Quotes About Hegel

Modern philosophies in which history is a process of human self-realization are therefore spin-offs from the mystical speculations of medieval theologians. When Hegel envisioned history as a rational process, he was able to do so because – like Plato and Plotinus – he believed the world was a manifestation of Logos.

Hegel further believed that all things owe their existence to their opposites and that all opposites are actually identical.

Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity.

The differences between Buber and Hegel far outnumber their similarities. But they are at one in their opposition to any otherworldliness, in their insistence on finding in the present whatever beauty and redemption there may be, and in their refusal to pin their hopes on any beyond.

There is no absolute 'in-itself,' and no absolute 'for us'—for the same reasons, i.e., their reciprocal relativization, their 'mutual coincidence.' -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

With the cogito begins the struggle between consciousnesses in which, as Hegel says, each one seeks the death of the other. For this battle to even begin, for each consciousness to even suspect the external presences that it negates, they must have a common ground and they must remember their peaceful coexistence in the world of childhood.

The (ultimate) formula: 'the absolute is the subject' does not mean that there is only a subject. The 'free' is freedom of the free and the related. The absolute is the 'sameness' of the absolute and the relative. The true subject is the subjectivity of the subject and the object. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

Dialectic is not a property of consciousness, rather consciousness is the property of dialectic. Dialectic has consciousness. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

In the movement of experience, which brings understanding, we reach the absolute which is not something behind it or under it, but which is a water-mark within it and which exists only as a water-mark. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

Philosophy seeks to be philosophy while remaining non-philosophy, i.e. a 'negative philosophy' (in the sense of 'negative theology'). 'Negative philosophy' has access to the absolute, not as 'beyond,' as a positive second order, but another order which must be on this side, the double, inaccessible without being passed through. True philosophy scoffs at philosophy; true philosophy is a-philosophical. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel

According to Hegel, one attains the absolute by way of a phenomenology (the appearance of mind; mind in the phenomenon). This is not because the phenomenal mind is on one level of a scale, after which one moves on to the absolute, but because the absolute would not be absolute if it did not appear as absolute. Phenomenology is the whole truth from a certain point of view.

The Absolute is Mind – this is the supreme definition of the Absolute." -- Hegel

Hegel did not earn his reputation as a "difficult" philosopher for nothing. Yet no philosophy has ever been as magnificent, as ambitious, and as inspiring. Hegel showed how humanity and God are inextricably linked. He showed how it can truly be said that we can become God.

In short, Hegel argued that the capitalist organization of work emerging in his time could be ethically justified only on two conditions, described succinctly by Honneth: "first, it must provide a minimum wage; second, it must give all work activities a shape that reveals them to be a contribution to the common good."47

He wrote about this claim, that the evils of Auschwitz could not be assimilated into the Hegelian system and hence by implication by any philosophical thought and indeed by any thought at all, briefly in his book The Religious Dimension of Hegel's Thought, published in 1968, and then again in an essay, "Would Hegel Today Be a Hegelian?

To put the point facetiously, one could say that Hegel began his career a Marxist and later became a Hegelian.

Truth,' Hegel says, is seen as the end of thought. It is revealed where thought attains its telos, which is something to be determined by thinking itself. The truth is not something external to thought to which it may correspond and which would allow the possibility of the skeptical question, but is rather the immanent goal thought is itself directed towards…

From Plato to Hegel and beyond, some of the greatest philosophers have declared that what you think about death, and life beyond it, is the key to thinking seriously about everything else – and, indeed, that it provides one of the main reasons for thinking seriously about anything at all. This is something a Christian theologian should heartily endorse. So, without further delay, we plunge into

Hegel taught that no idea is true in an absolute or timeless sense.

Entweder man gehört zur Nachkommenschaft Hegels, oder man gehört zur Nachkommenschaft Schopenhauers. Tertium non datur.

Nietzsche is merely rude; Hegel is blasphemous.

the mind shaping reality just is reality. There is nothing beyond it. But this did not mean that reality remained in a fixed state. For Hegel, everything is in a process of change, and that change takes the form of a gradual increase in self-awareness, our state of self-awareness being fixed by the period in which we live.

As Hegel well knew, the ascent of reason has never followed a straight line.