G.W.F. Hegel: An Introduction

Matt Qvortrup observes the watcher of the world spirit.

- Matt Qvortrup

No philosopher has been more influential in the modern age than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). He has inspired individuals as diverse as Karl Marx, Francis Fukuyama, and, latterly, the football manager Jose Mourinho. “Have you ever read Hegel?” the former Manchester United boss asked a baffled journalist at a press conference in 2018.

The oldest son of a civil servant from south-west Germany, Georg Hegel was born a quarter of a millennium ago, in 1770. As a theology student in Stuttgart, Hegel feared that he would become a Populärphilosoph – a populariser of complex theories. There was little danger of that! In fact, few thinkers are as difficult to understand. Hegel himself in his monumentally dense Phenomenology of Spirit grumbled about the “complaints regarding the unintelligibility of philosophical writings from individuals who otherwise possess the educational requirements for understanding them.” But being difficult to read does not mean he is wrong. It is odd that we are content to carefully analyse a mathematical proof, willing to ponder poetry again and again, but often not willing to do the same with philosophy. Critics of Hegel’s philosophy sometime fail to understand that this roommate of the romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin sought to combine the stringency of mathematics with the beauty and grace of the poetic. We should, for this reason, follow Hegel when he says that philosophy must be “read over and over before it can be understood” (Phenomenology of Spirit, p.39).