closed the University of Jena, and so Hegel, whose inheritance had now been
exhausted, was forced to find other employment.
After a stint as a newspaper editor, Hegel served eight years in Nürnberg as the
rector of a Gymnasium(high school). There he published his second major work,
Science of Logic(1812–1816). He also met and married a young woman from a dis-
tinguished family who was half his age, and they had two sons. In 1816, Hegel
accepted a chair of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. He continued his
practice of producing a major book at each place he worked by publishing the
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outlinein 1817. In 1818, Hegel
moved to his final institution, the University of Berlin. There he published his
Philosophy of Right(1821)—and became famous throughout Europe. He remained
in Berlin until his death from cholera in 1831.
Following his death, a group of his friends published an eighteen-volume
collection of his works, including his early essays and his lectures on aesthetics,
the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history (portions of which are
reprinted here), and the philosophy of religion.
Like all philosophers of his age, Hegel was greatly influenced by Kant. Kant had
managed to synthesize two previously disparate realities—the rational world of
ideas (emphasized by rationalists) with the phenomenal world of perception
(emphasized by empiricists). But in so doing, Kant separated the noumenal world
of “things-in-themselves” from the phenomenal world of experience and declared
the noumenal world unknowable. In a sense, he had reconciled two competing epis-
temologies—Continental Rationalism and British Empiricism—at the expense of
abandoning metaphysics. Hegel sought to go one step further than Kant and effect a
complete synthesis that would not only draw together competing epistemologies
but would also show the connection between epistemology and metaphysics. The
key to this synthesis is the recognition that consciousness is the ultimate reality, or,
to use his famous phrase, “What is real is rational—what is rational is real.” That is,
metaphysical reality (the real) isIdea or Spirit or Mind (that which knows). The
resulting philosophy is called “Absolute Idealism” because all things that exist are
essentially related to absolute Idea or Spirit or Mind.
According to Hegel, traditional rationalism (what he calls raisonnement) tends to
classify all experience formally into abstract, lifeless universals. Taken to its logical
extreme, rationalists end up with the abstraction “Being”: “But this mere Being, as it
is mere abstraction, is therefore the absolutely negative: which, in a similarly imme-
diate aspect, is just NOTHING.” By abstracting away the concreteness or particularity
of actual experience, one is left with Being which is Nothing. The short article “Who
Thinks Abstractly?” (1807–1808?), reprinted here in Walter Kaufmann’s translation,
clearly conveys Hegel’s contempt for the process of abstraction.
Whereas Being and Nothing are both identical and yet contradictory, according to
Hegel, “the truth of Being and Nothing is... the unity of the two: and this unity is
BECOMING.” The unity of Becoming does not obliterate Being and Nothing but
holds both in tension in a higher truth. The two parts of the contradiction, together
with that which unites or overcomes them, make up a triad. This method of overcom-
ing contradictions by moving to a higher level of truth is known as the “dialectic.”
Hegel proposed to develop a complete dialectical system of reality based on the three
foundational triads of “Being—Nothing—Becoming,” “Being—Essence—Notion,”
908 G.W.F. HEGEL
