Some of Hegel's critical formulations:
- The truth is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development.
- What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational. On this conviction the plain man like the philosopher takes his stand, and from it philosophy starts in its study of the universe of mind as well as the universe of nature. If reflection, feeling, or whatever form subjective consciousness may take, looks upon the present as something vacuous and looks beyond it with the eyes of superior wisdom, it finds itself in a vacuum...[T]he great thing is to apprehend in the show of the temporal and transient the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present.
- To comprehend what is, this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason. Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age, jump over Rhodes. If his theory really goes beyond the world as it is and builds an ideal one as it ought to be, that world exists indeed, but only in his opinions, an unsubstantial element where anything you please may, in fancy, be built... To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thereby to enjoy the present, this is the rational insight which reconciles us to the actual, the reconciliation which philosophy affords to those in whom there has once arisen an inner voice bidding them to comprehend, not only to dwell in what is substantive while still retaining subjective freedom, but also to possess subjective freedom while standing not in anything particular and accidental but in what exists absolutely
Some Explanations about Hegel and Hegelianism:
- Hegel's philosophical system was perhaps the most ambitious since Aristotle, comprising logic, psychology, religion, aesthetics, history, law. As well as his published works, many volumes were compiled from the notes of his long-suffering students. Though they laboriously took down almost every word, one wonders how much they understood.
- Hegel's language is abstruse and sometimes tortuous, and makes great demands on the reader.
- Pantheism is the motivating force and the core of Hegel's system. It is a grandiose idealistic pantheism, in which all existence and all history are part of God's cosmic self-development.
- God is absolute spirit. But he also desires to manifest himself and to know himself. So it is part of his essence to become real, in particular material things, in individual persons and in the process of change and history. God is present and active in the real world. He acts through humans, and is conscious of himself through humans.
- God embodies and develops himself first in nature, then in the rising stages of human consciousness and civilization. Human history and culture are God's working out of his self-realization in the world. Individual humans - especially the great heroes of world history - are the principal means of change, while peoples and states are the embodiment of each phase.
- Hegel seems to have had an ethnocentric and egocentric view of the culmination of this great process. The German nation were the highest carriers of the wave of God's development. The bureaucratic monarchy of the Prussian type was the highest form of state. The pinnacle of philosophy - through which God at last becomes fully conscious of himself - was, implicitly, Hegel's own system.
- Hegel had an immense influence on German thought - not always positive. Some of his ideas had a clear aftermath stretching down to Hitler: his insistence on the identification of the individual, the nation and the state; his stress on Great Men as the only real agents of history; his belief that individual welfare or suffering simply did not matter in the sweep of world history, advancing like a juggernaut over the corpses of individuals. Hegel also had influence through the young philosophers who rebelled against his system, or developed it in ways that he would have disowned. The best known of these were David Strauss, Max Stirner, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx and Engels rejected Hegel's idealism, but took on his view that history proceeded through the dialectical process of thesis, contradiction and synthesis.
Hegel also had a powerful impact on the development of pantheism and panentheism.