, the same day as Ivan Reitman's "Ghostbusters". "Gremlins" ranked second, with $12.5 million in its first weekend, $1.1 million less than "Ghostbusters". By the end of its American screenings on November 29, it had grossed $148,168,459 domestically. This made it the fourth highest-grossing film of the year, behind "Beverly Hills Cop", "Ghostbusters", and "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom". In August 1984, it opened in Argentina and Spain, and in October it premiered in West Germany. Screenings began in Mexico, Australia, and much of the rest of Europe in December. Since "Gremlins" had an international audience, different versions of the film were made to overcome cultural barriers. Mandel learned to speak his few intelligible lines, such as "Bright light!", in various languages, including German. Regional music and humor were also incorporated into foreign-language versions. Dante credited this work as being one of the factors which helped to make "Gremlins" a worldwide success. However, many critics questioned the summer release date of the film in America, as the film takes place during the Christmas holiday season, causing them to comment that it should have had a Christmas release date instead.


title: Gremlins

text: In addition to this, there were also complaints from audiences about the violence depicted in the film. These complaints were particularly present in people who had brought their children to see the film, many of whom walked out of the theater before the film had ended. Dante admitted to reporters later that "the idea of taking a 4-year-old to see "Gremlins", thinking it's going to be a cuddly, funny animal movie and then seeing that it turns into a horror picture, I think people were upset... They felt like they had been sold something family friendly and it wasn't entirely family friendly".


title: Gremlins

text: The film became available to audiences again when it was brought back to theaters on August 30, 1985. This additional release brought its gross up to $153,083,102.


title: Gremlins

text: By February 1985, the film had grossed $59.6 million internationally, including $17 million in Japan. It grossed a further $0.2 million in 2019, taking its worldwide gross to over $212.9 million.


title: Gremlins

text: Roger Ebert approved of the film, awarding three out of four stars and declaring it to not only be "fun", but also a "sly series of send-ups", effectively parodying many elemental film storylines. In his opinion, "Gremlins" did this partly through depictions of mysterious worlds (the shop in Chinatown) and tyrannical elderly women (Mrs. Deagle). Ebert also believed the rule in which a "mogwai" cannot eat after midnight was inspired by fairy tales, and that the final scenes parody classic horror films. He connected Kate's speech about her father with "the great tradition of 1950s sick jokes". Gene Siskel gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars, describing it as "a wickedly funny and slightly sick ride," and "a most original work. We're aware at every moment that someone is trying to entertain us. Playfulness abounds." Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" was mixed, writing that the film "is far more interested in showing off its knowledge of movie lore and making random jokes than in providing consistent entertainment. Unfortunately, it's funniest when being most nasty." "Variety" declared, "Make room for adorable 'Gremlins' dolls on the shelves and start counting the take for another calculated audience pleaser from the Steven Spielberg-Frank Marshall-Kathleen Kennedy team. But that's all that's here in this showy display of technical talent, otherwise nearly heedless of dramatic concerns." Leonard Maltin disapproved of the film, and his view was made clear in remarks he made on the television show "Entertainment Tonight". He called the film "icky" and "gross". He later wrote that despite being set in a "picture-postcard town" and blending the feel of "It's a Wonderful Life" (a clip of which appears in "Gremlins") with that of "The Blob", the film is "negated by too-vivid violence and mayhem"; giving the film two out of four stars. Maltin later made a cameo appearance in "Gremlins 2", repeating his criticisms of the original on film, as an in-joke, before being throttled by the creatures; he later gave the second film a more positive rating, three out of four stars.


title: Gremlins

text: While some critics criticized the film's depictions of violence and greed—such as death scenes, Kate's speech, and the gremlins' gluttony—for lacking comic value, scholar Charlotte Miller instead interpreted these as a satire of "some characteristics of Western civilization", suggesting that Westerners may take too much satisfaction from violence. "Gremlins" can also be interpreted as a statement against technology, in that some characters, such as Billy's father, are overly dependent on it. In contrast, Mr. Wing is shown to have a strong distaste for television. Kirkpatrick Sale also interpreted "Gremlins" as an anti-technology film in his book "Rebels Against the Future". Another scholar suggested that the film is meant to express a number of observations of society by having the gremlin characters shift in what they are meant to represent. At different times, they are depicted as teenagers, the wealthy establishment, or fans of Disney films.


title: Gremlins

text: Another scholar drew a connection between the microwave scene and urban legends about pets dying in microwave ovens. He described the portrayal of this urban legend in the film as successful, but that meant it seemed terrible. This is indeed a scene that is thought of as being one of the film's most violent depictions; with even Roger Ebert expressing some fear in his review that the film might encourage children to try similar things with their pets.


title: Gremlins

text: Colin Greenland reviewed "Gremlins" for "Imagine" magazine, and stated that "Two or three good jokes, three or four neat scenes, lots of detail, but overall a manic melee of pyrotechnics that made random grabs for my sympathy and failed to hold my attention, A bit more coherent thought, and who knows, it might have been something good."


title: Gremlins

text: "Gremlins" has been criticized for more than its depictions of violence. One BBC critic wrote in 2000 that "The plot is thin and the pacing is askew". However, that critic also complimented the dark humour contrasted against the ideal Christmas setting. In 2002, another critic wrote that in hindsight, "Gremlins" has "corny special effects" and that the film will tend to appeal to children more so than to adults; he also said the acting was dull.


title: Gremlins

text: Despite the initial mixed criticism, "Gremlins" has continued to receive critical praise over the years and is considered by many as one of the best films of 1984.


title: Gremlins

text: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a "Certified Fresh" approval rating of 86% based on 76 reviews, with an average rating of 7.4/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Whether you choose to see it as a statement on consumer culture or simply a special effects-heavy popcorn flick, "Gremlins" is a minor classic." On Metacritic, the film received a score of 70 based on 13 reviews, indicatng "generally favorable reviews".


title: Gremlins

text: Warner Home Video released "Gremlins" on VHS, CED Videodisc, and Beta in 1985. "Gremlins" made $79,500,000 in video rental stores. The film was released on DVD in 1997 in a bare bones presentation. It included both full screen and widescreen versions and the film's trailer. It was repackaged in 1999 with the same disc, but a different cover. On August 20, 2002, a "special edition" DVD was released, which featured cast and filmmakers' commentary and deleted scenes. A 25th anniversary Blu-ray edition was released on December 1, 2009. The film was again released on home video in 4K Ultra HD on October 1, 2019.


title: Gremlins

text: Since its release, the film has been criticized as being culturally insensitive. Jonathan Rosenbaum argued that the film compares gremlins to African Americans.


title: Gremlins

text: In "Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies", Patricia Turner writes that the gremlins "reflect negative African-American stereotypes" in their dress and behavior. They are shown "devouring fried chicken with their hands", listening to black music, breakdancing, and wearing sunglasses after dark and newsboy caps, a style common among African American males in the 1980s. She argues that the choice of the film's only African-American character, Roy, as the first victim suggests that his "punishment may be for pursuing a place in a predominantly white society". Turner groups "Gremlins" together with "Little Shop of Horrors" as films that show fears of African-Americans "without realizing it", although she credits the film with containing "a rather charming love story".


title: Gremlins

text: Turner also claims that the origin of the gremlins with a Chinese character suggests that "no one in the dominant culture is to blame for the havoc wrecked ["sic"] by the unruly aliens".


title: Gremlins

text: With its commercial themes, particularly the cuteness of the character Gizmo, "Gremlins" became the center of considerable merchandising. Due to this, it became part of a rising trend in film, which had received a boost from Spielberg's "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial". Manufacturers including LJN produced versions of Gizmo as dolls or stuffed animals, the latter of which became a popular high demand toy during the holiday season of 1984. Both Gizmo and the gremlins were mass-produced as action figures, and Topps printed trading cards based upon the film.


title: Gremlins

text: A product placement deal with fast food chain Hardee's also led to a series of five book-and-cassette/45 records adaptations of the film's story. Starting in the early 2000s, companies such as Jun Planning and the National Entertainment Collectibles Association produced all-new Gremlins toys and collectibles. In 2017 Trick or Treat Studios began producing official Gremlins life-size puppets of Stripe and Gizmo. In May 2019, NECA unveiled their Christmas 2019 collectible, which features two Gremlins singing carols.


title: Gremlins

text: The screenplay was adapted into a novelization by George Gipe, published by Avon Books in June 1984. The novel offered an origin for "mogwai" and gremlins as a prologue. Supposedly, "mogwai" were created as gentle, contemplative creatures by a scientist on an alien world. However, it was discovered their physiology was unstable. The end result was only 1 in 10,000 "mogwai" would retain their sweet, loving demeanor. The rest would change into creatures the novel referred to as "mischievous". The minority "mogwai" (the 1 in 10,000) are immortal by human standards, though Gizmo explains to Stripe if he were to undergo the transformation himself, he would become like the others, "short lived and violent." This origin is unique to the novel but is referred to in the novelization of "Gremlins 2" by David Bischoff. No definitive origin for "mogwai" or gremlins is given in either "Gremlins" film. The novelization contains a subplot that was cut from the original film, where the National Guard plans to neutralize the gremlins with fire hoses.


title: Gremlins

text: Several officially licensed video games based on the film have been produced. One of the first was "Gremlins", released by Atari, Inc. for their 2600 console.


title: Gremlins

text: Atari, Inc. released a completely different (and more technically advanced) game—also called "Gremlins"—for the Atari 5200 console and the Apple II, Commodore 64, and IBM PC computers. Although the Atari 5200 version went to manufacturing in 1984, the turmoil surrounding Jack Tramiel's takeover of Atari's consumer business resulted in it not being released until 1986.


title: Gremlins

text: In the 2000s, more games were released; "Gremlins: Unleashed!" was released on Game Boy Color in 2001. The game was about Gizmo trying to catch Stripe and thirty other gremlins, while the gremlins also try to turn Gizmo into a gremlin. Both Gizmo and Stripe are playable characters in the game.


title: Gremlins

text: A Gremlins Team Pack was released for "Lego Dimensions" on November 18, 2016. The pack includes minifigures of Gizmo and Stripe, a constructible polaroid camera and RC car, and grants access to an Adventure World and Battle Arena based on the film. Howie Mandel and Frank Welker reprise their respective roles as Gizmo and Stripe, while Phoebe Cates, Hoyt Axton and Frances Lee McCain reprise as non-playable characters Kate Beringer, Randall Peltzer and Lynn Peltzer respectively.


title: Gremlins

text: At the time of the film's release, an interactive fiction game based on scenes from the film, entitled "Gremlins: The Adventure" (1985), was released for various home computers, including the Acorn Electron, the BBC Micro, the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spectrum. The game was written by Brian Howarth for Adventure Soft and was text-based, with full-color illustrations on some formats.


title: Gremlins

text: In addition to this, "Gremlins" brand breakfast cereal was produced by Ralston concurrent to and for a few years after the first film was released in 1984. The front of the cereal box featured Gizmo, and inside were decals of the malevolent gremlins, including Stripe.


title: Gremlins

text: The film not only spawned the sequel, "", and an advertisement for British Telecom, but is believed to have been the inspiration for several unrelated films about small monsters. These include "Ghoulies","Critters (film series)", "Troll", "Hobgoblins", and "Munchies".


title: Gremlins

text: In music, the Scottish post-rock band Mogwai are named after the film's creatures: as for the reason why the band chose this as their name, their guitarist, Stuart Braithwaite, has stated that "it has no significant meaning and we always intended on getting a better one, but like a lot of other things we never got round to it". Welsh singer and songwriter Rod Thomas performs under the name Bright Light Bright Light, which is a direct quote from the film.


title: Gremlins

text: In January 2013, Vulture reported that Warner Bros. was negotiating with Amblin Entertainment to reboot the "Gremlins" franchise. Seth Grahame-Smith was tapped to produce, alongside David Katzenberg. In January 2015, Grahame-Smith stated that the project has been put on hold. In November 2015, Zach Galligan confirmed that the third film will be a sequel and not a reboot.


title: Gremlins

text: In a December 2016 interview with "Bleeding Cool", Galligan again spoke about a third film saying that "Warner Bros. definitely wants it, Chris Columbus wants to do it because he’d like to undo the "Gremlins 2" thing as he wasn’t thrilled with it, and Spielberg wants to." He claimed "Gremlins 3" is being written by Carl Ellsworth. In an interview with /Film in 2017, a script was written by Chris Columbus. His script explored the idea that has been on the fan's mind for a long time: "if all the gremlins come from getting Gizmo wet and feeding his mogwai offspring after midnight, should Gizmo be eliminated?" He described his script as "twisted and dark".


title: Gremlins

text: In November 18, 2016, both Gizmo and Stripe made their appearance in Lego Dimensions as playable characters in their own Team Pack. Many of the other in-game playable characters, such as Supergirl, hint not to give gremlins water or light. Gizmo and Stripe also each have their own unique abilities and vehicles; Gizmo has the RC Car and Stripe gets the Flash 'n' Finish.


title: Gremlins

text: In 2017, gremlins were featured in the animated film "The Lego Batman Movie", with director Chris McKay explaining he loved the characters. The gremlins were among numerous villains from outside of the "Batman" franchise playing a role in the film, with many of the added antagonists owned by Warner Bros.


title: Gremlins

text: In 2019, Warner Bros. successfully gained registered trademark of the name and the franchise. That same year, the studio's parent company WarnerMedia greenlit an animated series, "" based on the property for its streaming service, HBO Max.


title: Gremlins

text: Also in 2021, a trio of Gremlins including Stripe appear in "". They were shown running towards the sight of the basketball game between the Tune Squad and the Goon Squad and can be seen cheering from on top of the blue Bronto-Crane from "The Flintstones".


title: Gremlins

text: In response to some of the more violent sequences in the film, and with similar complaints about "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom", Spielberg suggested that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) alter its rating system by introducing an intermediary between the PG and R ratings. The MPAA concurred, and a new PG-13 rating was introduced within two months after the film's release.


title: Eredivisie

text: The Eredivisie (; ""Honour Division"" or ""Premier Division"") is the highest level of professional football in the Netherlands. The league was founded in 1956, two years after the start of professional football in the Netherlands. It is considered one of the best European leagues. As of the 2020–21 season, it is ranked the sixth-best league in Europe by UEFA.


title: Eredivisie

text: The Eredivisie consists of 18 clubs. Each club meets every other club twice during the season, once at home and once away. At the end of each season, the two clubs at the bottom are relegated to the second level of the Dutch league system, the (First Division), while the champion and runner-up of the are automatically promoted to the Eredivisie. The club finishing third from the bottom of the Eredivisie goes to separate promotion/relegation play-offs with six high-placed clubs from the .


title: Eredivisie

text: The winner of the Eredivisie claims the Dutch national championship. Ajax have won the most titles with 36. PSV Eindhoven are next with 24, and Feyenoord follow with 15. Since 1965, these three clubs have won all but three Eredivisie titles (the 1981 and 2009 titles went to AZ and FC Twente won in 2010). Ajax, PSV, and Feyenoord are known as the "Big Three" or "Traditional Top Three" of Dutch football. They are the only clubs in their current form to have never been relegated out of the Eredivisie. A fourth club, FC Utrecht, is the product of a 1970 merger between three of that city's clubs, one of which, VV DOS, had also never been relegated out of the Eredivisie.


title: Eredivisie

text: From 1990 to 1999, the official name of the league was PTT Telecompetitie (after the sponsor, PTT Telecom), which was changed to KPN Telecompetitie (because PTT Telecom changed its name to KPN Telecom) in 1999 and to KPN Eredivisie in 2000. From 2002 to 2005, the league was called the Holland Casino Eredivisie. Since the 2005–06 season, the league has been sponsored by the "Sponsorloterij" (lottery), but for legal reasons its name could not be attached to the league (the Dutch government was against the name, because the Eredivisie would, after Holland Casino's sponsorship, yet again be sponsored by a company providing games of chance).


title: Eredivisie

text: On 8 August 2012, it was made public that tycoon Rupert Murdoch had secured the rights to the Eredivisie for 12 years at the expense of 1 billion euros, beginning in the 2013–14 season. Within this deal, the five largest Eredivisie clubs are to receive 5 million euros per year. In 2020, the Eredivisie was abandoned due to the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Eredivisie

text: From the foundation of the Dutch national football championship in 1898 until 1954, the title was decided through play-offs by a handful of clubs who had previously won their regional league. The competition was purely an amateur one; the Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB) rejected any form of payment and suspended players who were caught receiving salary or transfer fees. The call for professional football grew in the early fifties after many national team members left to play abroad in search for financial benefits. The KNVB would usually suspend these players, preventing them from appearing for the Dutch national team. After the North Sea flood of 1953, the Dutch players abroad (mainly playing in the French league) organised a charity match against the French national team in Paris. The match was boycotted by the KNVB, but after the assembled Dutch players defeated the French (2–1), the Dutch public witnessed the heights that could be achieved through professional football. To serve the growing interest, a dissident professional football association (the NBVB) and league were founded for the 1954–55 season. On 3 July 1954, the KNVB met with a group of concerned amateur club chairmen, who feared the best players would join the professional teams. The meeting, dubbed the "slaapkamerconferentie" ('bedroom conference'), led to the Association reluctantly accepting semi-professionalism.


title: Eredivisie

text: Meanwhile, both the KNVB and the NBVB started their separate competition. The first professional football match was contested between Alkmaar and Venlo. The leagues went on for eleven rounds, before a merger was negotiated between the two federations in November. Both leagues were cancelled and a new, combined competition emerged immediately. De Graafschap, Amsterdam, Alkmaar and Fortuna '54 from the NBVB were accepted to the new league. Other clubs merged, which led to new names like Rapid J.C., Holland Sport and Roda Sport. The first (semi-)professional league was won by Willem II. For the 1956–57 season, the KNVB abandoned the regional league system. The Eredivisie was founded, in which the eighteen best clubs nationwide directly played for the league title without play-offs. The inaugural members of the Eredivisie in 1956 were Ajax, BVC, BVV, DOS, EVV, Elinkwijk, SC Enschede, Feijenoord, Fortuna '54, GVAV, MVV, NAC, NOAD, PSV, Rapid J.C., Sparta, VVV '03 and Willem II. Ajax was the first team to claim the title that season. Below is a complete record of how many teams played in each season throughout the league's history;


title: Eredivisie

text: Since the beginning of the league, there have been three clubs with an attendance much higher than the others: Ajax, PSV and Feyenoord. Clubs like Heerenveen, FC Utrecht and FC Groningen also have fairly large fanbases. The regular season average league attendance was just over 7,000 in 1990, but this figure has risen sharply over the years thanks to the opening of new stadiums and the expansion of existing ones nationwide. Average attendance for the 2018–19 season was 18,010, with Ajax having the largest (52,987) and Excelsior having the smallest (4,223). Ajax's figures however differ from those provided by the Johan Cruyff Arena since the club counts all tickets sold instead of the number of people going through the turnstiles.


title: Eredivisie

text: The UEFA Super Cup was founded by a Dutch reporter named Anton Witkamp and Ajax's 1973 win was the first time the tournament was contested officially.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (; ; 27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) was a German philosopher. He is one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. His influence extends across the entire range of contemporary philosophical topics, from metaphysical issues in epistemology and ontology, to political philosophy, the philosophy of history, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Born in 1770 in Stuttgart during the transitional period between the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement in the Germanic regions of Europe, Hegel lived through and was influenced by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. His fame rests chiefly upon "The Phenomenology of Spirit", "The Science of Logic", and his lectures at the University of Berlin on topics from his "Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences".


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Throughout his work, Hegel strove to address and correct the problematic dualisms of modern philosophy, Kantian and otherwise, typically by drawing upon the resources of ancient philosophy, particularly Aristotle. Hegel everywhere insists that reason and freedom are historical achievements, not natural givens. His dialectical-speculative procedure is grounded in the principle of immanence, that is, in assessing claims always according to their own internal criteria. Taking skepticism seriously, he contends that we cannot presume any truths that have not passed the test of experience.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Guided by the Delphic imperative to "know thyself," Hegel presents free self-determination as the essence of humanity—a conclusion from his 1806-07 "Phenomenology" that he claims is further verified by the systematic account of the interdependence of logic, nature, and spirit in his later "Encyclopedia". It is his claim that the "Logic" at once preserves and overcomes the dualisms of the material and the mental – that is, that it accounts for both the continuity and difference marking of the domains of nature and culture – as a metaphysically necessary and coherent "identity of identity and non-identity."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel's thought continues to exercise enormous influence – both positive and negative, direct and indirect – across a wide variety of traditions in Western philosophy.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel was born on 27 August 1770 in Stuttgart, capital of the Duchy of Württemberg in southwestern Germany. Christened Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, he was known as Wilhelm to his close family. His father, Georg Ludwig, was secretary to the revenue office at the court of Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg. Hegel's mother, Maria Magdalena Louisa (née Fromm), was the daughter of a lawyer at the High Court of Justice at the Württemberg court. She died of bilious fever when Hegel was thirteen. Hegel and his father also caught the disease, but they narrowly survived. Hegel had a sister, Christiane Luise (1773–1832); and a brother, Georg Ludwig (1776–1812), who perished as an officer during Napoleon's 1812 Russian campaign. At the age of three, Hegel went to the German School. When he entered the Latin School two years later, he already knew the first declension, having been taught it by his mother. In 1776, he entered Stuttgart's "Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium" and during his adolescence read voraciously, copying lengthy extracts in his diary. Authors he read include the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and writers associated with the Enlightenment, such as Christian Garve and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. In 1844, Hegel's first biographer, Karl Rosenkranz described the young Hegel's education there by saying that it "belonged entirely to the Enlightenment with respect to principle, and entirely to classical antiquity with respect to curriculum." His studies at the "Gymnasium" concluded with his graduation speech, "The abortive state of art and scholarship in Turkey."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: At the age of eighteen, Hegel entered the Tübinger Stift, a Protestant seminary attached to the University of Tübingen, where he had as roommates the poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin and the future philosopher Friedrich Schelling. Sharing a dislike for what they regarded as the restrictive environment of the Seminary, the three became close friends and mutually influenced each other's ideas. (It is mostly likely that Hegel attended the "Stift" because it was state-funded, for he had "a profound distaste for the study of orthodox theology" and never wanted to become a minister.) All three greatly admired Hellenic civilization, and Hegel additionally steeped himself in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Lessing during this time. They watched the unfolding of the French Revolution with shared enthusiasm. Although the violence of the 1793 Reign of Terror dampened Hegel's hopes, he continued to identify with the moderate Girondin faction and never lost his commitment to the principles of 1789, which he expressed by drinking a toast to the storming of the Bastille every fourteenth of July. Schelling and Hölderlin immersed themselves in theoretical debates on Kantian philosophy, from which Hegel remained aloof. Hegel, at this time, envisaged his future as that of a "Popularphilosoph", (a "man of letters") who serves to make the abstruse ideas of philosophers accessible to a wider public; his own felt need to engage critically with the central ideas of Kantianism would not come until 1800.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Having received his theological certificate from the Tübingen Seminary, Hegel became "Hofmeister" (house tutor) to an aristocratic family in Berne (1793–1796). During this period, he composed the text which has become known as the "Life of Jesus" and a book-length manuscript titled "The Positivity of the Christian Religion." His relations with his employers becoming strained, Hegel accepted an offer mediated by Hölderlin to take up a similar position with a wine merchant's family in Frankfurt in 1797. There, Hölderlin exerted an important influence on Hegel's thought. In Berne, Hegel's writings had been sharply critical of orthodox Christianity, but in Frankfurt, under the influence of early Romanticism, he underwent a sort of reversal, exploring, in particular, the mystical experience of love as the true essence of religion. Also in 1797, the unpublished and unsigned manuscript of "The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism" was written. It was written in Hegel's hand, but may have been authored by Hegel, Schelling, or Hölderlin. While in Frankfurt, Hegel composed the essay "Fragments on Religion and Love." In 1799, he wrote another essay entitled "The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate", unpublished during his lifetime.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: In 1801, Hegel came to Jena at the encouragement of Schelling, who held the position of Extraordinary Professor at the University of Jena. Hegel secured a position at the University of Jena as a "Privatdozent" (unsalaried lecturer) after submitting the inaugural dissertation "De Orbitis Planetarum", in which he briefly criticized mathematical arguments that assert that there must exist a planet between Mars and Jupiter. Later in the year, Hegel's first book "The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy" was completed. He lectured on "Logic and Metaphysics" and gave lectures with Schelling on an "Introduction to the Idea and Limits of True Philosophy" and facilitated a "philosophical disputorium." In 1802, Schelling and Hegel founded the journal "Kritische Journal der Philosophie" ("Critical Journal of Philosophy") to which they contributed until the collaboration ended when Schelling left for Würzburg in 1803. In 1805, the university promoted Hegel to the unsalaried position of Extraordinary Professor after he wrote a letter to the poet and minister of culture Johann Wolfgang Goethe protesting the promotion of his philosophical adversary Jakob Friedrich Fries ahead of him. Hegel attempted to enlist the help of the poet and translator Johann Heinrich Voß to obtain a post at the renascent University of Heidelberg, but he failed. To his chagrin, Fries was, in the same year, made Ordinary Professor (salaried). The following February marked the birth of Hegel's illegitimate son, Georg Ludwig Friedrich Fischer (1807–1831), as the result of an affair with Hegel's landlady Christiana Burkhardt née Fischer. With his finances drying up quickly, Hegel was under great pressure to deliver his book, the long-promised introduction to his philosophical system. Hegel was putting the finishing touches to it, "The Phenomenology of Spirit", as Napoleon engaged Prussian troops on 14 October 1806 in the Battle of Jena on a plateau outside the city. On the day before the battle, Napoleon entered the city of Jena. Hegel recounted his impressions in a letter to his friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer:


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: I saw the Emperor—this world-soul ["Weltseele"]—riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel's biographer Terry Pinkard notes that Hegel's comment to Niethammer "is all the more striking since he had already composed the crucial section of the "Phenomenology" in which he remarked that the Revolution had now officially passed to another land (Germany) that would complete 'in thought' what the Revolution had only partially accomplished in practice." Although Napoleon had spared the University of Jena from much of the destruction of the surrounding city, few students returned after the battle and enrollment suffered, making Hegel's financial prospects even worse. Hegel traveled in the winter to Bamberg and stayed with Niethammer to oversee the proofs of the "Phenomenology", which was being printed there. Although Hegel tried to obtain another professorship, even writing Goethe in an attempt to help secure a permanent position replacing a professor of Botany, he was unable to find a permanent position. In 1807, he had to move to Bamberg since his savings and the payment from the "Phenomenology" were exhausted and he needed money to support his illegitimate son Ludwig. There, he became the editor of the local newspaper, ", a position he obtained with the help of Niethammer. Ludwig Fischer and his mother stayed behind in Jena.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: In Bamberg, as editor of the ", which was a pro-French newspaper, Hegel extolled the virtues of Napoleon and often editorialized the Prussian accounts of the war. Being the editor of a local newspaper, Hegel also became an important person in Bamberg social life, often visiting with the local official , and becoming involved in local gossip and pursued his passions for cards, fine eating, and the local Bamberg beer. However, Hegel bore contempt for what he saw as "old Bavaria", frequently referring to it as "Barbaria" and dreaded that "hometowns" like Bamberg would lose their autonomy under new the Bavarian state. After being investigated in September 1808 by the Bavarian state for potentially violating security measures by publishing French troop movements, Hegel wrote to Niethammer, now a high official in Munich, pleading for Niethammer's help in securing a teaching position. With the help of Niethammer, Hegel was appointed headmaster of a "gymnasium" in Nuremberg in November 1808, a post he held until 1816. While in Nuremberg, Hegel adapted his recently published "Phenomenology of Spirit" for use in the classroom. Part of his remit was to teach a class called "Introduction to Knowledge of the Universal Coherence of the Sciences." In 1811, Hegel married Marie Helena Susanna von Tucher (1791–1855), the eldest daughter of a Senator. This period saw the publication of his second major work, the "Science of Logic" ("Wissenschaft der Logik"; 3 vols., 1812, 1813 and 1816), and the birth of two sons, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm (1813–1901) and Immanuel Thomas Christian (1814–1891).


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Having received offers of a post from the Universities of Erlangen, Berlin and Heidelberg, Hegel chose Heidelberg, where he moved in 1816. Soon after, his illegitimate son Ludwig Fischer (now ten years old) joined the Hegel household in April 1817, having spent time in an orphanage after the death of his mother Christiana Burkhardt. In 1817, Hegel published "The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline" as a summary of his philosophy for students attending his lectures at Heidelberg. It is also while in Heidelberg that Hegel first lectured on the philosophy of art. In 1818, Hegel accepted the renewed offer of the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, which had remained vacant since Johann Gottlieb Fichte's death in 1814. Here, Hegel published his "Philosophy of Right" (1821). Hegel devoted himself primarily to delivering lectures; his lectures on the philosophy of fine art, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of history, and the history of philosophy were published posthumously from students' notes. In spite of his notoriously terrible delivery, his fame spread and his lectures attracted students from all over Germany and beyond. Meanwhile, Hegel and his pupils, such as Leopold von Henning, Friedrich Wilhelm Carové, were harassed and put under the surveillance of Prince Sayn-Wittgenstein, the interior minister of Prussia and his reactionary circles in the Prussian court. In the remainder of his career, he made two trips to Weimar, where he met Goethe, and to Brussels, the Northern Netherlands, Leipzig, Vienna, Prague, and Paris.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: During the last ten years of his life, Hegel did not publish another book but thoroughly revised the "Encyclopedia" (second edition, 1827; third, 1830). In his political philosophy, he criticized Karl Ludwig von Haller's reactionary work, which claimed that laws were not necessary. A number of other works on the philosophy of history, religion, aesthetics and the history of philosophy were compiled from the lecture notes of his students and published posthumously.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel was appointed University Rector of the university in October 1829, but his term ended in September 1830. Hegel was deeply disturbed by the riots for reform in Berlin in that year. In 1831 Frederick William III decorated him with the Order of the Red Eagle, 3rd Class for his service to the Prussian state. In August 1831, a cholera epidemic reached Berlin and Hegel left the city, taking up lodgings in Kreuzberg. Now in a weak state of health, Hegel seldom went out. As the new semester began in October, Hegel returned to Berlin in the mistaken belief that the epidemic had largely subsided. By 14 November, Hegel was dead. The physicians pronounced the cause of death as cholera, but it is likely he died from another gastrointestinal disease. His last words are said to have been, "There was only one man who ever understood me, and even he didn't understand me." He was buried on 16 November. In accordance with his wishes, Hegel was buried in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery next to Fichte and Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel's illegitimate son, Ludwig Fischer, had died shortly before while serving with the Dutch army in Batavia and the news of his death never reached his father. Early the following year, Hegel's sister Christiane committed suicide by drowning. Hegel's remaining two sons—Karl, who became a historian; and , who followed a theological path—lived long and safeguarded their father's manuscripts and letters, and produced editions of his works.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: As H. S. Harris recounts, when Hegel entered the Tübingen seminary in 1788, "he was a typical product of the German Enlightenment – an enthusiastic reader of Rousseau and Lessing, acquainted with Kant (at least at second hand), but perhaps more deeply devoted to the classics than to any thing modern." During this early period of his life "the Greeks – especially Plato – came first." Although he later elevated Aristotle above Plato, Hegel never abandoned his love of ancient philosophy, the imprint of which is everywhere in his thought.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel's concern with various forms of cultural unity (Judaic, Greek, medieval, and modern) during this early period would remain with him throughout his career. In this way, he was also a typical product of early German romanticism. "Unity of life" was the phrase used by Hegel and his generation to express their concept of the highest good. It encompasses unity "with oneself, with others, and with nature. The main threat to such unity consists in division ("Entzweiung") or alienation ("Entfremdung")."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: In this respect, Hegel was particularly taken with the phenomenon of "love" as a kind of "unity-in-difference," this both in the ancient articulation provided by Plato and in the Christian religion's doctrine of "agape", which Hegel at this time viewed as "already 'grounded on universal Reason. This interest, as well as his theological training, would continue to mark his thought, even as it developed in a more theoretical or metaphysical direction.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Although it is often unacknowledged in the philosophical literature, Hegel's thought (in particular, the tripartite structure of his system) also owes much to the hermetic tradition, in particular, the work of Jakob Böhme. The conviction that philosophy must take the form of a system Hegel owed, most particularly, to his Tübingen roommates, Schelling and Hölderlin.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel also read widely and was much influenced by Adam Smith and other theorists of the political economy.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: It was Kant's Critical Philosophy that provided what Hegel took as the definitive modern articulation of the divisions that must be overcome. This led to his engagement with the philosophical programs of Fichte and Schelling, as well as his attention to Spinoza and the Pantheism controversy. The influence of Johann Gottfried von Herder, however, would lead Hegel to a qualified rejection of the universality claimed by the Kantian program in favor of a more culturally, linguistically, and historically informed account of reason.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel's philosophical system is divided into three parts: the science of logic, the philosophy of nature, and the philosophy of spirit (the latter two of which together constitute the real philosophy). This structure is adopted from Proclus's Neoplatonic triad of remaining-procession-return' and from the Christian Trinity." Although evident in draft writings dating back as early as 1805, the system was not completed in published form until the 1817 "Encyclopedia" (1st ed.).


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Frederick C. Beiser argues that the position of the logic with respect to the real philosophy is best understood in terms of Hegel's appropriation of Aristotle's distinction between "the order of explanation" and "the order of being." To Beiser, Hegel is neither a Platonist who believes in abstract logical entities, nor a nominalist according to whom the particular is first in the orders of explanation and being alike. To Beiser, Hegel is a holist. For Hegel, the universal is always first in the order of explanation even if what is naturally particular is first in the order of being. With respect to the system as a whole, that universal is supplied by the logic, according to Beiser.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Michael J. Inwood plainly states, "The logical idea is non-temporal and therefore does not exist at any time apart from its manifestations." To ask 'when' it divides into nature and spirit is analogous to asking 'when' 12 divides into 5 and 7. The question does not have an answer because it is predicated upon a fundamental misunderstanding its terms. The task of the logic (at this high systemic level) is to articulate what Hegel calls "the identity of identity and non-identity" of nature and spirit. Put another way, it aims to overcome subject-object dualism. This is to say that, among other things, Hegel's philosophical project endeavors to provide the metaphysical basis for an account of spirit that is continuous with, yet distinct from, the 'merely' natural world—without thereby reducing either term to the other.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Furthermore, the final sections of Hegel's "Encyclopedia" suggest that to give priority to any one of its three parts is to have an interpretation that is "one-sided," incomplete or otherwise inaccurate. As Hegel famously declares, "The true is the whole."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: "The Phenomenology of Spirit", published in 1807, is Hegel's first book. This is also the first time that, at the age of thirty-six, he lays out "his own distinctive approach" and adopts an "outlook that is recognizably 'Hegelian' to the philosophical problems of post-Kantian philosophy. Yet Hegel's book was poorly understood even by his contemporaries and received mostly negative reviews. To this day, the "Phenomenology" is infamous for, among other things, its conceptual and allusive density, idiosyncratic terminology, and confusing transitions. Its most comprehensive commentary, scholar H. S. Harris’s two-volume "Hegel's Ladder" ("The Pilgrimage of Reason" and "The Odyssey of Spirit"), runs more than three times the length of the text itself.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: The fourth chapter of the "Phenomenology" includes Hegel's first presentation of the lord-bondsman dialectic, the section of the book that has been most influential in general culture. What is at stake in the conflict Hegel presents is the practical (not theoretical) recognition or acknowledgement ["Anerkennug", "anerkennen"] of the universality—e.g., personhood, humanity—of each of two opposed self-consciousnesses. What the readers learn, but what the self-consciousnesses described do not yet realize, is that recognition can only be successful and actual as reciprocal or mutual. This the case for the simple reason that the recognition of someone you do not recognize as properly human cannot count as genuine recognition.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel describes "The Phenomenology" as both the "introduction" to his philosophical system and also as the "first part" of that system as the "science of the experience of consciousness." Yet it has long been controversial in both respects; indeed, Hegel's own attitude changed throughout his life.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Nevertheless, however complicated the details, the basic strategy by which it attempts to make good on its introductory claim is not difficult to state. Beginning with only the most basic "certainties of consciousness itself," "the most immediate of which is the certainty that "I" am conscious of "this" object, "here" and "now"," Hegel aims to show that these "certainties of natural consciousness" have as their consequence the standpoint of speculative logic.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: This does not, however, make the "Phenomenology" a "Bildungsroman". It is not the consciousness under observation that learns from its experience. Only "we," the phenomenological observers, are in a position to profit from Hegel's logical reconstrution of the science of experience.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: The ensuing dialectic is long and hard. It is described by Hegel himself as a "path of despair," in which self-consciousness finds itself to be, over and again, in error. It is the self-concept of consciousness itself that is tested in the domain of experience, and where that concept is not adequate, self-consciousness "suffers this violence at its own hands, and brings to ruin its own restricted satisfaction." For, as Hegel points out, one cannot learn how to swim without getting into the water. By progressively testing its concept of knowledge in this way, by "making experience his standard of knowledge, Hegel was embarking upon nothing less than a "transcendental deduction" of metaphysics."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: In the course of its dialectic, the "Phenomenology" purports to demonstrate that – because consciousness always includes self-consciousness – there are no 'given' objects of direct awareness not already mediated by thought. Further analysis of the structure of self-consciousness reveals that both the social and conceptual stability of our experiential world depend upon networks of reciprocal recognition. Failures of recognition, then, demand reflection upon the past as a way "to understand what is required of us at the present." For Hegel, this ultimately involves rethinking an interpretation of "religion as the collective reflection of the modern community on what ultimately counts for it." He contends, finally, that this "historically, socially construed philosophical account of that whole process" elucidates our distinctly "modern" standpoint and its genesis.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Another way of putting this is to say that the "Phenomenology" takes up Kant's philosophical project of investigating the capacities and limits of reason. Under the influence of Herder, however, Hegel proceeds historically, instead of altogether "a priori". Yet, although proceeding historically, Hegel resists the relativistic consequences of Herder's own thought. In the words of one scholar, "It is Hegel’s insight that reason itself has a history, that what counts as reason is the result of a development. This is something that Kant never imagines and that Herder only glimpses."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: In praise of Hegel's accomplishment, Walter Kaufmann writes that the guiding conviction of the "Phenomenology" is that a philosopher should not "confine him or herself to views that have been held but penetrate these to the human reality they reflect." In other words, it is not enough to consider propositions, or even the content of consciousness; "it is worthwhile to ask in every instance what kind of spirit would entertain such propositions, hold such views, and have such a consciousness. Every outlook in other words, is to be studied not merely as an academic possibility but as an existential reality."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: What the reader of "The Phenomenology of Spirit" learns is that the search for an externally objective criterion of truth is a fool's errand. The constraints on knowledge are necessarily internal to spirit itself. Yet, although our theories and self-conceptions may always be reevaluated, renegotiated, and revised, this is not a merely imaginative exercise. Claims to knowledge must always prove their own adequacy in real historical experience.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Although Hegel seemed during his Berlin years to have abandoned "The Phenomenology of Spirit", at the time of his unexpected death, he was in fact making plans to revise and republish it. As he was no longer in need of money or credentials, H. S. Harris argues that "the only rational conclusion that can be drawn from his decision to republish the book… is that he still regarded the 'science of experience' as a valid project in itself" and one for which later system has no equivalent. There is, however, no scholarly consensus about the "Phenomenology" with respect to either of the systematic roles asserted by Hegel at the time of its publication.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel's concept of logic differs greatly from that of the ordinary English sense of the term. This can be seen, for instance, in such metaphysical definitions of logic as "the science of "things" grasped in [the] "thoughts" that used to be taken to express the "essentialities" of the "things"." As explains, Hegel's logic is a continuation of Kant's distinctive logical program. Its occasional engagement with the familiar Aristotelian conception of logic is only incidental to Hegel's project. Twentieth-century developments by such logicians as Frege and Russell likewise remain logics of formal validity and so are likewise irrelevant to Hegel's project, which aspires to provide a metaphysical logic of truth.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: There are two versions of Hegel's "Logic". The first, "The Science of Logic" (1812, 1813, 1816; bk.I revised 1831), is sometimes also called the "Greater Logic." The second is the first volume of Hegel's "Encyclopedia" and is sometimes known as the "Lesser Logic." The "Encyclopedia" Logic is an abbreviated or condensed presentation of the same dialectic. Hegel composed it for use with students in the lecture hall, not as a substitute for its proper, book-length exposition.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel presents logic as a presuppositionless science that investigates the most fundamental thought-determinations of categories, and so constitutes the basis of philosophy. In putting something into question, one already presupposes logic; in this regard, it is the only field of inquiry that must constantly reflect upon its own mode of functioning. "The Science of Logic" is Hegel's attempt to meet this foundational demand. As he puts it, ""logic" coincides with "metaphysics"."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: It is important to see, however, that Hegel's metaphysical program is not a return to the Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalism critiqued by Kant, which is a criticism Hegel accepts. In particular, Hegel rejects any form of metaphysics as speculation about the transcendent. His procedure, an appropriation of Aristotle's concept of substantial form, is fully immanent. More generally, Hegel agrees wholeheartedly with Kant's rejection of all forms of dogmatism and also agrees that any future metaphysics must pass the test of criticism. It is the assessment of scholar Stephen Houlgate that Hegel's method of immanent logical development and critique is historically unique.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Béatrice Longuenesse holds that this project may be understood, on analogy to Kant, as "inseparably a metaphysical and a transcendental deduction of the categories of metaphysics." This approach insists, and claims to demonstrate, that the insights of logic cannot be judged by standards external to thought itself, that is, that "thought... is not the mirror of nature." Yet, she argues, this does not imply that these standards are arbitrary or subjective. Hegel's translator and scholar of German idealism George di Giovanni likewise interprets the "Logic" in as (drawing upon, yet also in opposition to, Kant) "immanently" transcendental; its categories, according to Hegel, are built into "life itself", and define what it is to be "an object in general."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Books one and two of the "Logic" are the doctrines of "Being" and "Essence." Together they comprise the Objective Logic, which is largely occupied with overcoming the assumptions of traditional metaphysics. Book three is the final part of the "Logic". It discusses the doctrine of "the Concept," which is concerned with reintegrating those categories of objectivity into a thoroughly idealistic account of reality. Simplifying greatly, Being describes its concepts just as they appear, Essence attempts to explain them with reference to other forces, and the Concept explains and unites them both in terms of an internal teleology. The categories of Being "pass over" from one to the next as denoting thought-determinations only extrinsically connected to one another. The categories of Essence reciprocally "shine" into one another. Finally, in the Concept, thought has shown itself to be fully self-referential, and so its categories are organically "develop" from one to the next.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: It is clear then, that in Hegel's technical sense of the term, the concept ("Begriff", sometimes also rendered "notion," capitalized by some translators but not others) is not a psychological concept. When deployed with the definitive article ("the") and sometimes modified by the term "logical," Hegel is referring to the intelligible structure of reality as articulated in the Subjective Logic. (When used in the plural, however, Hegel's sense is much closer to the ordinary dictionary sense of the term.)


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel's inquiry into thought is concerned to systematize thought's own internal self-differentiation, that is, how pure concepts (logical categories) differ from one another in their various relations of implication and interdependence. For instance, in the opening dialectic of the "Logic", Hegel claims to display that the thought of ""being, pure being"—without further determination" is indistinguishable from the concept of "nothing", and that, in this "passing back and forth" of being and nothing, ""each" immediately "vanishes in its opposite."" This movement is neither one concept nor the other, but the category of "becoming". There is not a difference here to which we can "refer," only a dialectic that we can observe and describe.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: The final category of the "Logic" is "the idea." As with "the concept", the sense of this term for Hegel is not psychological. Rather, following Kant in "The Critique of Pure Reason", Hegel's usage harks back to the Greek "eidos", Plato's concept of form that is fully existent and universal: "Hegel's "Idee" (like Plato's idea) is the product of an attempt to fuse ontology, epistemology, evaluation, etc., into a single set of concepts."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: The "Logic" accommodates within itself the necessity of the realm of natural-spiritual "contingency", that which cannot be determined in advance: "To go further, it must abandon thinking altogether and let itself go, opening itself to that which is other than thought in pure receptivity." Simply put, logic realizes itself only in the domain of nature and spirit. Hence the conclusion of the "Science of Logic" with "the idea "freely discharging" [entläßt] itself" into "objectivity and external life"—and, so too, the systematic transition to the "Realphilosophie".


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: In contrast to the first, logical part of Hegel's system, the second, real-philosophical part – the Philosophy of Nature and of Spirit – is an ongoing historical project. It is, as Hegel puts it, ""its own time comprehended in thoughts"."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: A further word on the subject of "issuing instructions" on how the world ought to be: philosophy, at any rate, always comes too late to perform this function. As the "thought" of the world, it appears only at a time when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its completed state ["sich fertig gemacht"]. This lesson of the concept is necessarily also apparent from history, namely that it is only when actuality ["Wirklichkeit"] has reached maturity that the ideal appears opposite the real and reconstructs this real world, which it has grasped in its substance, in the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its gray in gray, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the gray in gray of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: This easily reads – and frequently has been read – as an expression of the impotence of philosophy, political or otherwise, and a rationalization of the status quo. Allegra de Laurentiis, however, points out that the German expression ""sich fertig machen"" does not only imply completion, but also preparedness. This additional meaning is important because it better reflects Hegel's Aristotelian concept of actuality. He characterizes actuality as being-at-work-staying-itself that can never be once-and-for-all completed or finished.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel describes the relationship between the logical and the real-philosophical parts of his system in this way: "If philosophy does not stand above its time in content, it does so in form, because, as the thought and knowledge of that which is the substantial spirit of its time, it makes that spirit its object."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: This is to say that what makes the philosophy of the real "scientific" in Hegel's technical sense is the systematically coherent logical form it uncovers in its natural-historical material—and so also displays in its presentation.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: The philosophy of nature organizes the contingent material of the natural sciences systematically. As part of the philosophy of the real, in no way does it presume to "tell nature what it must be like." Historically, various interpreters have questioned Hegel's understanding of the natural sciences of his time. However, this claim has been largely refuted by recent scholarship.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: One of the very few ways in which the philosophy of nature might correct claims made by the natural sciences themselves is to combat reductive explanations; that is to discredit accounts employing categories not adequate to the complexity of the phenomena they purport to explain, as for instance, attempting to explain life in strictly chemical terms.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Although Hegel and other "Naturphilosophen" aim to revive a teleological understanding of nature, they argue that their strictly "internal" or "immanent" concept of teleology is "limited to the ends observable within nature itself." Hence, they claim, it does not violate the Kantian critique. Even more strongly, Hegel and Schelling claim that Kant's restriction of teleology to regulative status effectively undermines his own critical project of explain the possibility of knowledge. Their argument is that "only under the assumption that "there is" an organism is it possible to explain the "actual interaction" between the subjective and the objective, the ideal and the real." Hence the organism must be acknowledged to have constitutive status.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Introducing Hegel's philosophy of nature for a 21st-century audience, observes that "contemporary philosophy of science" has lost sight of "the ontological issue at stake, namely, the question of an intrinsically lawful nature": "Consider, for example, the problem of what constitutes a law of nature. This problem is central to our understanding of nature. Yet philosophy of science has not provided a definitive response to it up to now. Nor can we expect to have such an answer from that quarter in future." It is back to Hegel that Wandschneider would direct philosophers of science for guidance in the philosophy of nature.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Recent scholars have also argued that Hegel's approach to the philosophy of nature provides valuable resources for theorizing and confronting recent environmental challenges entirely unforeseen by Hegel. These philosophers point to such aspects of his philosophy as its distinctive metaphysical grounding and the continuity of its conception of the nature-spirit relationship.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: The German "Geist" has a wide range of meanings. In its most general Hegelian sense, however, ""Geist" denotes the human mind and its products, in contrast to nature and also the logical idea." (Some older translations render it as "mind", rather than "spirit.")


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: As is especially evident in the Anthropology, Hegel's concept of spirit is an appropriation and transformation of the self-referential Aristotelian concept of "energeia". Spirit is not something above or otherwise external to nature. It is "the highest organization and development" of nature's powers.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: According to Hegel, "the "essence" of spirit is "freedom"." The "Encyclopedia" Philosophy of Spirit charts the progressively determinate stages of this freedom until spirit fulfills the Delphic imperative with which Hegel begins: ""Know thyself"."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: As becomes clear, Hegel's concept of freedom is not (or not merely) the capacity for arbitrary choice, but has as its "core notion" that "something, especially a person, is free if and only if, it is independent and self-determining, not determined by or dependent upon something other than itself." It is, in other words, (at least predominantly, dialectically) an account of what Isaiah Berlin would later term positive liberty.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Standing at the transition from nature to spirit, the role of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit is to analyze "the elements necessary for or presupposed by such relations [of objective spirit], namely, the structures characteristic of and necessary to the individual rational agent." This happens by elaborating "the fundamental nature of the biological/spiritual human individual along with the cognitive and the practical prerequisites of human social interaction."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: This section, particularly its first part, contains various comments that, although commonplace in Hegel's day, we now recognize as racist. What could be said in Hegel's defense, if one wanted to defend him, is that for him it is "climate", not "race", that is the determining factor. According to Hegel, it is not racial characteristics, but the climactic conditions in which a people lives that variously limit or enable its capacity for free self-determination. Hegel is not a "scientific" racist because he believes that race is not destiny: any group could, in principle, improve and transform its condition by migrating to friendlier climes. It is clear, however, that the implications of these remarks we now recognize as racist are not likely to be definitively resolved—or at least not anytime soon.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel divides his philosophy of the subjective spirit into three parts: anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology. Anthropology "deals with 'soul', which is spirit still mired in nature: all that within us which precedes our self-conscious mind or intellect." In the section "Phenomenology", Hegel examines the relation between consciousness and its object and the emergence of intersubjective rationality. Psychology "deals with a great deal that would be categorized as epistemology (or 'theory of knowledge') today. Hegel discusses, among other things, the nature of attention, memory, imagination and judgement."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Throughout this section, but especially in the Anthropology, Hegel appropriates and develops Aristotle's hylomorphic approach to what in modern times is theorized as the mind-body problem: "The solution to the mind–body problem [according to this theory] hinges upon recognizing that mind does not act upon the body as cause of effects but rather acts upon itself as an embodied living subjectivity. As such, mind develops itself, progressively attaining more and more of a self-determined character."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Its final section, Free Spirit, develops the concept of "free will," which is foundational for Hegel's philosophy of right.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: In the broadest terms, Hegel's philosophy of objective spirit "is his social philosophy, his philosophy of how the human spirit objectifies itself in its social and historical activities and productions." Or, put differently, it is an account of the institutionalization of freedom. Besier declares this a rare instance of unanimity in Hegel scholarship: "all scholars agree there is no more important concept in Hegel's political theory than freedom." This is because it is the foundation of right, the essence of spirit, and the "telos" of history.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: This part of Hegel's philosophy is presented first in his 1817 "Encyclopedia" (revised 1827 and 1830) and then at greater length in the 1821 "Elements of the Philosophy of Right" (like the "Encyclopedia", intended as a textbook), upon which he also frequently lectured. Its final part, the philosophy of world history, was additionally elaborated in Hegel's lectures on the subject.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel's "Elements of the Philosophy of Right" has been controversial from the date of its original publication. It is not, however, a straightforward defense of the autocratic Prussian state, as some have alleged, but is rather a defense of "Prussia as it was to have become under [proposed] reform administrations."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: The German "Recht" in Hegel's title does not have a direct English equivalent (though it does correspond to the Latin "ius" and the French "droit"). As a first approximation, Michael Inwood distinguishes three senses:


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Beiser observes that Hegel's theory is "his attempt to rehabilitate the natural law tradition while taking into account the criticisms of the historical school." He adds that "without a sound interpretation of Hegel's theory of natural law, we have very little understanding of the very foundation of his social and political thought." Consistent with Beiser's position, Adriaan T. Peperzak documents Hegel's arguments against social contract theory and stresses the metaphysical foundations of Hegel's philosophy of right.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Observing that "analyzing the structure of Hegel's argument in the "Philosophy of Right" shows that achieving political autonomy is fundamental to Hegel's analysis of the state and government," Kenneth R. Westphal provides this brief outline:


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel describes the state of his time, a constitutional monarchy, as rationally embodying three cooperative and mutually inclusive elements. These elements are "democracy (rule of the many, who are involved in legislation), aristocracy (rule of the few, who apply, concretize, and execute the laws), and monarchy (rule of the one, who heads and encompasses all power)." It is what Aristotle called a "mixed" form of government, which is designed to include what is best of each of the three classical forms. The division of powers "prevents an single power from dominating others." Hegel is particularly concerned to bind the monarch to the constitution, limiting his authority so that he can do very little more than to declare of what his ministers have already decided that it is to be so.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: The relation of Hegel's philosophy of right to modern liberalism is complex. He sees liberalism as a valuable and characteristic expression of the modern world. However, it carries the danger within itself to undermine its own values. This self-destructive tendency may be avoided by measuring "the subjective goals of individuals by a larger objective and collective good." Moral values, then, have only a "limited place in the total scheme of things." Yet, although it is not without reason that Hegel is widely regarded as a major proponent of what Isaiah Berlin would later term positive liberty, he was just as "unwavering and unequivocal" in his defense of negative liberty.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: If Hegel's ideal sovereign is much weaker than was typical in monarchies his time, so too is his democratic element much weaker than is typical in democracies of our time. Although he insists upon the importance of public participation, Hegel severely limits suffrage and follows the English bicameral model, in which only members of the lower house, that of commoners and bourgeoisie, are elected officials. Nobles in the upper house, like the monarch, inherent their positions.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: The final part of the Philosophy of Objective Spirit is entitled "World History." In this section, Hegel argues that "this immanent principle [the Stoic "logos"] produces with logical inevitability an expansion of the species' capacities for self determination ('freedom') and a deepening of its self understanding ('self-knowing')." In Hegel's own words: "World history is progress in the consciousness of freedom – a progress that we must comprehend conceptually."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: "(See also: Legacy, below, for further discussion of the complex legacy of Hegel's social and political philosophy.)"


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel's use of the term "absolute" is easily misunderstood. Inwood, however, clarifies: derived from the Latin "absolutus", it means "not dependent on, conditional on, relative to or restricted by anything else; self-contained, perfect, complete." For Hegel, this means that absolute knowing can only denote "an 'absolute relation' in which the ground of experience and the experiencing agent are one and the same: the object known is explicitly the subject who knows." That is, the only "thing" (which is really an activity) that is truly absolute is that which is entirely self-conditioned, and according to Hegel, this only occurs when spirit takes itself up as its own object. The final section of his Philosophy of Spirit presents the three modes of such absolute knowing: art, religion, and philosophy.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: It is with reference to different modalities of consciousness – intuition, representation, and comprehending thinking – that Hegel distinguishes the three modes of absolute knowing. Frederick Beiser summarizes: "art, religion and philosophy all have the same object, the absolute or truth itself; but they consist in different forms of knowledge of it. Art presents the absolute in the form of immediate intuition ("Anschauung"); religion presents it in the form of representation ("Vorstellung"); and philosophy presents it in the form of concepts ("Begriffe")."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Rüdiger Bubner additionally clarifies that the increase in conceptual transparency according to which these spheres are systematically ordered is not hierarchical in any evaluative sense.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Although Hegel's discussion of absolute spirit in the "Encyclopedia" is quite brief, he develops his account at length in lectures on the philosophy of fine art, the philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: In the "Phenomenology", and even in the 1817 edition of the "Encyclopedia", Hegel discusses art only as it figures in what he terms the "Art-Religion" of the ancient Greeks. In the 1820's, however, Hegel begins lecturing on the philosophy of art as an explicitly autonomous domain.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Although H. G. Hotho titled his edition of the Lectures "Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik" ["Lectures on Aesthetics"], Hegel directly states that his topic is not "the spacious realm of the beautiful," but "art, or, rather, fine art." He doubles down on this in the next paragraph by explicitly distinguishing his project from the broader philosophical projects pursued under the heading of "aesthetics" by Christian Wolff and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Some critics – most canonically, Benedetto Croce, in 1907 – have attributed to Hegel some form of the thesis that art is "dead." Hegel, however, never said any such thing, nor can such a view be plausibly attributed to him. Indeed, one commentator places that debate in perspective with the observation that Hegel's claim that "art no longer serves our highest aims" is "radical not for the suggestion that art now fails to do so but for the suggestion that it ever did."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel's detailed and systematic treatment of the various arts over such a great span has even led Ernst Gombrich to present Hegel as "the father of art history." Indeed, until recently, Hegel's "Lectures" were largely ignored by philosophers and received most of their attention from literary critics and art historians.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: The more narrowly conceptual project of the philosophy of art, however, is to articulate and defend "the "autonomy" of art, making possible an account of the "special individuality" distinguishing works of aesthetic worth."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: According to Hegel, artistic beauty reveals absolute truth through perception.' He holds that the best art conveys metaphysical knowledge by revealing, through sense perception, what is unconditionally true," that is, "what his metaphysical theory affirms to be unconditional or absolute." So, while Hegel "ennobles art insofar as it conveys metaphysical knowledge," "he tempers his assessment in view of his belief that art's sensory media can never adequately convey what completely transcends the contingency of sensation." This is why, according to Hegel, art can only be one of three mutually complimentary modes of absolute spirit.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Although his understanding of Christianity evolved over time, Hegel identified as a Lutheran his entire life. One constant was his profound appreciation for the Christian insight into the intrinsic worth and freedom of every individual.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel's earliest writings on Christianity date between 1783 and 1800. He was still working out his ideas at this time, and everything from this period was abandoned as fragments or unfinished drafts. Hegel was very much dissatisfied with the dogmatism and positivity of the Christian religion, to which he opposed the spontaneous religion of the Greeks. In "The Spirit of Christianity", he proposes a sort of resolution by aligning the universality of Kantian moral philosophy with the universality of the teachings of Jesus; in paraphrase: "The moral principle of the Gospel is charity, or love, and love is the beauty of the heart, a spiritual beauty which combines the Greek Soul and Kant's Moral Reason." Although he did not return to this Romantic formulation, the unification of Greek and Christian thought would remain a preoccupation throughout his life.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Religion is a major theme throughout the 1807 "Phenomenology of Spirit" well before it emerges as the explicit topic of the penultimate Religion chapter. We see this most directly in the metaphysical "unhappiness" of the Augustinian consciousness in chapter IV and in Hegel's depiction of the struggle of the Church of the Faithful with Enlightenment philosophes in chapter VI.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel's proper account of Christianity, however, is to be found in the final section of the "Phenomenology" just prior to the closing chapter, Absolute Knowing. It is presented under the heading The Revelatory Religion ["die offenbare Religion"]. By means of philosophical exposition of Christian doctrines such as Incarnation and Resurrection, Hegel claims to demonstrate or to make "manifest" the conceptual truth of Christianity, and so to overcome was has only been positively revealed ["geöffenbarte"] by explication of its underlying, revelatory truth.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: The heart of Hegel's interpretation of Christianity can be seen in his interpretation of the Trinity. God the Father must give Himself existence as finitely human Son, the death of whom discloses His essential being as Spirit—and, crucially, according to Hegel, his [Hegel's] own philosophical "concept" of spirit makes transparent what is only obscurely "represented" in the Christian concept of the Trinity. And so it makes manifest the philosophical "truth" of religion, which now is "known".


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: In an essay on the "Phenomenology", George di Giovanni contrasts Kant's rational faith with Hegel's rational religion. On his view, the modern role of religion consists in "expressing and nurturing spirit in its most individual forms" rather than in explaining reality. There is no longer any place for faith in opposition to knowledge. Instead, faith assumes such forms as the trust placed "in individuals close to us, or in the time and place in which we happen to live."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: In other words, according to Hegel's philosophical interpretation, Christianity does not require faith in any doctrine that is not fully justified by reason. What is left, then, is the religious community, free to minister to individual needs and to celebrate the absolute freedom of spirit.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel's "Encyclopedia" includes a section on the Revealed Religion, but it is quite short. It is in his Berlin Lectures that we get his next presentation of Christianity, which he variously refers to as the "consummate," "absolute," or "revelatory" religion (all equivalent terms in this context). Transcripts of three of Hegel's four courses have been preserved, and they show him to be continually adjusting his emphases and exposition. The interpretation of Christianity that he advances, however, is still very much that which he presented in the "Phenomenology"—only now he is able to expound at greater length and with greater clarity upon what he had covered earlier in such a condensed fashion.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: questions whether Luther would have recognized Hegel's claim to Protestantism. Hegel embraces the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers with his concept of spirit, but rejects the core Lutheran doctrines of "sola gratia" and "sola scriptura". Instead, he affirms as the "fundamental principle" of Protestantism "the obstinacy that does honor to mankind, to refuse to recognize in conviction anything not ratified by thought." On similar grounds, Frederick Beiser, while acknowledging Hegel's apparently sincere profession of Lutheranism, describes Hegel's theology as effectively "the very opposite of Luther's."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Discussing the "Hegel Renaissance" in late 20th-century Anglo-American philosophy, Beiser expresses surprise – given today's highly secular academic culture – at such a surge of interest in Hegel. For, according to Hegel, the divine is the centerpoint of philosophy. Hegel's concept of God differs from theistic conceptions found in orthodox Christianity and from deistic conceptions suggested by eighteenth-century philosophers. Nonetheless, Hegel conceptualizes God as the infinite or absolute, in agreement with the classical definition given by St. Anselm as "that of which nothing greater can be conceived."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Just how to most properly characterize Hegel's distinctive articulation of Christianity was a matter of intense debate even in his own life and, among his students, after his death. So it is likely to remain. Neither theistic, nor deistic, Hegel's god can only be articulated in the philosophical terms of the concept of spirit or his own distinctive logical vocabulary. Nevertheless, Hegel everywhere insists that his is the Christian God.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: "History," Frederick Beiser writes, "is central to Hegel's conception of philosophy." Philosophy is only possible "if it is historical, only if the philosopher is aware of the origins, context, and development of his doctrines." In this 1993 essay, titled "Hegel's Historicism," Beiser declares this to be "nothing less than a revolution in the history of philosophy." In a 2011 monograph, however, Beiser excludes Hegel from his treatment of the German historicist tradition for the reason that Hegel is more interested in the philosophy of history than in the epistemological project of justifying its status as a science. Moreover, against the relativistic implications of historicism narrowly construed, Hegel's metaphysics of spirit supplies a "telos", internal to history itself, in terms of which progress can be measured and assessed. This is the self-consciousness of freedom. The more that awareness of this essential freedom of spirit permeates a culture, the more advanced Hegel claims it to be.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Because freedom, according to Hegel, is the essence of spirit, the developing self-awareness of this is just as much a development in truth as it is in politicical life. Thinking presupposes an "instinctive belief" in truth, and the history of philosophy, as recounted by Hegel, is a progressive sequence of "system-identifying" concepts of truth.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Whether or not Hegel is a historicist simply depends upon how one defines the term. The importance of history in Hegel's philosophy, however, cannot be denied.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: German has two words for "history," "Historie" and "Geschichte". The first refers to "the narrative organization of empirical material." The second "includes an account of the underlying developmental logic (the 'intrinsic ground') of deeds and events." Only the latter procedure can supply a properly universal or philosophical history, and this is the procedure Hegel adopts in all of his historical writings. According to Hegel, humans are distinctly historical creatures because, not only do we exist in time, we internalize temporal events so that they become, in a profound sense, part of what and who we are, "integral to humanity's self-understanding and self-knowledge." This is why the history of philosophy, for instance, is integral to philosophy itself, it being literally impossible for early philosophers to think what later philosophers, afforded all the riches of their predecessors, could think—and perhaps, with this distance, work through more thoroughly or consistently. From a later perspective, for instance, it becomes apparent that the concept of personhood includes the implication of universality such as renders contradictory any interpretation or implementation that extends it to some people, but not to others.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: In the Introduction to his "Lectures on the Philosophy of World History", simplifying his own account, Hegel divides human history into three epochs. In what he calls the "Oriental" world, "one" person (the pharaoh or emperor) was free. In the Greco-Roman world, "some" people (moneyed citizens) were free. In the "Germanic" world (that is, European Christendom) "all" persons are free.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: In his discussion of the ancient world, Hegel provides a heavily qualified defense of slavery. As he puts it elsewhere, "slavery occurs in a transitional phase between the natural human existence and the truly ethical condition; it occurs in a world where a wrong is still right. Here, the wrong "is valid", so that the position it occupies is a necessary one." Hegel is clear, however, that there is an unconditional moral demand to reject the institution of slavery, and that slavery is incompatible with the rational state and the essential freedom of every individual.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Some commentators – most notably, Alexandre Kojève and Francis Fukuyama – have understood Hegel to claim that, having achieved a fully universal concept of freedom, history is complete, that it has reached its conclusion. Against this, however, it can be objected that freedom may yet be expanded in terms both of its "scope" and its "content". We have, since Hegel's day, expanded the scope of our concept freedom to acknowledge the rightful inclusion of women, formerly enslaved or colonized peoples, the mentally ill, and those who do not conform to conservative norms with respect to sexual preference or gender identity, among others. As to the content of freedom, the United Nations' International Bill of Human Rights, just for instance, expands the concept of freedom beyond what Hegel himself articulated. Additionally, although Hegel consistently presents his philosophical histories as East-to-West narratives, scholars such as J. M. Fritzman argue that, not only is this prejudice is quite incidental to the substance of Hegel's philosophical position, but that – with India now the world's largest democracy, for instance, or with South Africa's mighty efforts to transcend apartheid – we may already be witnessing the movement of freedom back to the East.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel is often credited with proceeding according to a "dialectical method"; in point of fact, however, Hegel characterizes his philosophy as "speculative" ("spekulativ"), rather than dialectical, and uses the term "dialectical" only "quite rarely." This is because, although ""Dialektik" sometimes stands for the entire movement of the self-articulation of meaning or thought, this term refers more specifically to the self-negation of the determinations of the understanding ("Verstand"), when they are thought through in their fixedness and opposition."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: For example, self-consciousness is "the concept that consciousness has of itself. Thus in this case concept and referent coincide:... 'self-consciousness' refers to mind's taking on the self-contradictory (and thus also self-negating) role of being subject and object of one and the same act of cognition—simultaneously and in the same respect." Hence it is a speculative concept.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: According to Beiser, "if Hegel has any methodology at all, it appears to be an anti-methodology, a method to suspend all methods." Hegel's term "dialectic" must be understood with reference to the "concept" of the object of investigation. What must be grasped is "the 'self-organization' of the subject matter, its 'inner necessity' and 'inherent movement. Hegel renounces all external methods such as could be "applied" to some subject matter.


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: The dialectical character of Hegel's speculative procedure often makes his position on any given issue quite difficult to characterize. Instead of seeking to answer a question or solve a problem directly, he frequently recasts it by showing, for instance, "how the dichotomy underlying the dispute is false, and that it is therefore possible to integrate elements from both positions." Speculative thought preserves what is true from apparently opposing theories in a process that Hegel terms "sublation."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: Hegel generally uses the term in all three senses, with particular emphasis on the second two, in which apparent contradictions are speculatively overcome. His word for what is sublated is "moment" ("das Moment", in the neuter), which denotes "an essential feature or aspect of a whole conceived as a static system, and an essential phase in a whole conceived as a dialectical movement or process." (When Hegel describes something as "contradictory," what he means is that it is not independently self-sustaining on its own terms, and so it can only be comprehended ["begreifen"] as a moment of a larger whole.)


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: According to Hegel, to think the finite as a moment of the whole, rather than an independently self-determined existent, is what it means to grasp it as idealized ("das Ideelle"). Idealism, then, "is the doctrine that finite entities are ideal ("ideell"): they depend not on themselves for their existence but on some larger self-sustaining entity [i.e., the whole] that underlies or embraces them."


title: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

text: The pronoun-expressions – moment, sublate, and idealize – are characteristic of Hegel's account of idealism. They can be understood as stages of thought in which the "object is conceptually present first in mere adumbration, then according to circumstances both internal and external to it, and finally standing completely on its own." This phenomenological and conceptual analysis distinguishes Hegel's idealism from Kant's transcendental idealism and Berkeley's mentalistic idealism. In contrast to those positions, Hegel's idealism is entirely compatible with realism and non-mechanistic naturalism. This position rejects empiricism as an "a priori" account of knowledge, but it is in no way opposed to the philosophical legitimacy of empirical knowledge. Hegel's idealistic contention, which he claims to demonstrate, is that "being itself" is rational.