George Hegel"We do not need to be shoemakers to know if our shoes fit,
and just as little have we any need to be professionals
to acquire knowledge of matters of universal interest."
Another German philosopher in the strictest sense, George Hegel took up the philosophy introduced by Immanuel Kant and developed it into something even more comprehensive. Although he acknowledged the value of concepts like unity, spirit and the absolute, he nonetheless acquired a large group of detractors due to the confusing nature of his philosophy. Two of his greatest critics were Bertrand Russell and Dr. Carl Jung. Russell acknowledged the fact that, "the leading academic philosophers, both in America and Britain, were largely Hegelian" but saw Hegel as “the single most difficult philosopher to understand”. Carl Jung also made a merciless attack on him in his book On the Nature of the Psyche. |
As great thinkers often reserve their worst criticism for those with whom they most highly respect, it may be said that Dr. Jung at least recognized the great influence of Hegel’s work. It is partly ironic that Hegel had tried to show how thought fails to have significant value when it is presented as a mere abstraction. Nevertheless, he made great pains to show how thought must be grounded within its historical context in order to be more properly understood. In his major work The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel went on to trace the formation of self-consciousness through history. He referred to Hindu thought of similar to that of Advaita-Vedanta in his introduction and then again in his Science of Logic. He also made great efforts to show the value of “others” in the awakening of our own self-consciousness and described history as a progression in which each successive age emerges as a solution to the problems in the preceding age.
Hegel also developed many ideas out of his method of “dialectical logic” which is a term that refers to the method of “question and answer” in philosophy and was first and most notably used by Socrates in what was called the “Socratic dialectic”. Hegel’s method described how one concept, known as a “thesis”, would always inevitably generate its opposite, known as its “antithesis”. The interaction of these two concepts would then lead to a third concept known as “synthesis”.
Hegel published only four books during his life: The Phenomenology of Spirit, The Science of Logic, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences and The Elements of the Philosophy of Right. His thinking can be broadly viewed within the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Kant. Other philosophers which might be placed in this group would be Meister Eckhart, Jakob Boehme Spinoza, Goethe and Rousseau. Philosophers who opposed Hegel's philosophy included Karl Marx, Arthur Schopenhaur, Soren Kierkegaard, Bertrand Russell and Carl Jung. References Hegel, Georg, E. S. Haldane, and Frances H. Simson, (1995), Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 3: Medieval and Modern Philosophy, University of Nebraska Press |