Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Hispanicization of his name Jorge Guillermo Federico Hegel) (Stuttgart, August 27, 1770-Berlin, November 14, 1831) was a philosopher of German Idealism, the last of Modernity, even called the "conscience of modernity", the third among whom we could call the "three great Cartesians" —the other two being Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl— and certainly the most systematic of the post-Kantian philosophers.

The most general claim of his philosophy could be said to be that of logically explaining the process through which the real and the truth come to be constituted as such, through the systematic exposition of the intrinsic rationality of everything effectively given in the world. In the famous Preface to the Principles of the Philosophy of Law (1817) he states that the task of philosophy is to "conceive what is, since what is is reason" and that just as the individual "is a child of his time; in the same way, philosophy is its time apprehended in thoughts".

One of his most controversial contributions for some, brilliant for others, is the role that dialectic plays in everything given. This, in his great work of youth during his Jeniense period, Phenomenology of the Spirit, is linked to the experience that natural consciousness suffers when losing the previous conception it had of its object -be it itself as in this work or any object - when it is replaced by a new one. It is a violence that she does to herself where the relationship between object and previous concept is overcome by a new one without, however, completely negating the previous conception, but rather overcomes it while preserving the content of truth that could be nested in it. It is for this reason that the Hegelian dialectic is associated with a determined negation, different from that of skepticism, since it ends up consuming a long path of purification, from its most naive version, to absolute knowledge. But unlike his predecessor Kant, Hegel defended a type of Reason that resulted from the dialectical relationship between individual reasoning and the unpredictable facts of reality, and whose substance could only be understood a posteriori, being of This forms a historical, collective and providential reason. Hence his expression "cunning of Reason", since hardly anyone could by himself consider all the relevant variables to carry out in the world, in a predictable way, an ideology of consciousness: reason produces results that "escape" to the forecasts that one could make in relation to its present functionality, unfolding according to a predestination that is inaccessible a priori.

His theory was reinterpreted by Karl Marx from a materialist perspective, thus subordinating the human race and its reason (a secondary phenomenon in Marx) to the ups and downs of the great conformations of matter (the Church, the State and the Market, for example): the human being inevitably depends on his ideal and material conditions, facing them in an imperishable dialectic, which does not make him free in any way, but rather gives him a new material form in each dialectical cycle.

He received his training at the Tübinger Stift (a seminary of the Protestant Church in Württemberg), where he became friends with the future philosopher Friedrich Schelling and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. He admired the works of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Rousseau, as well as the French Revolution, which he ended up rejecting when it fell into the hands of the Jacobin terror. Although it was suspected that he was the victim of a cholera epidemic that raged during the summer and autumn of 1831, recent investigations point to unknown causes rather than cholera as the cause of death, ruling out the latter. He was the father of the historian Karl von Hegel (1813-1901).

Considered by the classical history of philosophy as the representative of "the pinnacle of the nineteenth-century German movement of philosophical idealism" and as a revolutionary of dialectic, he was to have a profound impact on the historical materialism of Karl Marx. The intellectual relationship between Marx and Hegel has been a great source of interest in Hegel's work. His thought generated a series of reactions and revolutions ranging from the explanation of Marxist materialism, Søren Kierkegaard's pre-existentialism, Friedrich Nietzsche's escape from metaphysics, Gabriel Marcel's existentialism, Martin Heidegger's critique of ontology, the thought by Jean-Paul Sartre, the Nietzschean philosophy of Georges Bataille, the actualism of Giovanni Gentile, the negative dialectic of Theodor W. Adorno, the deconstruction theory of Jacques Derrida and the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, among others. In this sense, the impact that the Hegelian system has had on continental philosophy and, especially, on French philosophy of the last century, where the reception of Hegel was mediated mainly by Jean Hyppolite, Alexandre Koyré and Alexandre Kojeve.

Training

Hegel attended the Protestant seminary in Tübingen with the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the objective idealist Schelling. All three closely followed the development of the French Revolution and were influenced by Kant, Germany's greatest philosopher, as well as by Fichte. But above all, Hegel and Hegelianism must be understood as a reaction against the Kantianism that then prevailed in most of the German faculties. For Hegel there will be no "thing in itself" (Ding an sich) in the Kantian way, reason will appropriate all of reality, the self-awareness that Kant had already called "synthetic unity of the apperception" is going to sweep away everything that is unknowable, to give rise to rational categories with which to know the contradominance.

Work

His Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is usually considered Hegel's first really important work, although his Youth Writings —never published while he was alive—, among that stands out The Spirit of Christianity and its destiny, have been the object of study and interpretation since they came to light at the beginning of the 20th century. Other prephenomenological works, such as The Constitution of Germany (1802), give an account of the sad state of the Holy Roman Empire at the beginning of the s. XIX. The system that he proposes for Germany and the resentment that he expresses there for the other European countries, with the exception of Italy, which, according to Hegel, shares the fate of Germany, makes this work a strange harbinger of World War II. ^{[citation needed]} In 1802 his first publications appeared in the Critical Magazine of Philosophy, in which he worked together with Schelling, his old companion from the Tübingen Seminary.

Together with the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel's most important works are considered to be the Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik, 1812- 1816), the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, 1817, with several subsequent reprints) and the Philosophy of Law (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, 1821). In addition, there are other works that constitute compilations of his classes on different topics and that were published posthumously as thematic volumes and may also be very relevant for more specific studies.

Thought

Hegel's works have a reputation for being difficult because of the breadth of topics they purport to cover. Hegel introduced a system for understanding the history of philosophy and the world itself, often called "dialectic": a progression in which each successive movement emerges as a solution to the contradictions inherent in the previous movement. For example, the French Revolution constitutes for Hegel the introduction of true freedom to Western societies for the first time in history.

However, precisely because of its absolute novelty, it is also absolutely radical: on the one hand, the abrupt increase in violence that was necessary to carry out the revolution cannot cease to be what it is, and on the other hand, it has already consumed to your opponent. The revolution, therefore, no longer has anywhere to turn but to its own result: the freedom won with so many hardships is consumed by a brutal Reign of Terror. History, however, progresses by learning from its own mistakes: only after this experience, and precisely because of it, can the existence of a constitutional State of free citizens be postulated, enshrining both the (supposedly) benevolent organizing power of rational and the revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality. "Thought is where freedom resides".

In contemporary explanations of Hegelianism —for pre-university classes, for example— Hegel's dialectic often appears fragmented, for convenience, into three moments called “thesis” (in our example, the revolution), “antithesis” (the subsequent terror) and “synthesis” (the constitutional state of free citizens). However, Hegel did not personally employ this classification at all; it had been created earlier by Fichte in his more or less analogous account of the relationship between the individual and the world. Serious Hegel scholars do not generally recognize the validity of this classification, although it probably has some pedagogical value (see Dialectical Triad).

Historicism grew significantly during Hegel's philosophy. In the same way as other exponents of historicism, Hegel considered that the study of history was the appropriate method to approach the study of the science of society, since it would reveal some tendencies of historical development. In his philosophy, history not only offers the key to understanding society and social changes, but is also taken into account as a court of justice for the world.

Hegel's philosophy stated that everything that is real is also rational and that everything that is rational is real. The end of history was, for Hegel, the parousia of the spirit, and historical development could be compared to the development of an organism, the components work affecting the rest and have defined functions.

Hegel says that it is a divine norm, that the will of God is found in everything, which is to lead man to freedom; for this reason he is considered a pantheist. He thus justifies the historical misfortune: all the blood and pain, poverty and wars are "the price"; necessary to pay to achieve the freedom of humanity.

Hegel used this system to explain the entire history of philosophy, science, art, politics, and religion, but many modern critics point out that Hegel often seems to overlook the realities of history. history in order to make them fit their dialectical mould. Karl Popper, Hegel's critic in The Open Society and Its Enemies, believes that Hegel's system constitutes a thinly disguised justification for the rule of Frederick William III and for the Hegelian idea that the ultimate goal of history is to arrive at a state that approximates that of Prussia in the 1831s. lowercase">XX was thoroughly criticized by Herbert Marcuse in Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, arguing that Hegel was not an apologist for any state or form of authority simply because these existed; for Hegel, the State must always be rational. Arthur Schopenhauer despised Hegel for his historicism and branded his work as pseudophilosophy.

Hegel's philosophy of history is also marked by the concepts of "the tricks of reason" and the "mockery of history"; history guides men who believe they are leading themselves, as individuals and as societies, and punishes their claims so that world-history mocks them, producing exactly the opposite, paradoxical results to those intended by their authors, although ultimately history is rearranged and, in a fantastic loop, it goes back on itself and with its mockery and sarcastic paradox, turned into an encryption mechanism, it also creates itself, without wanting it, realities and symbols hidden from the world and accessible only to those who know it, that is, to those who want to know.

Logic

The act of knowing is the introduction of contradiction. The principle of the excluded third party, something either is A or it is not A, is the proposition that wants to reject the contradiction and in doing so precisely incurs a contradiction: A must be +A or -A, with which The third term, A, has now been introduced, which is neither + nor - and is therefore +A and -A. A thing is itself and it is not itself, because in reality everything changes and transforms itself into something else. This means overcoming formal logic and establishing dialectical logic.

All things are self-contradictory and this is deeply and fully essential. Identity is the determination of the simple, immediate and static, while contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality, the principle of all self-movement, and only that which contains a contradiction moves.

The ordinary imagination captures identity, difference and contradiction, but not the transition from one to the other, which is the most important thing, how the one becomes the other.

Cause and effect are moments of universal reciprocal dependence, of the reciprocal connection and concatenation of events, links in the chain of development of matter and society: the same thing appears first as cause and then as effect.

It is necessary to raise awareness of intercausality, of the laws of objective universal connection, of struggle and the unity of opposites and of the transitions and transformations of nature and society. The totality of all aspects of the phenomenon, of reality and of their reciprocal relationships, that is what truth is made up of.

The reality is the unity of essence and existence. The essence is not behind or beyond the phenomenon, but for the same reason that the essence exists, the essence materializes in the phenomenon. Existence is the immediate unity of being and reflection: possibility and accidentality are moments of reality posited as forms that constitute the exteriority of the real and therefore are a matter that affects the content, because in reality this exteriority meets with interiority, in a single movement and becomes necessity, so that what is necessary is mediated by a host of circumstances or conditions.

Quantity is transformed into quality and the changes are interconnected and cause each other. Mathematics have not been able to justify these operations that are based on the transition, because the transition is not of a mathematical or formal nature, but dialectical.

The logical determinations previously exposed, the determinations of being and essence, are not mere determinations of thought. The logic of the concept is ordinarily understood as only a formal science, but if the logical forms of the concept were dead, passive containers of mere representations and thoughts, their knowledge would be superfluous; but in reality they are like forms of the concept, the living spirit of the real and therefore it is necessary to investigate the truth of these forms and their necessary connection.

The method of knowledge is not a merely external form, but is the soul and concept of the content. Regarding the nature of the concept, analysis comes first, because it must elevate the given matter into the form of universal abstractions, which, then, through the synthetic method b> are put as definitions. The analysis resolves the concrete data, isolates its differences and gives them the form of universality or leaves the concrete as the foundation and, through the abstraction of the particularities that appear to be inessential, highlights a concrete universal, that is, the force of general law.. This universality is then also determined through the synthesis of the concept in its forms, in definitions.

Human activity unites the subjective with the objective. The subjective end is linked to the objectivity outside of it, through a means that is the unity of both, this is the activity according to the end. Thus, with his tools, man has power over external nature, although in regard to his ends he is often subject to it.

Aesthetics

Hegel studied art as a way of appearing from the idea in beauty. In his lectures on aesthetics he first defines the field in which this science must work. For this, he makes a distinction between natural beauty and artistic beauty. The artistic beauty is superior to the natural beauty because in the first the spirit is present, the freedom, which is the only true thing. The beautiful in art is beauty generated by the spirit, therefore a participant in it, unlike the natural beauty that will not be worthy of an aesthetic investigation, precisely because it is not a participant in that spirit that is the ultimate goal of knowledge.

Before analyzing the artistic beauty, Hegel refutes some objections that classify art as unworthy of scientific treatment (by scientific treatment Hegel refers to philosophical treatment and not to science as it is understood today).

As the first point to discuss, he talks about the statement that makes art unworthy of scientific investigation because it contributes to the relaxation of the spirit, thus lacking a serious nature. According to this, art, taken as a game, uses illusion as a means to its end and, since the means must always correspond to the dignity of the end, the true can never arise from appearance.

Hegel also refers to Kant at this point to criticize him. Kant comes to say that art is indeed worthy of scientific investigation, assigning it the role of mediator between reason and sensibility. But Hegel not only does not believe this possible, since both reason and sensibility would not lend themselves to such mediation and would claim their purity, but also clarifies that, being a mediator, art would not gain more seriousness, since this would not be a an end in itself and art would continue to be subordinated to more serious, higher ends.

Within the field of aesthetics or philosophy of art, Hegel distinguishes between free art and servile art, the latter having purposes alien to him, such as decorating. It is free art that will be the object of study, since it has its own ends, it is free and true, because it is a way of expressing the divine in a sensitive way. In this way, art approaches the mode of manifestation of nature, which is necessary, serious and follows laws.

As an illusion, art cannot be separated from all reality. Appearance is essential to the spirit, so that everything real will be its appearance. There is a difference between appearance in reality and appearance in art. The first, thanks to the immediacy of the sensible, presents itself as true, it appears to us as the real. On the other hand, the appearance in the artistic is presented as an illusion, it takes away from the object the claim to truth that it has in reality and gives it a higher reality, daughter of the spirit. So that although the idea is found both in reality and in art, it is in the latter that it is easier to penetrate into it.

Since art has the spirit as its essence, it follows that its nature is thinking, so that the products of fine art, beyond the freedom and discretion they may have, as participants in the spirit, are fixed by it. limits, support points. They have conscience, they think about themselves. The content determines a form.

Since the form is essential to art, it is limited. There is a moment in which art satisfies the needs of the spirit, but due to its limited nature this will no longer be the case. Once it stops satisfying these needs, the work of art generates in us, in addition to immediate enjoyment, thought and reflection; it generates judgment in us, and this will have as its objective knowing art, the spirit that appears in it, its being there. This is why the philosophy of art is even more necessary today than in the past.

Then, the products of fine art are an alienation of the spirit in the sensible. The true task of art is to bring to consciousness the true interests of the spirit and that is why, being thought by science, art fulfills its purpose.

Hegel distinguishes three art forms: the Symbolic art form, the Classical art form and the Romantic art form. These mark the path of the idea in art, they are different relationships between content and form.

The Symbolic art form is a mere search for the form for a content that is still indeterminate. The figure is deficient, it does not express the idea. Man starts from the sensible material of nature and builds a form to which he assigns a meaning. The use of the symbol occurs and this, in its ambiguous character, will fill all symbolic art with mystery. The form is greater than the content. Hegel relates this artistic form to the art of architecture, it does not show the divine but its exterior, his place of residence. He refers to cult architecture, more specifically to Egyptian, Indian and Hebrew.

The Classical art form strikes a balance between form and content. The idea is not only determined but exhausted in its manifestation. Greek art, sculpture, is the art of the classical art form. Greek sculptures were not, for the Greeks, representations of the god but were the god himself. The Greek man was able to express his absolute spirit, his religion, in art. This is what Hegel refers to when he speaks of the past character of art. Art, in its essence, always belongs to the past, because it is in it where it fulfills it, it is in Greek art where Art achieves its ultimate goal, the total representation of the idea.

But precisely because of the limited nature of art, this balance has to be broken and here the Romantic art form takes the step. Once again there is an inequality between form and content, they no longer fit perfectly, but now it is the form that is not capable of representing the spirit. The content goes beyond the form.

The arts of this art form are painting, music, and poetry. The idea goes from the most material, painting, to the least material, going through music, which has sound as its material, and reaches poetry, which is the universal art of the spirit since it has beautiful fantasy as its material. Poetry will traverse all other arts.

Many philosophers will return to the theme of art in Hegel, Hans-Georg Gadamer, for example, will speak of «The death of Art» referring to Hegelian aesthetics. Hegel never spoke of a death of art, but rather he gave it the character of the past, a past not understood as something that no longer exists; The "past character of art" is closely linked to the goal of Hegelian philosophy, to know the spirit, that it be free. Within this purpose, art fulfilled its task in the past, in classical times, to be later surpassed by religion and, ultimately, by philosophy.

Historical Dialectic

Hegel expounded his philosophy of history at length in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Universal History. However, the most remarkable exposition of his dialectical vision of history is that contained in the work that, like no other, embodies and symbolizes his philosophy: the Phenomenology of Spirit . This is the analysis presented in the central section of the Phenomenology, which is headed The Spirit (Der Geist) and deals with the history of Europe from classical Greece to the Germany of Hegel's time.

In accordance with his dialectical scheme, Hegel divides the period to be analyzed into three large phases: that of the original unity (the polis of classical Greece), that of the conflictive but developing division (Rome, feudalism and the until the French Revolution) and, finally, the return to unity, but now enriched by the earlier development (Hegel's present). The starting point is the moment of what Hegel calls the True Spirit (Der wahre Geist). This moment, represented by the Greek city states, shows us the Spirit in its original unity, still undifferentiated and undeveloped. It is a moment of happiness given by the harmony between the whole (the city) and the parts (the citizens), where individuals understand their destiny as a direct expression of the collective destiny and where, as Hegel says in a way inspired by the Antigone by Sophocles, human law and divine law coincide. Men live here according to inherited customs that form the basis of a spontaneous and evident ethics, still very far from reflective morality. This state or moment represents a kind of childhood of humanity: happy in the natural immediacy of its ties and in its still unquestioned certainties. But this happiness of primal harmony cannot last, since its price is lack of development. By its nature, the Spirit seeks to delve into its own content and just like Adam, and with the same consequences, it cannot stop eating the fruit of the tree of wisdom. In this way the enchantment of the Garden of Eden is broken and an abyss opens between divine law and human law. Men become individualized and come into conflict with each other: the original community breaks up. This is how families and then cities face each other, each of which wants to affirm its law and its peculiarities as universal and thus seeks to subdue the others. War becomes inevitable, but the Spirit does not back down from war or suffering. Due to internal divisions and tears as well as external conflicts, old customs lose their natural and spontaneous legitimacy, their evident and unquestioned validity. Childhood is thus left behind and we enter the phase of youth, active, challenging and conflictive. In this way men enter a long pilgrimage, in a social state characterized by division and estrangement. The Spirit enters the realm of alienation.

The second moment of the development of the Spirit is that of the Spirit astonished at itself (Der sich entfremdete Geist). The Spirit has become a stranger to itself, unity and totality have given way to the struggle of the parts in an increasingly atomized world, where the particular (individuals or groups) rebels against the general (society). or community). The social fabric is split between a private and a public sphere. Individual life is privatized and, at the same time, the public becomes the domain or property of a few: the State is separated from society. The march of progress that results from this division becomes alien to its own creators. History runs like this, as first Hegel and then Marx liked to say, behind the backs of men. The loss of the original unity and the social division create a strong feeling of unhappiness. It is the age of what Hegel calls the “unhappy conscience” (unglücklige Bewusstsein), which finds in Christianity its adequate religious expression through which it recognizes its own estrangement and its inability to understand its own self. own work on the idea of a transcendent, unattainable and incomprehensible God. Life becomes a mystery and the mystery becomes the essence of God. All of this is painful, but such is progress, the realization of reason is tragic as taught by the very sacrifice of Christ.

The conflict between the whole and the parts reaches its sharpest form in the struggle that directly precedes Hegel's time: the struggle between enlightenment and superstition (der kampf der Aufklärung mit dem Aberglauben). Faith, religious feeling, represents the general, the totality, the species, but in a mystical way. The Enlightenment represents, in turn, the analytical force of the intellect, the deepening through specialized sciences in the singularities of existence, the unlimited domain of the individual and the particular. In this confrontation, the Enlightenment triumphed and faith disintegrated under the onslaught of the intellect. But the victory of the intellect – which is the negation of the whole or unity – is only temporary and prepares the definitive victory of the totality, in the form of the all-encompassing system of reason by Hegel himself, which is nothing other than the negation of the negation. and with it the return to the original affirmation, but now enriched by the intermediate development.

The last act in the drama of the Spirit alienated from itself is the French Revolution. Around the same Hegel develops one of the most notable analysis of him. The French Revolution represents for Hegel the attempt to establish on earth the kingdom of what he calls “absolute freedom” (die absolute Freiheit). It is about the arrogant individual reason that decides to act with full freedom, without limits, as if the world could be created anew and, moreover, at will. The questioning of faith and the elevation of the human intellect to the seat of God create the illusion that everything can be changed according to the plan of the revolutionary reformers. It is about the hubris of reason that, in this way, turns against everything that exists. But the revolt of revolutionary reason or of absolute freedom is for Hegel nothing more than a tragic misunderstanding, which could not but end in terror (der Schrecken). Finally, each leader and each revolutionary faction tries to impose their utopias on the rest and create a new world at will as if they were gods. And these new ferocious gods, determined to do good to humanity even if it cost the lives of countless human beings, necessarily ended up fighting each other, with that blindness and cruelty that only those who believe themselves to be the bearers of extreme goodness can exhibit.. Rivalry and mutual suspicion thus became the rule and the reign of the so-called "general will" ended in the despotism of Robespierre. However, the tragic end of the French Revolution does not mean that his evaluation of the whole is negative for Hegel, quite the contrary. True to his historicist logic, where even the most repugnant violence plays its role, he sees it not only as a necessary moment for the realization of the Spirit but as one of its great moments. The revolution was a grandiose attempt to transform each individual into the master of the world and of his destiny, to submit all objectivity, everything given, to the transformative will of the human being. Thus, the program of the Enlightenment was radically fulfilled, the one that Kant summed up in his famous definition of the Enlightenment as “man's coming out of his minority”. But by being fulfilled in such a radical and absolute way, the Enlightenment program exposed its fallacies and problems. The court of reason became the revolutionary court, where not only the past was beheaded but also the revolutionaries themselves. In any case, the revolutionary apocalypse was a definitive milestone for the future and made possible, like the storm that clears the cloudy sky, the passage of the Spirit to the phase of its final reconciliation.

After the bloody end of the great dream of absolute freedom, individuals returned to their modest daily chores, but post-revolutionary Europe could never be the same again. A new principle had been embodied and would become the axis of a new State, the "rational State", which did not deny the previous distinctions proper to civil society nor to the individual, but rather subordinated them all in a new organic unit, in a superior harmony that was thus the negation of the negation, the end of alienation, the reconciliation of the parts with the whole and of the individuals with the community. With this, the culminating moment of the realization of the Spirit was passed, that of the Spirit certain of itself (Der seiner selbst gewisse Geist ) that reaches its most adequate form in the “ absolute philosophy”, which is none other than Hegel's. The lesson of the great revolution was truly decisive. For Hegel it meant the definitive abandonment of all utopian dreams – among them those youthful dreams of a reestablishment of that supposed state of original harmony represented by the polis of Antiquity – to become the profoundly conservative thinker of his mature age, that thinker who already He is not the philosopher of the revolution but of the restoration. What the failure of the attempt to establish the reign of absolute freedom showed was that men, in reality, have nothing to change in essentials, that they cannot build a world as they please, that the past is not a pure string of stupid irrationalities, that what has existed has a lasting meaning and content, that it is nothing less than the expressions of reason in its different moments, all of them necessary to reach its proper form. Behind the curtain of the end of history there is nothing but history itself. That is why what remains is not to destroy the inheritance of the centuries but to recognize it and give it a definitively harmonious or rational form, that is, according to the whole of the Idea already realized. At the end of the story there is only reconciliation or the return of the spirit to itself.

Accusations of Eurocentrism

Hegel is often criticized as Eurocentric. It is common for him to be accused of having been one of the most notable promoters of European superiority (more precisely of northern Europe) over the other cultures of the world. These accusations are usually linked to the representation according to which Hegel would also have been the official philosopher of the Prussian absolute monarchy, a mystifier of the State, promoter of expansionist nationalism, and defender of reactionary politics in general. The author is often accused, in particular, of being the spokesman for the project of Modernity, or of being the spokesman for the German nationalist response against the Enlightenment (or, contradictorily, both at the same time). He points him out as an unrestricted defender of the "Germanic Spirit." The most radical and crude version of this story has come to accuse Hegel of pre-configuring Nazism, despite having died more than 100 years before Adolf Hitler came to power.

However, this opinion is not shared by specialists. On the contrary, Hegel scholars and his thought consider such accusations to be mere "myths", which stem from a tradition of distorting critics of Hegel's work. The origins of this anti-Hegelian propaganda can be traced to the first half of the 19th century. At present, this type of criticism is usually put into circulation by authors or commentators who have not read the author's original work, or who have only read texts in a fragmentary way.

In an opposite sense, the reception of Hegel's thought in Latin America promoted the development of a philosophy of Hegelian liberation in a specifically Latin Americanist key. Some of the most recognized authors in this line have been Julio de Zan and Rubén Dri.

Followers

After Hegel's death, his followers divided into two main and opposing camps, which were named by David F. Strauss the Hegelian Right and the Hegelian Left. The right-wing Hegelians, also called "old Hegelians", direct disciples of Hegel at the University of Berlin, defended a spiritualist interpretation of his work and the compatibility between Christianity and Hegelian idealism, and the political conservatism that restored the monarchical systems, especially that of Prussia under Frederick William III (1770-1840), after the Napoleonic wars at the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815), on the grounds that "everything real is rational". They also supported various Christian dogmas. The most prominent were Karl Friedrich Göschel (1781-1861), author of On the proofs of the immortality of the soul in the light of speculative philosophy (1835); Georg Andreas Gabler (1786-1853), who wrote The Propedeutics of Philosophy (1827) among other works; Casimir Corradi (1784-1849), who printed Immortality and Eternal Life (1837); Kuno Fischer (1824-1907), to whom we owe a Hegelian-inspired History of Modern Philosophy (1854-1907), and Karl Rosenkranz (1805-1879), initially a follower of Schleiermacher and later a biographer of Hegel, although for some he is the one who interpreted the "Hegelian center".

In contrast to the "Old Hegelians," those on the left were called Young Hegelians and interpreted Hegel in a revolutionary sense, leading them to stick to atheism in religion and liberal democracy in religion. policy. They rejected any religious interpretation of Hegel's philosophy, and even maintained the incompatibility between Christianity and Hegelian philosophy; for them religion was a mere myth. They applied the dialectic to present reality, which is why they understood it as a moment that could be overcome by a better rationality. Among the Hegelians on the left are Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), who first counted among those on the right, but later became adhered to the theses of Strauss; Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), author of Thoughts on Death and Immortality; David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874), whose biography of Jesus Christ so shocked Europeans; Max Stirner (1806-1856), author of The only one and his property and the most famous, Karl Marx (1818-1883), author of the incomplete Capital . Multiple schisms in this faction eventually led to Stirner's anarchist variety of egoism and the Marxist version of communism.

Throughout nineteenth-century Europe there were such notable followers of Hegel as the Italians Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, the Frenchman Étienne Vacherot, and the Englishman J. M. E. McTaggart, among others. In the 20th century, Hegel's philosophy had a great renaissance: This was partly because it was rediscovered and reappraised as philosophical progenitor of Marxism by philosophically oriented Marxists, partly to a revival of the historical perspective that Hegel brought to everything, and partly to the growing recognition of the importance of his dialectical method. Some figures that are related to this renaissance are Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Alexandre Kojève and Gotthard Günther. Hegel's renaissance also highlighted the importance of his early works, that is, those published before the Phenomenology of Spirit. Scholars disagree whether contemporary philosophers such as Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, Robert Brandom, and Slavoj Žižek should be considered Neo-Hegelians.

Main works

• Difference between Fichte and Schelling Philosophical Systems (Differenz des Fichte ́schen un Schelling ́schen Systems der Philosohpie in Bezeihung auf Reinhold ́s Beyträge zur leichtern Übersicht des Zustand der Philosophie zu Anfang des neunzehnten jarhunderts, Istes. Heft,1800)
• Phenomenology of the Spirit (Phänomenologie des GeistesBamberg, 1807)
• Science of logic (Wissenschaft der Logik3 vols., 1812–1816). Trad. esp.: publishing house Solar / Hachette, Buenos Aires, second ed. 1968. Trad. of Augusta and Rodolfo Mondolfo. Prologue of R. Mondolfo.
• Philosophical Science Encyclopedia (Enzyklopaedie der philosophischen WissenschaftenHeidelberg, 1817; 2.a ed. 1827; 3.a, 1830)
• Elements of the philosophy of law (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts1821)
• Lessons on aesthetics (Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (gehalten 1820–1829, aus Notizen und Mitschriften 1835–1838 postum herausgeben von Heinrich Gustav Hotho). Trad. esp.: Akal Editions. Trad. de Alfredo Brotons Muñoz