Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

German philosopher (1770–1831), born in Stuttgart, professor at Jena, Heidelberg and finally Berlin, where he exerted overwhelming influence, becoming, within his lifetime, the dominant philosophical figure in Germany and, de facto, the official philosopher of the Prussian state. Trained at the Tübingen seminary alongside Hölderlin and Schelling, he developed a totalising philosophical system that sought to grasp the whole of reality —nature, history, art, religion, law— as the rational unfolding of a single Spirit (Geist) that progressively comes to know itself through contradiction and its overcoming, dialectic. The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), written under dramatic circumstances while Napoleon occupied Jena, traces the journey of consciousness from the most elementary sense-certainty to absolute knowledge, passing through crucial stages such as the famous master-slave dialectic, in which self-consciousness is only fully constituted through mutual recognition and struggle. The Science of Logic reformulates metaphysics as a necessary unfolding of categories from the most abstract being to the concept, while the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences offers a complete synthesis of the system. The Philosophy of Right sets out his political and social philosophy, articulated through family, civil society and the state, culminating in the latter as the 'actuality of the ethical idea'. His Berlin lectures on aesthetics, the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of history —published posthumously by his students— consolidated his image as a thinker of unprecedented systematic ambition. His maxim that 'what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational' has been interpreted both as a conservative justification of the existing order and as a revolutionary promise of its future unfolding —a divergence that gave rise to right- and left-Hegelianism, the latter the direct origin of the thought of Feuerbach and Marx.

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