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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Hegel's Philosophy
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Hegel's philosophy of the State, his theory of history, and his account of absolute mind are the most interesting portions of his philosophy and the most easily understood. The Stae, he says, is mind objectified. The individual mind, which, on account of its passions, its prejudices, and its blind impulses, is only partly free, subjects itself to the yoke of necessity---the opposite of freedom---in order to attain a fuller realization of itself in the freedom of the citizen. This yoke of necessity is first met with in the recognition of the rights of others, next in morality, and finally in social morality, of which the primal institution is the family. Aggregates of families form civil society, which... is but an imperfect form of organization compared with the State. The State is the perfect social embodiment of the idea, and stands in this stage of development for God Himself.
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By this time Hegel's enthusiasm for the French Revolution had waned, and to some it appeared that he was an apologist for Prussian reaction. However, his major political work - the only book he published while at Berlin - confounds such a simple interpretation. Here he insists, "Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thought." It is for statesmen, not philosophers, to prescribe for tomorrow. Published in 1821, the book has a double title: Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse and Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (translated by T. M. Knox as Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1952).
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Historians have spoken of Hegel's influence as represented by two opposing camps. The Right Hegelians, the direct disciples of Hegel at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universit�t (now known as the Humboldt-Universit�t zu Berlin), advocated evangelical orthodoxy and the political conservatism of the post-Napoleon Restoration period. The Left became known as the Young Hegelians and they interpreted Hegel in a revolutionary sense, leading to an advocation of atheism in religion and liberal democracy in politics. It is important to note that almost none of the so-called "Left Hegelians" actually described themselves as followers of Hegel, and several of them openly repudiated or insulted the legacy of Hegel's philosophy. Nevertheless, this historical category is deemed useful in contemporary academic philosophy (in part because the critiques of Hegel offered from the "Left Hegelians" form an important part of the literature on and about Hegel) and it includes Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, David Friedrich Strauss, Max Stirner, and most famously, Karl Marx. Bauer, Marx, and Stirner were members of a political-philosophic roundtable called die Freien ("the free"), all of whom were familiar with Hegel's work but repudiated it. Although both Stirner's anarchistic variety of egoism and Marx's version of communism were briefly "united" by membership in die Freien, this was only a debating club, and the two schools of though neither have common origins, nor common attitudes toward Hegel.
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Believing that the traditional description of Hegel's philosophy in terms of thesis-antithesis-synthesis was mistaken, a few scholars, like Raya Dunayevskaya have attempted to discard the triadic approach altogether. According to their argument, although Hegel refers to "the two elemental considerations: first, the idea of freedom as the absolute and final aim; secondly, the means for realising it, i.e. the subjective side of knowledge and will, with its life, movement, and activity" (thesis and antithesis) he doesn't use "synthesis" but instead speaks of the "Whole": "We then recognised the State as the moral Whole and the Reality of Freedom, and consequently as the objective unity of these two elements." Furthermore, in Hegel's language, the "dialectical" aspect or "moment" of thought and reality, by which things or thoughts turn into their opposites or have their inner contradictions brought to the surface, what he called "aufhebung", is only preliminary to the "speculative" (and not "synthesizing") aspect or "moment", which grasps the unity of these opposites or contradiction. Thus for Hegel, reason is ultimately "speculative", not "dialectical".
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Hegel is regarded as one of the most influential figures on modern political and intellectual development. After painting Hegel's life and times in broad strokes, Peter Singer goes on to tackle some of the more challenging aspects of Hegel's philosophy. Offering a broad discussion of Hegel's ideas and an account of his major works, Singer explains what have often been considered abstruse and obscure ideas in a clear and inviting manner.
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To the contrary, scholars like Howard Kainz explain that Hegel's philosophy contains thousands of triads. However, instead of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis," Hegel used different terms to speak about triads, for example, "immediate-mediate-concrete," as well as, "abstract-negative-concrete." Hegel's works speak of synthetic logic. Nevertheless, it is widely admitted today that the old-fashioned description of Hegel's philosophy in terms of "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" was always inaccurate. At the same time... those same terms survive in scholarly works, such is the persistence of this misnomer.
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Hegel's Philosophy