Hegel

An Intellectual Biography

Horst Althaus, Michael Tarsh

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745683386
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

This accessible and highly readable book is the first full-length biography of Hegel to be published since the largely outdated treatments of the nineteenth century. Althaus draws on new historical material and scholarly sources about the life and times of this most enigmatic and influential of modern philosophers. He paints a living portrait of a thinker whose personality was more complex than is often imagined, and shows that Hegel's relation to his revolutionary times was also more ambiguous than is usually accepted.

Althaus presents a broad chronological narrative of Hegel's development from his early theological studies in Tübingen and the associated unpublished writings, profoundly critical of the established religious orthodoxies. He traces Hegel's years of philosophical apprenticeship with Schelling in Jena as he struggled for an independent intellectual position, up to the crowning period of influence and success in Berlin where Hegel appeared as the advocate of the modern Prussian state. Althaus tells a vivid story of Hegel's life and his intellectual and personal crises, drawing generously on the philosopher's own words from his extensive correspondence. His central role in the cultural and political life of the time is illuminated by the impressions and responses of his contemporaries, such as Schelling, Schleiermacher and Goethe.

This panoramic introduction to Hegel's life, work and times will be a valuable resource for scholars, students and anyone interested in this towering figure of philosophy.

1

Origins

When Hegel was born in Stuttgart on 27 August 1770 the very landscape of the place seems already to have left a powerful mark upon the character that would subsequently emerge. Hegel was born a native of Württemberg, and always continued – even in later years as a salaried official of the Prussian state – to consider himself as a Württembergian.

According to family tradition the Hegels were descended from immigrants from the Steiermark or Kärnten region, persecuted Protestants who had sought protection in Württemberg in the middle of the sixteenth century. One of these immigrants was a Johann Hegel, potter by profession, who had settled in Grossbottwar in the Neckar region and eventually managed to become mayor of this little town. His numerous descendants in Württemberg included the Pastor Hegel who baptized Friedrich Schiller and the philosopher’s father, Georg Ludwig Hegel, ducal secretary and later counsellor of state. The philosopher’s grandfather had been chief intendant in Altensteig in the Black Forest, whilst his mother, Maria Magdalena, came from an old Stuttgart family of the seventeenth century which had spawned theologians, lawyers and officials, and which could be traced back on the maternal side to the Württemberg reformer Johannes Brenz.

For a young man with the family background that Hegel possessed and the interests that he would later develop, Württemberg in the latter half of the eighteenth century was an extremely auspicious place in which to be born. Alongside Saxony and the Saxon-Thuringian principalities, the state of Württemberg could boast the most developed educational system in the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’. Prussia at the time still lagged far behind in this respect, and the only teachers it could call upon in any abundance were retired soldiers and war-wounded veterans who were very poorly remunerated for their educational services.

The exemplary educational institutions were all to be found in Saxony and Württemberg. Saxony could draw on schools in Meissen, Grimma and Schulpforta to supply its future state officials and civil servants, and especially the clerics and high-school teachers whom the country constantly required, and the philologists who, having read their Homer and developed an elegant Latin style, would leave their institutes of learning feeling properly equipped for any post or task. There was a highly developed system of financial assistance available which was administered in accordance with two essential criteria for selection of candidates: the steadfast faith and appropriate behaviour of a good Lutheran Christian, and the grammatical mastery of the classical languages. If things were in good order here, then it was felt that everything else could be left to take care of itself.

In Hegel’s time the Swabians of Württemberg represented the only Protestant German community south of the river Main which occupied a self-enclosed territory with jurisdiction of its own, and that since 1565, the year in which, after protracted sectarian conflicts, the State Assembly irrevocably declared the Lutheranism of the Augsburg Confession as the sole official religion of state. In this respect the Württemberg Swabians clearly distinguished themselves from the Swabians who still occupied ancient Habsburg territory under remarkable arrangements and structures of political rule which, dissociated from one another as they largely were, never succeeded in developing into any cultural or political unity. So-called ‘Austrian Swabia’, together with Vorarlberg and Breisgau, formed part of lower Austria and was governed until 1752 from Innsbruck, and subsequently from Freiburg. The region in question, with its various flatlands on the upper Danube as well as in the north, belonged amongst the outlying territories of the Habsburg crown, although it also boasted a number of ‘Free Cities’ and principalities. But under the rule of Karl Eugen the idea of ‘Swabia’ came increasingly to be identified with Württemberg because the dukedom, with its approximately 500,000 inhabitants, constituted a strong centralized state in marked contrast to the scattered Swabian settlements beyond its borders with their largely Catholic populations. On the one hand an absolutist regime of an eighteenth-century monarch with leanings towards the Enlightenment and a centralized, pragmatic and secularized system of public administration, and on the other an antiquated expression of Imperial rule with strong feudal remnants that tamely resisted the state and its all-powerful monarchy. What the categories of ‘state’, ‘monarchy’ and ‘feudalism’ effectively signified as political and historical factors at this time can be most fruitfully studied in relation to Swabia, where these forms all coexisted with one another, variously in cooperation or conflict as the case might be. In addition Württemberg was characterized by the presence of a state church which since the Reformation had continued to exercise its undiminished influence, through all other political changes, and which still closely controlled the lives of its subjects from the cradle to the grave.

Württemberg is a country rich in towns, but, with the exception of the princely residences of Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg, there is little real separation between ‘town’ and ‘country’ as such. The countryside effectively begins in the towns and penetrates deep within them, its plots and allotments already forming part of the latter, its rows of houses incorporating stables for cattle and store-rooms for agricultural equipment used out in the fields beyond the town. Even in 1849 Friedrich Theodor Vischer could describe Tübingen as a rather ‘dirty and desolate little village’ where cows were still being driven through the narrow streets. Stutttgart is not like Dresden any more than Lessing is like Schiller, and even less like Leipzig which already appeared to Goethe, even before Hegel was born, as a ‘little Paris’. None the less, the princely residence of Stuttgart and its roughly twenty thousand inhabitants was a comfortable and attractive place, with its parks, gardens, promenades and businesses, with its stores and shops serving the demands of court, and formed a striking contrast with the surrounding countryside. The area around the New Palace, the English Garden which faces towards Cannstatt, the neatly regular streets in the suburbs and the Residential Palace in Ludwigsburg, all these are classical expressions of the eighteenth century.

It is difficult to free ourselves from the image of Franz Eugen’s Württemberg as a kind of educational forcing house – not least because of Schiller’s early experiences there which drove him to abandon the state and its residential capital. Nor were the characteristic features of political absolutism lacking here either: witness the exercise of arbitrary government, the examples of financial extravagance, an established culture of court ‘mistresses’ with Franziska von Hohenheim as the conspicuous centre of attention, and the fortress of Hohenasperg which essentially functioned as a political prison. The fate of the poet Schubart, whom the Duke had deviously tempted to set foot in Württemberg territory and then confined to prison there under the most wretched conditions for ten years, had shocked people throughout the German lands of the ‘Empire’, including Frederick the Great, who eventually succeeded in getting him released. But the political system was largely felt to be an artificial intrusion, and hardly exercised any deeper effects upon the predominantly agricultural life of the country. The memory of the precious ‘System of Ancient Law’ (Das gute alte Recht) had never completely disappeared. The latter very much represented the feudalism which Hegel would later bitterly reject, but it also stood for the other more attractive aspect of a system where the estates could still offer some resistance to the power of the absolute monarch.

But it was precisely this absolutist power which encouraged modernizing tendencies in the educational system in contrast to the ecclesiastical monopoly of influence that had formerly prevailed. What the Duke expected from the Karlsschule was less a supply of young blood for the pulpit or schoolroom, something which in Swabia had been abundantly available for centuries already, but rather, in addition to military officers, a reliable source of trained doctors and professional people for the technical and administrative elite of the country. And he would enlist such people wherever they could be found. As a pupil at the Karlsschule Schiller, for example, had studied medicine and natural sciences without even considering theology as an option.

None the less, the pragmatically oriented educational policy so in evidence here was much less characteristic of Württemberg generally. It would be a long time before it could even begin to compete with the theological traditions of Swabian education. The prospective theologian had to embark upon a path that led from minor seminaries to the University of Tübingen, and typically speaking from schools like those at Maulbronn or Babeuren to the Tübingen Stift. And, as in Saxony, there was also a highly developed system of financial support for the selected students. They would eventually arrive at an ecclesiastical institution without further pretensions, namely a seminary expressly designed to lead to the eventual ordination of an officially accredited preacher, the archetypal figure in whom the ‘Swabian system’ would find its ultimate fulfilment!

And this was also the path which Hegel’s father, the secretary of the ducal finance office, imagined for his eldest son. Wilhelm entered the German School at the age of three, and the Latin School at the age of five, but the original plan to send him finally to one of the Württemberg seminaries which prepared students to enter the university was dropped. Instead he attended the Stuttgart Gymnasium from the age of seven – only the year before the family had moved from the less select Eberhardstrasse to new and prosperous quarters in the Röderschen Gasse.

This was both a backward and a forward step. It was a backward step in so far as it deviated from the standard Swabian pattern of optimal educational choice; but it was something of a forward step from the perspective of Stuttgart court society and its conventions, since the Gymnasium Illustre paid generous tribute to more elevated educational aims. According to his station, Hegel’s father, if not exactly a man of the ducal court, was certainly a man of the ducal administration. But the Gymnasium was not the foremost school in Stuttgart. It was the Karlsschule that attracted the best teachers and the personal attentions of the Duke, and it was here that Hegel’s brother Ludwig was sent. There was no question of sending Hegel there on account of the practical orientation of the teaching and Hegel’s professed intention to become a minister. Unlike Schelling and Hölderlin and other young students from the smaller towns and regions of the area, Hegel did not find himself forced into entering one of the cloister schools in the country.

At the Gymnasium Hegel showed himself to be an exemplary student who responded to the authority of his teachers and specifically sought out further personal contact with them. This was particularly true for his class teacher Löffler, who had once presented the eight-year-old Hegel with the Eschenberg translation of Shakespeare’s works, and whom Hegel liked to accompany on his walks.

Hegel showed himself meticulous in complying with his duties at school. Plato and his Socrates, together with Homer and Aristotle, were naturally the focus of daily attention on his part. Amongst the Greek tragic poets he was particularly inspired by Sophocles’ Antigone as well as Euripides. He read the classical authors like Livy, Cicero and Longinus (whom he also translated) and Epictetus. His early experience in reading Greek came with the study of the New Testament. And since the young Württemberg schoolboy was already expected to become a cleric in due course, he had to study some Hebrew as well, a subject for which the curriculum allowed two hours’ study a week, just the same as for Greek. As far as more recent German literature was concerned Hegel acquainted himself with Goethe’s Werther, Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and Schiller’s play Fiesco. But the book which seemed to have particularly absorbed his attention at this time was Sophie’s Journey from Memel to Saxony by Johann Timotheus Hermes, a vast novel in six volumes describing the adventures of a young woman during the Seven Years War and the Russian occupation of East Prussia. The author allows himself, very much in the manner of Fielding or Richardson, to discourse at length about the realities of everyday life, with vivid scenes set in taverns and domestic houses featuring cooks and stable boys, and post-horses in the country, etc. Hegel found it impossible, as he confesses in his diary, to tear himself away from the book, which was indeed one of the most popular literary works of the century. Schopenhauer later took the opportunity of pouring contempt on Hegel’s judgement: ‘My favourite book is Homer, Hegel’s is Sophie’s Journey.’

Hegel essentially used his personal diary from the very beginning to record rationalistic precepts and observations, and rather precocious ones at that for someone of his age. There is no evidence here of participation in youthful pranks or transgressions of any kind, and Hegel the schoolboy and student seems never to have been young at all. Early on he responds to the problems and difficulties which social life can bring with a rather disarming good-humouredness. Harmless camaraderie, games of chess and card-playing with very low stakes characterize his spare time and clearly give much enjoyment. He looks on pretty girls with pleasure, but only at a safe distance. Failing to go to church one Sunday was the extent of his boldness, and merits a corresponding entry in the diary. He was even prepared to visit a Catholic church and observe proceedings there in order to compare it all with his own Lutheran background. He praised the priest’s sermon on that occasion, though not without recording his considerable antipathy to the ceremony of the Mass itself.

The burning question as to who would give the final school address at the end of the year – ‘On the Corrupted State of the Arts and Sciences amongst the Turks’ – was settled diplomatically by the authorities through entrusting the task to five pupils. As the top of his year Hegel was the last one to speak at the annual ceremony, something he did with all due solemnity, and much praise for his teachers of course. The address revealed all the characteristic stylistic features of a school speech. There is one point, however, which is rather more than a standard gesture of humility and seems to express a genuinely heartfelt Hegelian sentiment: ‘We can already learn to see now, although it is too late for some, that such neglect [of study and learning] will procure the disadvantageous effects that our teachers have warned about.’ In other words: what we ourselves neglect to do is lost for ever, and through our own deed.

That seems the appropriate tone for a self-searching Lutheran sinner with downcast eyes, one who none the less is sure of delivery from the errors and the confusions of youth and already desirous of attaining a maturity which will protect him from the errors he must remorsefully admit to now. A eulogy for a maturity which apparently cannot be acquired too early and for a rationality of outlook which should be seriously cultivated from the first. This confession, and the insights it harboured, represents more than a rhetorical topos and honestly reflects the attitudes of a precocious young man expressing his own experience on leaving school. He gladly recognizes that it is far better to live in Württemberg than in the Turkish Empire and is more than willing to offer heartfelt thanks to the Duke and his teachers for that.

2

The Tübingen Stift

Hegel entered the portals of the University of Tübingen in the autumn of 1788. His matriculation papers specify the exact date as 27 October and enter him in the Faculty of Theology. There had never been any real alternative as far as Hegel was concerned. This course had already been decided upon long before he graduated from the Stuttgart Gymnasium and it was in complete accordance with his father’s wishes.

Hegel had already made a successful application for a specific grant to support his studies and this, together with specific permission from the Duke, allowed him to enrol at the University Stift or seminary without further ado. The Stift, originally founded by Duke Ulrich, was located in a former Augustinian monastery that had been dissolved in 1547 and was now used to train and educate prospective Lutheran pastors and high-school teachers who were native citizens of Württemberg.

The ‘Ephor’ or Director of the Stift was the same Jacob Friedrich Abel who had once been Schiller’s teacher in Stuttgart. The actual day-to-day running of the institution was largely in the hands of the so-called ‘Repetenten’. The characteristic discipline of a seminary was maintained throughout the essentially semi-monastic institution. The various punishments and rewards which the students had acquired were carefully added up three times a year to provide a powerful yardstick for assessing their overall performance. All transgressions were punished with specific disciplinary measures called ‘Caritionen’, which ranged from threats to withdraw the standard wine ration at meal times to actual periodic incarceration.

With its barely three hundred students the University of Tübingen at this time was a supremely undistinguished institution, essentially little more than a training ground for people who would eventually serve in the churches and schools of Württemberg, while students destined for professions in the law or medicine would attend the Karlsschule in Stuttgart instead. The Enlightenment culture of the time, to which even a place like Tübingen was not entirely immune, was still essentially Enlightenment in the tradition of Christian Wolff, and knowledge of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which had already appeared in 1781, was largely the secret prerogative of more forward and precocious minds. And Hegel himself was certainly not amongst these. But quite irrespective of Kant or Wolff, Rousseau or Herder, the university teachers like Storr and Schnurrer, Flatt and Rosier effectively exercised their own narrow authority in the lecture halls. They gave priority to Christian dogmatics over exegesis or ecclesiastical history, and emphasized simple biblical faith of an orthodox or pietistic kind. These exemplary teachers of traditional theology presented the young Hegel, who had already accepted the superiority of Greek culture as a student at the Stuttgart Gymnasium, with the theoretical and practical reality of ‘Christianity’, as a phenomenon of ‘world history’, as a new principle in relation to the classical world.

Hegel reacted to the academic teaching at Tübingen with his own enormous capacity for lethargy. This was lethargy as an escape mechanism, as a means of intellectual survival. The Hegel of these years in Tübingen revealed a certain idleness, a general tendency to allow things to go their own way. This is also true for the numerous occasions on which he transgressed the Seminary rules (as many as eighteen times in 1790): he was punished and reproached by the administration for failing to attend lectures, for neglecting the accepted dress code, for going on drinking expeditions at night and sleeping in till the following midday, and for absenting himself from prayers. A year later he was punished with solitary confinement for leaving the Stift without permission and returning late from vacation.

The official documents up till 1791 remark upon a certain deterioration in his conduct but continue to praise his intellectual abilities and industry. His frequent absence from lectures is also duly noted. It seemed rather characteristic of the Stift that, without being generally permissive, it none the l...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Translator’s Note
• 1. Origins
• 2. The Tübingen Stift
• 3. Between Monarchy and Republic
• 4. The Tutoring Years
• 5. Schelling’s Apprentice
• 6. Jena contra Tübingen
• 7. Between Berne and Frankfurt
• 8. Theological Writings
• 9. A Stuttgart Romance
• 10. Farewell to Frankfurt
• 11. The Frankfurt Writings
• 12. The Unpaid Lecturer
• 13. Domestic Affairs
• 14. A Difference with Schelling
• 15. The Phenomenology of Spirit
• 16. Journalist in Bamberg
• 17. A Turning Point
• 18. Headmaster in Nuremberg
• 19. The Science of Logic
• 20. Professor in Heidelberg
• 21. Feudalism or Monarchy?
• 22. From Baden to Prussia
• 23. The Prussian State Philosopher?
• 24. The Philosophy of Right
• 25. The Philosophy of History
• 26. A Journey to the Low Countries
• 27. The Philosophy of Art
• 28. The Austrian Journey
• 29. The History of Philosophy
• 30. The Journey to France and the Stay in Weimar
• 31. The Philosophy of Religion
• 32. Absolute Monarch in the Empire of Philosophy
• 33. The End
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Page