Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"Georg W. F. Hegel's philosophy is another fundamentally Counter-Enlightenment attack on reason and individualism. His philosophy is a partially secularized version of traditional Judeo-Christian cosmology. While Kant's concerns centered upon epistemology, Hegel's centered upon metaphysics. For Kant, preserving faith led him to deny reason, while for Hegel preserving the spirit of Judeo-Christian metaphysics led him to be more anti-reason and antiindividualist than Kant ever was."

"Hegel agreed with Kant that realism and objectivism were dead ends. Kant had transcended them by making the subject prior, but from Hegel's perspective he had been too wishy-washy in doing so. Kant made the subject responsible only for the phenomenal world of experience, leaving noumenal reality forever closed off to us. This was intolerable to Hegel—after all, the whole point of philosophy is to achieve union with reality, to escape the merely sensuous and finite and to come to know and be one with the supersensuous and infinite. However, Hegel had no intention of trying to solve the epistemological puzzles about perception, concept-formation, and induction that had set Kant's agenda, in order to show us how we might acquire knowledge of the noumenal. Instead, taking a cue from Johann Fichte, Hegel's strategy was to assert boldly an identity of subject and object, thus closing the gap metaphysically."

"Theories of politics or of conduct that live long and retain influence have something more than theory behind them. They appeal to powerful instincts and interests, and the Hegelian philosophy is no exception. It appeals to the instincts and interests of counsellors and kings, of privileged classes, of Property and Order. It plays on the fear of fundamental criticism, of the razor-edge of thought, of the claim of conscience to scrutinize institutions and ordinances. It appeals to the slavishness which accepts a master if he will give the slave a share of tyranny over others more deeply enslaved. It satisfies national egotism and class ascendancy."

"Historically, when philosophy runs up against science, philosophy loses. Think of the bishops who refused to look through Galileo's telescope. Or Hegel's proving by logic that there can be no more than seven planets."

"There is reason in being, nature and history for Hegel. Such reason, or, as Hegel calls it, the 'Idea', is a reality, not a fiction. It is not, however, a transcendent power that dominates from on high the world in which we live. In that sense, it is not the infamous 'Absolute' attacked so frequently by Hegel's critics. The Idea is, rather, the rationality that is immanent in the world itself: the world's own inherent logic. In nature the Idea is the logic that is immanent in and generated by space as such and that leads to the emergence of freely moving matter and eventually to life. In history the Idea is nothing other than the logic that is immanent within and generated by human action and that leads human beings to become more social and more self-conscious as they seek to satisfy their interests."

"Hegel's logic requires our ordinary understanding to transform itself into dialectical thinking, but it sets out that process of transformation in a way that ordinary understanding can clearly understand. Hegel's logic is thus not some esoteric exercise in mystical thinking that can only be grasped by specially gifted initiates. It is the presuppositionless study of thought which is assessable and understandable by anyone who is prepared to be fully self-critical. Ordinary consciousness can understand the need for a presupposition - less logic and, as long as it is prepared to see its categories redefined, and see itself transformed in the process, it can understand the development of such a logic as well."

"As in the Phenomenology and elsewhere in his system, therefore, Hegel is concerned above all in the philosophy of nature not to reduce phenomena to mere expressions of a single, universal principle, but to understand the unique specificity of each phenomenon in turn, as well as the distinctive logic immanent in that specificity that makes further specificities necessary. In other words (and pace critics, such as Deleuze), Hegel endeavours throughout his mature work on nature and on the human spirit to develop a fully articulated philosophy of difference."

"Frau Edouard Devrient: "Do tell me, who is the stupid fellow sitting next to me?" Felix Mendelssohn (behind his napkin): "The stupid fellow next to you is the philosopher Hegel.""

"The question would then turn on the significance of Hegel's Phaenomenologie for the System: whether it is an Introduction, whether it remains outside the System, and if it is an Introduction, whether it is again incorporated within the System; furthermore, whether Hegel does not have to his credit the astonishing achievement of not only having written the System, but of having written two, eye, three Systems, which must always require a matchless systematic talent, but which nevertheless seems be the case, since the System is finished more than once."

"Situation: that Hegel in punishment for his attack upon the religious would have to deliver an upbuilding discourse."

"The second important characteristic of this utopia [as posited by Marxists] was the belief that the glorious future is not simply predetermined by the course of history hitherto, but that the future was already there, not empirically noticeable and yet more real than the empirical present about to crumble. This belief in a “higher” reality which, albeit invisible, was already embedded in the actual world could be traced back, to be sure, to its Hegelian sources; more exactly, it was an extension into the future-illegitimate in strictly Hegelian terms-of the Hegelian way of investigating the past. This enviable ability to detect in what appears to be something that appears not to be but that in fact is in a more eminent sense than what is “merely” empirical was itself in Hegel a secularized version of the Christian concept of salvation which, though not perceptible directly, is not just inscribed in God's plan but has already occurred, since in the divine timelessness whatever is going to happen did happen. It justifies the illimited self-righteousness of those who not only are capable of predicting the future but in fact are already its blessed owners, and it gives them the right to treat the actual world as essentially non-existent."

"Hegel... scornfully characterizes Empiricism as seeking truth in Experience instead of in Thought. It is on such principles that the modern German Philosophy has reproduced the ambitious but inane attempts of Scholasticism."

"Hegel's philosophy was taught in the German universities, and had the approval of the Prussian throne. Frederick William III regarded it as a very excellent philosophy — in fact, an intellectual bulwark of the crown. He reached that complacent conclusion in a very simple way. Hegel said: "All that is real is reasonable, and all that is reasonable is real." The Emperor interpreted this as follows: All that exists is real, therefore reasonable, therefore right. As Alexander Pope, the English poet, put it, "Whatever is, is right." As this seemed to be a philosophical justification of police-government, the censorship, and the star-chamber, the Hegelian philosophy flourished under royal patronage."

"Goethe made German literature into world literature, and Hegel made German philosophy into world philosophy."

"My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre Epigonoi [Epigones – Büchner, Dühring and others] who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing's time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell."

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."

"The principle of organic unities, like that of combined analysis and synthesis, is mainly used to defend the practice of holding both of two contradictory propositions, wherever this may seem convenient. In this, as in other matters, Hegel's main service to philosophy has consisted in giving a name to and erecting into a principle, a type of fallacy to which experience had shown philosophers, along with the rest of mankind, to be addicted. No wonder that he has followers and admirers."

"[W]hen Hitler says that “the State dominates the nation because it alone represents it,” he is only putting into loose popular language the formula of Hegel, that “the State is the general substance, whereof individuals are but accidents.”"

"While scientists were performing astounding feats of disciplined reason [during the Enlightenment], breaking down the barriers of the “unknowable” in every field of knowledge, charting the course of light rays in space or the course of blood in the capillaries of man's body -- what philosophy was offering them, as interpretation of and guidance for their achievements was the plain Witchdoctory of Hegel, who proclaimed that matter does not exist at all, that everything is Idea (not somebody's idea, just Idea), and that this Idea operates by the dialectical process of a new “super-logic” which proves that contradictions are the law of reality, that A is non-A, and that omniscience about the physical universe (including electricity, gravitation, the solar system, etc.) is to be derived, not from the observation of facts, but from the contemplation of that Idea's triple somersaults inside his, Hegel's, mind. This was offered as a philosophy of reason."

"Hegel's philosophy is so odd that one would not have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound. It can quite easily be expounded lucidly in words of one syllable, but then its absurdity becomes obvious."

"When I was young, most teachers of philosophy in British and American universities were Hegelians, so that, until I read Hegel, I supposed there must be some truth to his system; I was cured, however, by discovering that everything he said on the philosophy of mathematics was plain nonsense."

"Hegel published his proof that there must be exactly seven planets just a week before the discovery of the eighth. The matter was hushed up, and a new, revised edition was hastily prepared; nevertheless, there were some who scoffed."

"My reason for rejecting Hegel and monism in general is my belief that the dialectical argument against relations is wholly unsound. I think such a statement as 'A is west of B' can be exactly true. You will find that Bradley's arguments on this subject pre-suppose that every proposition must be of the subject-predicate form. I think this the fundamental error of monism."

"If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right."

"Of the nineteenth-century philosophers, Hegel put me off by his language, as arrogant as it was laborious; I regarded him with downright mistrust. He seemed to me like a man who was caged in the edifice of his own words and was pompously gesticulating in his prison."

"Among Noah's sons was one who covered the shame of his father, but the Hegelians are still tearing away the cloak which time and oblivion had sympathetically thrown over the shame of their Master."

"But it was Hegel, among all German thinkers, who had the deepest and most enduring impact on Western thought and identity. It is often forgotten that his work was a reaction against the Romantics' passion for India's past. He borrowed Indian ideas (such as monism) while debating Indologists to argue against the value of Indian civilization. He posited that the West, and only the West, was the agent of history and teleology. India was the 'frozen other', which he used as a foil to define the West.... Hegel has a peculiarly phobic and blind reaction to Asia in general and India in particular. He laboriously criticizes Sanskrit and Indian civilization, arguing with European Indologists with the aim of assimilating some ideas (such as absolute idealism) into his own philosophy while postulating India as the inferior other in order to construct his theory of the West. Asia's place in history is as an infant, whereas the West is mature and everyone's eventual destination."

"The legacy of Hegel is that he blinded the West to the parochialism of its supposed 'universals' and hence consolidated the discourse on what was wrong about India. Hegel captures all cultures in his boxed-in categories of past/present, high/low, great/small. This is Reason's march forward to the realization of the Absolute in the temporal state. The degree to which Western scholarship has been influenced by his linear theory of history (including many Marxist and humanist accounts of history and the various philosophies built on such accounts) is truly amazing. His views found wide acceptance across the West and reshaped attitudes towards India. Hegel's theory of history has led to liberal Western supremacy, which hides behind the notion of providing the 'universals'. These European Enlightenment presuppositions became incorporated in the confluence of academic philosophy, philology, social theories and 'scientific' methodologies – all of which were driven by various imperial and colonial values alongside Christian theology. These influences, then, informed Indology, and they haunt South Asian Studies today."

"To be a Hegelian was considered a sine qua non, not only among philosophers, but quite as much among theologians, men of science, lawyers, artists, in fact, in every branch of human knowledge, at least in Prussia. If Christianity in its Protestant form was the state-religion of the kingdom, Hegelianism was its state philosophy."

"The absolute moment may be the absolute moment simply or the absolute moment of all previous history. That it is the absolute moment simply had been the contention of Hegel. His system of philosophy, the final philosophy, the perfect solution of all philosophic problems belongs to the moment when mankind has solved in principle its political problem by establishing the post-revolutionary state, the first state to recognize the equal dignity of every human being as such. This absolute peak of history, being the end of history, is at the same time the beginning of the final decline. In this respect Spengler has merely brought out the ultimate conclusion of Hegel's thought."

"(According to Glenn Alexander Magee) Hegel is a hermetic thinker: he replaced the philosopher with the sage and philosophy with theosophy, drawing on the Kabala, Alchemy, Rosicrucians, Gnosis and the Hermetic tradition, from Hermes Trismegistus onwards, in a broad line that goes from Meister Eckhart to Böhme, from Agrippa to Lullo and Paracelsus, from Pico della Mirandola to Giordano Bruno, to occultism and spiritism, astrology and the esotericism of Freemasonry. Hegel refers to an Invisible Church in his correspondence with Schelling and Hölderlin... But Hegel remains a Christian and a professor, not a magician or esotericist. He is inspired more by Luther than by Paracelsus."

"Let us state that the term "philosophy of history" may be applied to Hegel's speculation only with reservations. For Hegel's history is not to be found in reality, and the reality of history is not in Hegel. The harmony between construct and history could be achieved [by Hegel] only though the omission of an essential factor of reality. The factor Hegel excludes is the mystery of a history that wends its way into the future without our knowing its end. History as a whole is not necessarily an object of cognition; the meaning of the whole is not discernible. Hegel can construct, then, a meaningfully self-contained project of history only by assuming that the revelation of God in history is fully comprehensible. The appearance of Christ for him [for Hegel] the crux of world history; in this decisive epoch God had revealed the Logos -- reason -- in history. But the revalation was incomplete, and Hegel considered it man's duty to complete the incomplete revalation by raising the Logos to complete clarity in consciousness. This elevation to consciousness is in fact possible through the mind of the philosopher -- concretely, through the mind of Hegel: in the medium of the Hegelian dialectic the revelation of God in history reaches its fulfillment. The validity of the construct depends on the assumption that the mystery of revelation and of the course of history can be solved and made fully transparent through the dialectical unfolding of the Logos. We have here a construct closely related to that of Joachim of Flora. Joachim, too, was dissatisfied with the Augustinian waiting for the end; he, too, wanted to have an intelligible meaning in history here and now; and in order to make the meaning intelligible, he had to set himself up as the prophet to whom this meaning was clear. In the same manner, Hegel identifies his human logos with the Logos that is Christ, in order make the meaningful process of history fully comprehensible."

"Hegel experiences his state of alienation as an acute loss of reality, and even as death. But he cannot, or will not, initiate the movement of return; the epistrophe, the periagoge, is impossible. The despair or lostness, then, turns into the mood of revolt. Hegel closes his existence in on himself; he develops a false self; and lets his false self engage in an act of self-salvation that is meant to substitute for the periagoge of which his true self proves incapable. The alienation which, as long as it remains a state of lostness in open existence, can be healed through the return [to God], now hardens into the acheronta movebo of the sorcerer who, through magic operations, forces salvation from the non-reality of his lostness. Since, however, nonreality has no power of salvation, and Hegel's true self knows this quite well, the false self must take the next step and, by ‘the energy of thinking,’ transform the reality of God into the dialectics of his consciousness: the divine power accrues to the Subjeckt that is engaged in self-salvation through reaching the state of reflective self-consciousness. If the soul cannot return to God, God must be alienated from himself and drawn into the human state of alienation. And finally, since none of these operations in Second Reality would change anything in the surrounding First Reality, but result only in the isolation of the sorcerer from the rest of society, the whole world must be drawn into the imaginary Second Reality. The sorcerer becomes the savior of the ‘age’ by imposing his System of Science as the new revelation on mankind at large. All mankind must join the sorcerer in the hell of his damnation."

"Hegel is explicit on the point that through his conceptual speculation one achieves a salvation that has not been delivered through Christ, or has been delivered only in an imperfect form and now will be delivered in perfect form by Hegel. When you go through his meditative exercise you are in the state of salvation and beyond being mere man."

"Hegel expressed his formulation that the purpose of Phenomenology is to find the magic words with which you can conjure up the shape of the future. He was, consummately, a sorcerer. [...] it is quite consciously a magic act by which reality is transmogrified into the perfect reality."

"We must first of all, however, definitely understand, in reference to the end we have in view, that it is not the concern of philosophy to produce religion in any individual. Its existence is, on the contrary, presupposed as forming what is fundamental in every one. So far as man's essential nature is concerned, nothing new is to be introduced into him. To try to do this would be as absurd as to give a dog printed writings to chew, under the idea that in this way you could put mind into it. It may happen that religion is awakened in the heart by means of philosophical knowledge, but it is not necessarily so. It is not the purpose of philosophy to edify, and quite as little is it necessary for it to make good its claims by showing in any particular case that it must produce religious feelings in the individual."

"The science of religion is one science within philosophy; indeed it is the final one. In that respect it presupposes the other philosophical disciplines and is therefore a result."

"The beginning of religion, more precisely its content, is the concept of religion itself, that God is the absolute truth, the truth of all things, and subjectively that religion alone is the absolutely true knowledge."

"The Church has consistently and justly refused to allow that reason might stand in opposition to faith, and yet be placed under subjection to it. The human spirit in its inmost nature is not something so divided up that two contradictory elements might subsist together in it. If discord has arisen between intellectual insight and religion, and is not overcome in knowledge, it leads to despair, which comes in the place of reconciliation. This despair is reconciliation carried out in a one-sided manner. The one side is cast away, the other alone held fast; but a man cannot win true peace in this way. The one alternative is, for the divided spirit to reject the demands of the intellect and try to return to simple religious feeling. To this, however, the spirit can only attain by doing violence to itself, for the independence of consciousness demands satisfaction, and will not be thrust aside by force; and to renounce independent thought, is not within the power of the healthy mind. Religious feeling becomes yearning hypocrisy, and retains the moment of non-satisfaction. The other alternative is a one-sided attitude of indifference toward religion, which is either left unquestioned and let alone, or is ultimately attacked and opposed. That is the course followed by shallow spirits."

"Spirit is knowledge; but in order that knowledge should exist, it is necessary that the content of that which it knows should have attained to this ideal form, and should in this way have been negated. What Spirit is must in that way have become its own, it must have described this circle; then these forms, differences, determinations finite qualities, must have existed in order that it should make them its own. This represents both the way and the goal-that Spirit should have attained to its own notion or conception, to that which it implicitly is, and in this way only, the way which has been indicated in its abstract moments, does it attain it. Revealed religion is manifested religion, because in it God has become wholly manifest. Here all is proportionate to the notion; there is no longer anything secret in God."

"Faith must now get what is essentially the form of mediation. It itself is already this form implicitly, for it is knowledge of God and of his character, and this knowledge is in itself a process, a movement—is life, mediation. It is involved in the very nature of the freedom which is the inner characteristic of faith, that it should not be what we at first called substantial, solid unity, that it should not be idea; in freedom I exist on the contrary as that activity in the affirmation which is infinite negation of itself. Now if we should wish to give to mediation the form of an external mediation as the foundation of faith, then such a form would be a wrong one. This mediation, of which the basis is something external is false. The content of faith my indeed come to be my means of instruction, miracle, authority, etc. These may be the foundation of faith as subjective faith. But it is just in giving this position to the content whereby it assumes the character of a basis for me, that we go on a wrong track; and when faith is reached, this externality must drop away. In faith I make that my own which comes to me thus, and it ceases to be for me an Other. Immediate faith may be so defined as being the witness of the Spirit to Spirit, and this implies that no finite content has any place in it. Spirit witnesses only of Spirit, and only infinite things are mediated by means of external grounds. The true foundation of faith is the Spirit, and the witness of the Spirit is inherently living. Verification may at first appear in that external formal manner, but this must drop away. It may thus happen that faith in a religion has its commencement form such testimony, from miracles, that is in a finite content. Christ Himself, however, spoke against miracles, He reproached the Jews for demanding them of Him, and said to His disciples, “The Spirit will guide you into all truth.”"

"These are the Galla and Gaga tribes, which, as the most savage and most barbarous of conquerors, have repeatedly descended upon the coasts since the year 1542, pouring forth from the interior and inundating the whole country. These look upon man in the strength of his consciousness as too exalted to be capable of being killed by anything so obscure as the power of nature. What therefore takes place is, that sick people, in whose case magic has proved ineffectual, are put to death by their friends. In the same way the wild tribes of North America too killed their aged who had reached decrepitude, the meaning of which is unmistakable, namely, that man is not to perish by means of nature, but is to have due honour rendered to him at human hands. There is another people again who have the belief that everything would go to ruin if their high-priest were to die a natural death. He is therefore executed as soon as ever he becomes ill and weak; if a high-priest should notwithstanding die of some disease, they believe that some other person killed him by means of magic, and the magicians have to ascertain who the murderer was, when he is at once made away with. On the death of a king in particular, many persons are killed: according to a missionary of older days, it is the devil of the king who is slain. Such, then, is the very first form of religion, which cannot indeed as yet be properly called religion."

"An Englishman who, by a most careful investigation into the various representations, has sought to discover what is meant by Brahma, believes that Brahma is an epithet of praise, and is used as such just because he is not looked on as being himself solely this One, but, on the contrary, everything says of itself that it is Brahma. I refer to what Mill says in his History of India. He proves from many Indian writings that it is an epithet of praise which is applied to various deities, and does not represent the conception of perfection or unity which we associate with it. This is a mistake, for Brahma is in one aspect the One, the Immutable, who has, however, the element of change in him, and because of this, the rich variety of forms which is thus essentially his own is also predicated of him. Vishnu is also called the Supreme Brahma. Water and the sun are Brahma."

"That man should think of God as nothingness must at first sight seem astonishing, must appear to us a most peculiar idea. But, considered more closely, this determination means that God is absolutely nothing determined. He is the Undetermined; no determinateness of any kind pertains to God; He is the Infinite. This is equivalent to saying that God is the negation of all particularity."

"Among the Romans in Christian times Mithras-worship as very widely spread, and so late as the Middle Ages we meet with a secret Mithras-worship ostensibly connected with the order of the Knights-Templars. Mithras thrusting the knife into the neck of the ox is a figurative representation belonging essentially to the cult of Mithras, of which examples have been frequently found in Europe."

"In the religion of absolute Spirit the outward form of God is not made by the human spirit. God Himself is, in accordance with the true Idea, self-consciousness which exists in and for itself, Spirit. He produces Himself of His own act, appears as Being for “Other”; He is, by His own act, the Son; in the assumption of a definite form as the Son, the other part of the process is present, namely, that God loves the Son, posits Himself as identical with Him, yet also as distinct from Him. The assumption of form makes its appearance in the aspect of determinate Being as independent totality, but as a totality which is retained within love; here, for the first time, we have Spirit in and for itself. The self-consciousness of the Son regarding Himself is at the same time His knowledge of the Father; in the Father the Son has knowledge of His own self, of Himself. At our present stage, on the contrary, the determinate existence of God as God is not existence posited by Himself, but by what is Other. Here Spirit has stopped short half way."

"In the first element God is beyond time, as the eternal Idea, existing in the element of eternity in so far as eternity is contrasted with time. Thus time in this complete and independent form, time in-and-for-self, unfolds itself and breaks up into past, present, and future. Thus the divine history in its second stage as appearance is regarded as the past, it is, it has Being, but it is Being which is degraded to a mere semblance. In taking on the form of appearance it is immediate existence, which is at the same time negated, and this is the past. The divine history is thus regarded as something past, as representing the Historical properly so called. The third element is the present, yet it is only the limited present, not the eternal present, but rather the present which distinguishes itself from the past and future, and represents the element of feeling, of the immediate subjectivity of spiritual Being which is now."

"What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it."

"Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help."

"To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual."