The philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard has been a major influence in the development of 20th-century philosophy , especially existentialism and postmodernism . Søren Kierkegaard was a 19th-century Danish philosopher who has been labeled by many as the "Father of Existentialism", although there are some in the field who express doubt in labeling him an existentialist to begin with. His philosophy also influenced the development of existential psychology .
227-528: Kierkegaard criticized aspects of the philosophical systems that were brought on by philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel before him and the Danish Hegelians . He was also indirectly influenced by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant . He measured himself against the model of philosophy which he found in Socrates , which aims to draw one's attention not to explanatory systems, but rather to
454-547: A Popularphilosoph (a "man of letters") who serves to make the abstruse ideas of philosophers accessible to a wider public; his own felt need to engage critically with the central ideas of Kantianism would not come until 1800. Having received his theological certificate from the Tübingen Seminary, Hegel became Hofmeister (house tutor) to an aristocratic family in Berne (1793–1796). During this period, he composed
681-447: A "philosophical disputorium." In 1802, Schelling and Hegel founded the journal Kritische Journal der Philosophie ( Critical Journal of Philosophy ) to which they contributed until the collaboration ended when Schelling left for Würzburg in 1803. In 1805, the university promoted Hegel to the unsalaried position of extraordinary professor after he wrote a letter to the poet and minister of culture Johann Wolfgang von Goethe protesting
908-463: A battle between those who want to live for pleasure and those who demand an ethical existence. But Kierkegaard always points toward the religious goal, an "eternal happiness", or the salvation of the soul as the highest good. He says, be whatever you want, but remember that your soul belongs to God, not to the world. By now you have easily seen that in his life the ethical individual goes through stages we previously set forth as separate stages . He
1135-430: A certain reserve because the thought of death was present to them or the life of those who so abandoned themselves to life that they almost forgot the existence of death? For Kierkegaard's author, Vigilius Haufniensis , anxiety / dread / angst (depending on the translation and context) is unfocused fear. Haufniensis uses the example of a man standing on the edge of a tall building or cliff. From this height he can see all
1362-550: A collection of atomized individuals, instead taking a holistic view of human self-consciousness as requiring the recognition of others, and people's view of themselves as being shaped by the views of others. Hegel describes The Phenomenology as both the "introduction" to his philosophical system and also as the "first part" of that system as the "science of the experience of consciousness." Yet it has long been controversial in both respects; indeed, Hegel's own attitude changed throughout his life. Nevertheless, however complicated
1589-489: A covering of the multitude of sins? Love does not seek its own. Love does not seek its own, for there are no mine and yours in love. But "mine" and "yours" are only relational specifications of "one's own"; thus, if there are no mine and yours, there is no "one's own" either. But if there is no "one's own" at all, then it is of course impossible to seek one's own. Justice is identified by its giving each his own, just as it also in turn claims its own. This means that justice pleads
1816-459: A deeper concept of selfhood is discovered as one commits to one's actions, and takes ownership of the past and present. A concept of oneself, as this particular human being, begins to take form in one's own consciousness. Another perspective, one in which an individual can find some measure of freedom from despair, is available for the person with religious "faith." This attunes the individual so that he or she can recognize what has always been there:
2043-598: A difference here to which one can "refer," only a dialectic that one can observe and describe. The final category of the Logic is "the idea." As with "the concept", the sense of this term for Hegel is not psychological. Rather, following Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason , Hegel's usage harks back to the Greek eidos , Plato 's concept of form that is fully existent and universal: "Hegel's Idee (like Plato's idea)
2270-486: A full awareness that murdering a son is absolutely wrong, ethically speaking. Despair has several specific levels that a person can find themselves, each one further in despair than the last as laid out in The Sickness Unto Death . The first level is "The despair that is ignorant of being despair or the despairing ignorance of having a self and an eternal self." Essentially this level is one which has
2497-635: A high official in Munich, pleading for Niethammer's help in securing a teaching position. With the help of Niethammer, Hegel was appointed headmaster of a gymnasium in Nuremberg in November 1808, a post he held until 1816. While in Nuremberg, Hegel adapted his recently published Phenomenology of Spirit for use in the classroom. Part of his remit was to teach a class called "Introduction to Knowledge of
SECTION 10
#17327918501482724-592: A historian; and Immanuel [ de ] , who followed a theological path – lived long and safeguarded their father's manuscripts and letters , and produced editions of his works. As H. S. Harris recounts, when Hegel entered the Tübingen seminary in 1788, "he was a typical product of the German Enlightenment – an enthusiastic reader of Rousseau and Lessing , acquainted with Kant (at least at second hand), but perhaps more deeply devoted to
2951-420: A human being's upright walk is his absolute respect for the absolute τέλος, otherwise he walks on all fours. When it is a matter of relative elements mediation has its significance (that they are all equal before mediation), but when it is a matter of the absolute end or goal, mediation means that the absolute τέλος is reduced to a relative τέλος. It is not true, either, that the absolute τέλος becomes concrete in
3178-510: A kind of "unity-in-difference," this both in the ancient articulation provided by Plato and in the Christian religion's doctrine of agape , which Hegel at this time viewed as "already 'grounded on universal Reason. ' " This interest, as well as his theological training, would continue to mark his thought, even as it developed in a more theoretical or metaphysical direction. According to Glenn Alexander Magee, Hegel's thought (in particular,
3405-409: A mechanistic part of an industrialised system of production, from being a person capable of defining their value through direct, purposeful activity. Moreover, the near-total mechanisation and automation of the industrial production system would allow the (newly) dominant bourgeois capitalist social class to exploit the working class to the degree that the value obtained from their labour would diminish
3632-430: A metaphysical logic of truth. There are two texts of Hegel's Logic . The first, The Science of Logic (1812, 1813, 1816; bk.I revised 1831), is sometimes also called the "Greater Logic." The second is the first volume of Hegel's Encyclopedia and is sometimes known as the "Lesser Logic." The Encyclopedia Logic is an abbreviated or condensed presentation of the same dialectic. Hegel composed it for use with students in
3859-681: A metaphysically necessary and coherent "identity of identity and non-identity". Hegel was born on 27 August 1770 in Stuttgart , capital of the Duchy of Württemberg in the Holy Roman Empire (now southwestern Germany). Christened Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, he was known as Wilhelm to his close family. His father, Georg Ludwig Hegel (1733–1799), was secretary to the revenue office at the court of Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg . Hegel's mother, Maria Magdalena Louisa Hegel, née Fromm (1741–1783),
4086-402: A narrowly defined, minimum-wage "job" meant to extract maximal profit from individual labour as determined by and dictated under the capitalist mode of production. In the classless, collectively-managed communist society, the exchange of value between the objectified productive labour of one worker and the consumption benefit derived from that production will not be determined by or directed to
4313-613: A permanent position replacing a professor of botany, he was unable to find a permanent position. In 1807, he had to move to Bamberg since his savings and the payment from the Phenomenology were exhausted and he needed money to support his illegitimate son Ludwig. There, he became the editor of the local newspaper, Bamberger Zeitung [ de ] , a position he obtained with the help of Niethammer. Ludwig Fischer and his mother stayed behind in Jena. In Bamberg, as editor of
4540-482: A person, the work one performs is supposed to be an external realization of one's relationship to others and to the world. It is one's way of making the world a better place for oneself and for others. What reducing work to a monetary value does is to replace the concrete reality of one's everyday struggles with the world —to give it shape, form and meaning— with an abstraction. Kierkegaard lamented that "a young man today would scarcely envy another his capacities or skill or
4767-483: A place within pure thinking. What, then, do annulment and transition and a new unity signify? What, if anything, does it mean to think in such a way that one always merely makes a show of it because everything that is said is absolutely revoked? And what does it mean not to admit that one thinks this way but then continually to proclaim from the housetops the positive truth of this pure thinking? Just as existence has joined thinking and existing, inasmuch as an existing person
SECTION 20
#17327918501484994-698: A post from the Universities of Erlangen , Berlin and Heidelberg , Hegel chose Heidelberg, where he moved in 1816. Soon after, his illegitimate son Ludwig Fischer (now ten years old) joined the Hegel household in April 1817, having spent time in an orphanage after the death of his mother Christiana Burkhardt. In 1817, Hegel published The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline as
5221-430: A price that yields a maximal profit . Aside from the workers having no control over the design-and-production protocol, alienation ( Entfremdung ) broadly describes the conversion of labour (work as an activity), which is performed to generate a use value (the product), into a commodity, which—like products—can be assigned an exchange value . That is, the capitalist gains control of the manual and intellectual workers and
5448-419: A self is to wish to not have a relation to God or at the very least see one's relation to God as unworthy, and thus shrink from it. The lowest form of this group, however, is the desire to be a new self. This is logically the deepest form as it assumes the deepest understanding of one's despair. Once in despair, without a complete relation to God one will always be in despair, so to be in this level one understands
5675-433: A self to be realized within the circumstances it finds itself right now, i.e., this inner attunement brings about a sort of synthesis between the infinite and the finite. In Fear and Trembling , Johannes de Silentio argues that the choice of Abraham to obey the private, unethical, commandment of God to sacrifice his son reveals what faith entails: he directs his consciousness absolutely toward "the absolute" rather than
5902-420: A self, and lowest, the despair to wish for a new self. These three divisions are mostly the self-worth the person has and the amount to which they understand their own despair. The despair to not be oneself is pretty straightforward. A person sees themself as unworthy and as such does not see themself as worthy before something they do not understand. The despair not to be a self is deeper, because to not wish to be
6129-657: A summary of his philosophy for students attending his lectures at Heidelberg. It is also while in Heidelberg that Hegel first lectured on the philosophy of art. In 1818, Hegel accepted the renewed offer of the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, which had remained vacant since Johann Gottlieb Fichte 's death in 1814. Here, Hegel published his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821). Hegel devoted himself primarily to delivering lectures; his lectures on
6356-415: A task in such a way that it is chiefly to order, shape, temper, inflame, control-in short, to produce an evenness in the soul, a harmony, which is the fruit of the personal virtues. Resignation has made the individual face or has seen to it that he face toward an eternal happiness as the τέλος ("end", "purpose", or "goal"). This τέλος is not an element among other elements. Thus the both-and of mediation
6583-513: A very good sense that someone who is gripped by love is changed or becomes changed. Love is a revolution, the most profound of all, but the most blessed! An element of Kierkegaard's critique of modernity in his socio-political work, Two Ages , is the mention of money —which he calls an abstraction . An abstraction is something that only has a reality in an ersatz reality. It is not tangible, and only has meaning within an artificial context, which ultimately serves devious and deceptive purposes. It
6810-515: Is Hegel's attempt to meet this foundational demand. As he puts it, " logic coincides with metaphysics ." In the words of scholar Glenn Alexander Magee, the logic provides "an account of pure categories or ideas which are timelessly true" and which make up "the formal structure of reality itself". It is important to see, however, that Hegel's metaphysical program is not a return to the Leibnizian - Wolffian rationalism critiqued by Kant, which
7037-494: Is a criticism Hegel accepts. In particular, Hegel rejects any form of metaphysics as speculation about the transcendent. His procedure, an appropriation of Aristotle's concept of form , is fully immanent. More generally, Hegel agrees wholeheartedly with Kant's rejection of all forms of dogmatism and also agrees that any future metaphysics must pass the test of criticism. It is the assessment of scholar Stephen Houlgate that Hegel's method of immanent logical development and critique
Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard - Misplaced Pages Continue
7264-412: Is a figment of thought that has no concrete reality, neither now nor in the future. How is money an abstraction? Money gives the illusion that it has a direct relationship to the work that is done. That is, the work one does is worth so much, equals so much money. In reality, however, the work one does is an expression of who one is as a person; it expresses one's goals in life and associated meaning. As
7491-412: Is a form of ideological control exercised by the capitalist bourgeoisie through its cultural hegemony . Furthermore, in the capitalist mode of production the philosophic collusion of religion in justifying the relations of production facilitates the realisation and then worsens the alienation ( Entfremdung ) of the worker from their humanity; it is a socio-economic role independent of religion being "
7718-409: Is a legitimate and sympathetic act to dwell properly on the suffering, lest the suffering person become impatient over our superficial discussion in which he does not recognize his suffering, lest he for that reason impatiently thrust aside consolation and be strengthened in double-mindedness. It certainly is one thing to go out into life with the wish when what is wished becomes the deed and the task; it
7945-418: Is a power above which turns the evil into good; that power is the love which covers a multitude of sins. When hate dwells in the heart, then sin lies at a man's door, and its manifold desires exist in him; but when love dwells in the heart, then sin flees far away, and he sees it no more. When disputes, malice, wrath, quarrels, dissensions, factions fill the heart, does one then need to go far in order to discover
8172-443: Is a second and more crucial element of truth, which involves how one relates oneself to those matters of fact. Since how one acts is, from the ethical perspective, more important than any matter of fact, truth is to be found in subjectivity rather than objectivity. Many of Kierkegaard's earlier writings from 1843 to 1846 were written pseudonymously. In the non-pseudonymous The Point of View of My Work as an Author , he explained that
8399-415: Is a thinking person, so are there two media: the medium of abstraction and the medium of actuality. But pure thinking is yet a third medium, very recently invented. It begins, it is said, after the most exhaustive abstraction. Pure thinking is-what shall I say-piously or thoughtlessly unaware of the relation that abstraction still continually has to that from which it abstracts. Here in this pure thinking there
8626-417: Is a true existential 'either/or' decision faced by the individual. Either one chooses to live in faith (the religious stage) or to live ethically (the ethical stage). In Either/Or , Kierkegaard insists that the single individual has ethical responsibility of his life. However, everyone wants to enjoy themselves and ethics gets in the way of a person's enjoyment of life if taken to extremes. This results in
8853-556: Is almost merciless. Ah, let the newspaper writers and tax collectors and parish beadles talk about generosity and count and count; but let us never ignore that Christianity speaks essentially of mercifulness, that Christianity would least of all be guilty of mercilessness, as if poverty and misery not only needed money etc. but also were excluded from the highest, from being able to be generous, beneficent, benevolent. But people prattle and prate ecclesiastically-worldly and worldly-ecclesiastically about generosity, beneficence-but forget, even in
9080-452: Is an aesthete well aware that he can use the power of interpretation to define who he is and what he takes to be valuable. He knows he can shape and reshape his own self-identity. Nothing binds him to his relationships. Nothing binds him to his past actions. In the end though, he also knows he lacks a consistent understanding of who he is. He lacks a self that resists his own power of reinterpretation. His older friend Judge William, argues that
9307-431: Is an aspect of exploitation . Furthermore, with such a reified system of industrial production, the profit (exchange value) generated by the sale of the goods and services (products) that could be paid to the workers is instead paid to the capitalist classes: the functional capitalist, who manages the means of production; and the rentier capitalist , who owns the means of production. In the capitalist mode of production ,
Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard - Misplaced Pages Continue
9534-424: Is an ongoing project with respect to its historical content, which continues to change and develop. For instance, although Hegel regards "the basic structure" of the philosophy of nature as complete, he was "aware that science is not 'finished' and will continue to make new discoveries". Philosophy is, as Hegel puts it, " its own time comprehended in thoughts ." He expands upon this definition: A further word on
9761-521: Is basically in that definition of the absurd an approbation that Chestov grants it. What is perceptible in Leo Chestov will be perhaps even more so in Kierkegaard. To be sure, it is hard to outline clear propositions in so elusive a writer. But, despite apparently opposed writings, beyond the pseudonyms, the tricks, and the smiles, can be felt throughout that work, as it were, the presentiment (at
9988-471: Is cannot be rendered in the language of abstraction. Actuality is an inter-esse [between being] between thinking and being in the hypothetical unity of abstraction. Abstraction deals with possibility and actuality, but its conception of actuality is a false rendition, since the medium is not actuality but possibility. Only by annulling actuality can abstraction grasp it, but to annul it is precisely to change it into possibility. Within abstraction everything that
10215-440: Is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap , which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become. In The Concept of Anxiety , Haufniensis focuses on the first anxiety experienced by man: Adam 's choice to eat from God's forbidden tree of knowledge or not. Since
10442-503: Is commanded by a god or gods. However, Kierkegaard is not arguing that morality is created by God ; instead, he would argue that a divine command from God transcends ethics. This distinction means that God does not necessarily create human morality: it is up to us as individuals to create our own morals and values. But any religious person must be prepared for the event of a divine command from God that would take precedence over all moral and rational obligations. Kierkegaard called this event
10669-449: Is conditioned by their relationships with the people and things that facilitate survival, which is fundamentally dependent upon cooperation with others, thus, a person's consciousness is determined inter-subjectively (collectively), not subjectively (individually), because humans are a social animal. In the course of history, to ensure individual survival societies have organised themselves into groups who have different, basic relationships to
10896-431: Is consummating itself, and yet at the same moment he is at the very beginning, because he is choosing himself according to his freedom. When in pure thinking mention is made of an immediate unity of reflection-in-itself and reflection-in-the-other and of the annulment of this immediate unity, then something must indeed come between the elements of the immediate unity. What is this? Yes, it is time. But time cannot be assigned
11123-409: Is culture—do you believe that it is also loving the neighbor? With the neighbor you have the equality of a human being before God. God is the middle term. For Kierkegaard, true individuality is called selfhood. Becoming aware of our true self is our true task and endeavor in life—it is an ethical imperative, as well as preparatory to a true religious understanding. Individuals can exist at a level that
11350-400: Is defrauded of his own, or as soon as someone defrauds another of his own, justice intervenes, because it safeguards the common security in which everyone has his own, which he rightfully has.-But sometimes a change intrudes, a revolution, a war, an earthquake, or some such terrible misfortune, and everything is confused. Justice tries in vain to secure for each person his own; it cannot maintain
11577-528: Is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie —who own the means of production —in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1932), Karl Marx expressed the Entfremdung theory—of estrangement from the self. Philosophically,
SECTION 50
#173279185014811804-422: Is embarking upon nothing less than a transcendental deduction of metaphysics." In the course of its dialectic, the Phenomenology purports to demonstrate that – because consciousness always includes self-consciousness – there are no 'given' objects of direct awareness not already mediated by thought. Further analysis of the structure of self-consciousness reveals that both the social and conceptual stability of
12031-598: Is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his essential being. A person's mind should be free and conscious, instead it is controlled and directed by the capitalist, "the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own but someone else's, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another." This means he cannot freely and spontaneously create according to his own directive as labour's form and direction belong to someone else. The Gattungswesen ('species-essence' or 'human nature'), of individuals
12258-404: Is external to the worker," it is not a part of their essential being. During work, the worker is miserable, unhappy and drained of their energy, work "mortifies his body and ruins his mind." The production content, direction and form are imposed by the capitalist. The worker is being controlled and told what to do since they do not own the means of production they have no say in production, "labour
12485-438: Is going to develop in his life the personal , the civic , the religious virtues, and his life advances through his continually translating himself from one stage to another. As soon as a person thinks that one of these stages is adequate and that he dares to concentrate on it one-sidedly, he has not chosen himself ethically but has failed to see the significance of either isolation or continuity and above all has not grasped that
12712-593: Is historically unique. Philosopher Béatrice Longuenesse holds that this project may be understood, on analogy to Kant, as "inseparably a metaphysical and a transcendental deduction of the categories of metaphysics." This approach insists, and claims to demonstrate, that the insights of logic cannot be judged by standards external to thought itself, that is, that "thought... is not the mirror of nature." Yet, she argues, this does not imply that these standards are arbitrary or subjective. Hegel's translator and scholar of German idealism George di Giovanni likewise interprets
12939-503: Is identical with the repentance , which ratifies the choice . The individual with these capacities, these inclinations, these drives, these passions, influenced by this specific social milieu, as this specific product of a specific environment . But as he becomes aware of all this, he takes upon himself responsibility for all of it. He does not hesitate over whether he will take this particular thing or not, for he knows that if he does not do it something much more important will be lost. In
13166-529: Is indeed a classic poet , but just because the epic idea is a concrete idea, and because the medium is language, it so happens that in the section of the classics which contains the epic, there are many epics conceivable, which are all equally classic, because history constantly furnishes us with new epic material. In this too, I have the testimony of history and the assent of experience. The two positions touched on here could be regarded as attempts to actualize an ethical life-view. The reason that they do not succeed
13393-528: Is less than true selfhood. We can live, for example, simply in terms of our pleasures —our immediate satisfaction of desires, propensities, or distractions. In this way, we glide through life without direction or purpose. To have a direction, we must have a purpose that defines for us the meaning of our lives. Kierkegaard puts it this way in Either/Or : Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831)
13620-517: Is linked to external conditions, that is, what love as such does not have in its power, whereas it truly has mercifulness in its power just as surely as it has a heart in its bosom. It does not follow that because a person has a heart in his bosom he has money in his pocket, but the first is still more important and certainly is decisive with regard to mercifulness. Below are three quotes concerning Kierkegaard's idea of abstraction which cannot be thought about without thinking about concretion. He moves from
13847-493: Is maintained only through the negation of human reason. (Let me assert again: it is not the affirmation of God that is questioned here, but rather the logic leading to that affirmation.) Kierkegaard put it this way in Three Edifying Discourses 1843 and Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846): Getting the majority vote on one's side and one's God-relationship transformed into a speculative enterprise on
SECTION 60
#173279185014814074-610: Is mostly likely that Hegel attended the Stift because it was state-funded, for he had "a profound distaste for the study of orthodox theology" and never wanted to become a minister. ) All three greatly admired Hellenic civilization, and Hegel additionally steeped himself in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Lessing during this time. They watched the unfolding of the French Revolution with shared enthusiasm. Although
14301-408: Is neither a Platonist who believes in abstract logical entities, nor a nominalist according to whom the particular is first in the orders of explanation and being alike. Rather, Hegel is a holist . For Hegel, the universal is always first in the order of explanation even if what is naturally particular is first in the order of being. With respect to the system as a whole, that universal is supplied by
14528-664: Is not a psychological concept. When deployed with the definitive article ("the") and sometimes modified by the term "logical," Hegel is referring to the intelligible structure of reality as articulated in the Subjective Logic. (When used in the plural, however, Hegel's sense is much closer to the ordinary dictionary sense of the term. ) Hegel's inquiry into thought is concerned to systematize thought's own internal self-differentiation, that is, how pure concepts ( logical categories ) differ from one another in their various relations of implication and interdependence. For instance, in
14755-417: Is not discrete (separate and apart) from their activity as a worker and as such species-essence also comprises all of innate human potential as a person. Conceptually, in the term species-essence , the word species describes the intrinsic human mental essence that is characterised by a "plurality of interests" and "psychological dynamism," whereby every individual has the desire and the tendency to engage in
14982-413: Is not just an emotion, in a deeper sense it is the loss of self, i.e., it describes the state when one has the wrong conception of oneself. Is despair a merit or a defect? Purely dialectically it is both. If one were to think of despair only in the abstract, without reference to some particular despairer, one would have to say it is an enormous merit. The possibility of this sickness is man's advantage over
15209-447: Is not much better, even though less naïve, than the previously described jovial chatter that includes everything. At the moment of resignation, of collecting oneself, of choice the individual is allowed to salute the absolute τέλος—but then, then comes the mediation. So, too, a dog can be taught to walk on two legs for a moment but then, then comes the mediation, and the dog walks on four legs—mediation also does that. Spiritually understood,
15436-438: Is on relationship rather than analysis. This relationship is a way of looking at one's life that evades objective scrutiny. Kierkegaard's analysis of the present age uses terms that resemble but are not exactly coincident with Hegel and Marx's theory of alienation . However Kierkegaard expressly means that human beings are alienated from God because they are living too much in the world. Individuals need to gain their souls from
15663-405: Is rest for every doubt; here is the eternal positive truth and whatever one cares to say. This means that pure thinking is a phantom. And if Hegelian philosophy is free from all postulates, it has attained this with one insane postulate: the beginning of pure thinking. For the existing person, existing is for him his highest interest, and his interestedness in existing in his actuality. What actuality
15890-433: Is said about actuality in the language of abstraction is said within possibility. That is, in the language of actuality all abstraction is related to actuality as a possibility, not to an actuality within abstraction and possibility. Actuality, existence, is the dialectical element in a trilogy, the beginning and end of which cannot be for an existing person, who qua existing is in the dialectical element. Abstraction merges
16117-427: Is something else to go out into life away from the wish. Abraham had to leave his ancestral home and emigrate to an alien nation, where nothing reminded him of what he loved—indeed, sometimes it is no doubt a consolation that nothing calls to mind what one wishes to forget, but it is a bitter consolation for the person who is full of longing. Thus a person can also have a wish that for him contains everything, so that in
16344-770: Is supposed to exist, which is also the existing person's highest interest. Death is inevitable and temporally unpredictable. Kierkegaard believed that individuals needed to sincerely and intensely come to realize the truth of that fact in order to live passionately. Kierkegaard accuses society of being in death-denial. Even though people see death all around them and grasp as an objective fact that everyone dies, few people truly understand, subjectively and inwardly, that they will die someday. For example, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript , Kierkegaard notes that people never think to say, "I shall certainly attend your party, but I must make an exception for
16571-423: Is supposed to have forgotten it the next moment. Therefore, as I said before, resignation remains in the individual and the task is so far from getting the absolute τέλος mediated into all sorts of both-and that, on the contrary, it is to aim at the form of existence that permanently has the pathos of the great moment. In Works of Love and Purity of Heart , Kierkegaard skillfully examines Christian ethics and
16798-448: Is that a worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of these actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realised human being, as an economic entity this worker
17025-444: Is that as one travels further down the forms of despair, the number of people in each group becomes fewer. Many philosophers who initially read Kierkegaard, especially Kierkegaard's (written under the pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio ) Fear and Trembling , often come to the conclusion that Kierkegaard supports a divine command law of ethics. The divine command theory is a metaethical theory which claims moral values are whatever
17252-446: Is that the individual has chosen himself in his isolation or has chosen himself abstractly. To say it in other words, the individual has not chosen himself ethically . He therefore has no connection with actuality , and when that is the case no ethical way of life can be put into practice. But the person who chooses himself ethically chooses himself concretely as this specific individual, and he achieves this concretion because this choice
17479-520: Is the final part of the Logic . It discusses the doctrine of "the Concept," which is concerned with reintegrating those categories of objectivity into a thoroughly idealistic account of reality. Simplifying greatly, Being describes its concepts just as they appear, Essence attempts to explain them with reference to other forces, and the Concept explains and unites them both in terms of an internal teleology. The categories of Being "pass over" from one to
17706-412: Is the most common in the world. The next level of despair is "The despair that is conscious of being despair and therefore is conscious of having a self in which there is something eternal and then either in despair does not will to be itself or in despair wills to be itself." This becomes further subdivided into three categories: the despair not to will or want to be oneself, the despair not to will to be
17933-462: Is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature. Within this antithesis, the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, and the proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it. In discussion of " aleatory materialism " ( matérialisme aléatoire ) or "materialism of the encounter," French philosopher Louis Althusser criticised
18160-446: Is the product of an attempt to fuse ontology, epistemology, evaluation, etc., into a single set of concepts." The Logic accommodates within itself the necessity of the realm of natural-spiritual contingency , that which cannot be determined in advance: "To go further, it must abandon thinking altogether and let itself go, opening itself to that which is other than thought in pure receptivity." Simply put, logic realizes itself only in
18387-448: Is the self-concept of consciousness itself that is tested in the domain of experience, and where that concept is not adequate, self-consciousness "suffers this violence at its own hands, and brings to ruin its own restricted satisfaction." For, as Hegel points out, one cannot learn how to swim without getting into the water. By progressively testing its concept of knowledge in this way, by "making experience his standard of knowledge, Hegel
18614-414: Is to articulate what Hegel calls "the identity of identity and non-identity" of nature and spirit. Put another way, it aims to overcome subject-object dualism. This is to say that, among other things, Hegel's philosophical project endeavors to provide the metaphysical basis for an account of spirit that is continuous with, yet distinct from, the "merely" natural world – without thereby reducing either term to
18841-414: Is understood and as such, instead of turning to faith and humbling oneself before God, they despair in their own weakness and unworthiness. In this sense, they despair over the eternal and refuse to be comforted by the light of God. The last and lowest form of despair is the desire "In despair to will to be oneself." This last form of despair is also referred to by Kierkegaard as "demonic despair" (Note that
19068-418: Is wholly abstract, and bears no relation to the historical; the medium through which it is expressed is likewise abstract, consequently there is a great probability that the section of the classic works which includes sculpture will contain only a few. In this I have the testimony of time and experience on my side. If, on the other hand, I take a concrete idea and a concrete medium, then it seems otherwise. Homer
19295-640: The Bamberger Zeitung [ de ] , which was a pro-French newspaper, Hegel extolled the virtues of Napoleon and often editorialized the Prussian accounts of the war. Being the editor of a local newspaper, Hegel also became an important person in Bamberg social life, often visiting with the local official Johann Heinrich Liebeskind [ de ] , and becoming involved in local gossip and pursued his passions for cards, fine eating, and
19522-505: The teleological suspension of the ethical . Abraham, the knight of faith , chose to obey God unconditionally, and was rewarded with his son, his faith, and the title of Father of Faith . Abraham transcended ethics and leaped into faith. But there is no valid logical argument one can make to claim that morality ought to be or can be suspended in any given circumstance, or ever. Thus, Silentio believes ethics and faith are separate stages of consciousness. The choice to obey God unconditionally
19749-488: The Encyclopedia (second edition, 1827; third, 1830). In his political philosophy, he criticized Karl Ludwig von Haller 's reactionary work, which claimed that laws were not necessary. A number of other works on the philosophy of history , religion , aesthetics and the history of philosophy were compiled from the lecture notes of his students and published posthumously. Hegel was appointed University Rector of
19976-690: The Enlightenment , such as Christian Garve and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing . In 1844, Hegel's first biographer, Karl Rosenkranz described the young Hegel's education there by saying that it "belonged entirely to the Enlightenment with respect to principle, and entirely to classical antiquity with respect to curriculum." His studies at the Gymnasium concluded with his graduation speech, "The abortive state of art and scholarship in Turkey." At
20203-528: The Industrial Revolution —the rearranged economic order of the social classes favoured the social class who controlled the technologies (the means of production) that made possible the change in the relations of production. Likewise, there occurred a corresponding rearrangement of the human nature ( Gattungswesen ) and the system of values of the owner-class and of the working-class, which allowed each group of people to accept and to function in
20430-499: The Logic as (drawing upon, yet also in opposition to, Kant ) immanently transcendental ; its categories, according to Hegel, are built into life itself , and define what it is to be "an object in general." Books one and two of the Logic are the doctrines of "Being" and "Essence." Together they comprise the Objective Logic, which is largely occupied with overcoming the assumptions of traditional metaphysics. Book three
20657-434: The Phenomenology a Bildungsroman . It is not the consciousness under observation that learns from its experience. Only "we," the phenomenological observers, are in a position to profit from Hegel's logical reconstruction of the science of experience. The ensuing dialectic is long and hard. It is described by Hegel himself as a "path of despair," in which self-consciousness finds itself to be, over and again, in error. It
20884-438: The Phenomenology with respect to either of the systematic roles asserted by Hegel at the time of its publication. Hegel's philosophical system is divided into three parts: the science of logic , the philosophy of nature , and the philosophy of spirit (the latter two of which together constitute the real philosophy ). This structure is adopted from Proclus 's Neoplatonic triad of " 'remaining-procession-return' and from
21111-450: The essentialities of the things ." As Michael Wolff explains, Hegel's logic is a continuation of Kant's distinctive logical program. Its occasional engagement with the familiar Aristotelian conception of logic is only incidental to Hegel's project. Twentieth-century developments by such logicians as Frege and Russell likewise remain logics of formal validity and so are likewise irrelevant to Hegel's project, which aspires to provide
21338-422: The estrangement (German: Entfremdung ) of people from aspects of their human nature ( Gattungswesen , 'species-essence') as a consequence of the division of labour and living in a society of stratified social classes . The alienation from the self is a consequence of being a mechanistic part of a social class, the condition of which estranges a person from their humanity. The theoretical basis of alienation
21565-407: The existentialists do. Hegel views both of these conditions as evils, because people have a deep and abiding need to inhabit a social world that is a home. People are subjectively alienated in two cases: 1) when the world they inhabit is a home but they fail to understand this; 2) when the world they inhabit is not a home, yet they believe it to be. Hegel believes the first of these two cases to be
21792-504: The inaugural dissertation De Orbitis Planetarum , in which he briefly criticized mathematical arguments that assert that there must exist a planet between Mars and Jupiter . Later in the year, Hegel's essay The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy was completed. He lectured on "Logic and Metaphysics" and gave lectures with Schelling on an "Introduction to the Idea and Limits of True Philosophy" and facilitated
22019-429: The means of production establish a competitive labour-market meant to extract from the worker as much labour (value) as possible in the form of capital . The capitalist economy's arrangement of the relations of production provokes social conflict by pitting worker against worker in a competition for "higher wages", thereby alienating them from their mutual economic interests; the effect is a false consciousness , which
22246-503: The means of production . One societal group (class) owned and controlled the means of production while another societal class worked the means of production and in the relations of production of that status quo the goal of the owner-class was to economically benefit as much as possible from the labour of the working class. In the course of economic development when a new type of economy displaced an old type of economy— agrarian feudalism superseded by mercantilism , in turn superseded by
22473-420: The proletariat until compelling them to social revolution for survival. Yet, social alienation remains a practical concern, especially among the contemporary philosophers of Marxist humanism . In The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism (1992), Raya Dunayevskaya discusses and describes the existence of the desire for self-activity and self-actualisation among wage-labour workers struggling to achieve
22700-504: The Christian Trinity." Although evident in draft writings dating back as early as 1805, the system was not completed in published form until the 1817 Encyclopedia (1st ed.). Frederick C. Beiser argues that the position of the logic with respect to the real philosophy is best understood in terms of Hegel's appropriation of Aristotle's distinction between "the order of explanation" and "the order of being." To Beiser, Hegel
22927-505: The Christian who wants to be a Christian living in a world that has abandoned Christianity. Both Camus and Kierkegaard had in common an equal distaste for a Christian Democracy where all are forced to take a positive part in Christianity because freedom of choice would be lacking and in a non-Christian Democracy where none are allowed to take an active part in Christianity. Kierkegaard was against voting about Christianity, for him, Christ
23154-406: The Philosophical Sciences . Throughout his work, Hegel strove to address and correct the problematic dualisms of modern philosophy, Kantian and otherwise, typically by drawing upon the resources of ancient philosophy , particularly Aristotle . Hegel everywhere insists that reason and freedom are historical achievements, not natural givens. His dialectical -speculative procedure is grounded in
23381-601: The Universal Coherence of the Sciences." In 1811, Hegel married Marie Helena Susanna von Tucher (1791–1855), the eldest daughter of a Senator. This period saw the publication of his second major work, the Science of Logic ( Wissenschaft der Logik ; 3 vols., 1812, 1813 and 1816), and the birth of two sons, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm (1813–1901) and Immanuel Thomas Christian (1814–1891). Having received offers of
23608-438: The University of Jena from much of the destruction of the surrounding city, few students returned after the battle and enrollment suffered, making Hegel's financial prospects even worse. Hegel traveled in the winter to Bamberg and stayed with Niethammer to oversee the proofs of the Phenomenology , which was being printed there. Although Hegel tried to obtain another professorship, even writing Goethe in an attempt to help secure
23835-411: The ability of the worker to materially survive. As a result of this exploitation, when the proletarian working-class become a sufficiently developed political force, they will effect a revolution and re-orient the relations of production to the means of production —from a capitalist mode of production to a communist mode of production . In the resultant communist society , the fundamental relation of
24062-441: The absolute τέλος is equal with everything else for me or for a particular individual. It may be very commendable for a particular individual to be a councilor of justice, a good worker in the office, no.1 lover in the society, almost a virtuoso on the flute, captain of the popinjay shooting club, superintendent of the orphanage, a noble and respected father-in short, a devil of a fellow who can both-and has time for everything. But let
24289-420: The absurd is sin without God. It is a matter of living in that state of the absurd. I am taking the liberty at this point of calling the existential attitude philosophical suicide. But this does not imply a judgment. It is a convenient way of indicating the movement by which a thought negates itself and tends to transcend itself in its very negation. For the existential negation is their God. To be precise, that god
24516-424: The accepted criterion of reality and truth is ambiguous and subjective thought—that which cannot be proven with logic , historical research, or scientific analysis . Humans cannot think out choices in life, we must live them; and even those choices that we often think about become different once life itself enters into the picture. For Kierkegaard, the type of objectivity that a scientist or historian might use misses
24743-591: The age of eighteen, Hegel entered the Tübinger Stift , a Protestant seminary attached to the University of Tübingen , where he had as roommates the poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin and the future philosopher Friedrich Schelling . Sharing a dislike for what they regarded as the restrictive environment of the Seminary, the three became close friends and mutually influenced each other's ideas. (It
24970-540: The age of three, Hegel went to the German School. When he entered the Latin School two years later, he already knew the first declension , having been taught it by his mother. In 1776, he entered Stuttgart's Eberhard-Ludwigs-Gymnasium and during his adolescence read voraciously, copying lengthy extracts in his diary. Authors he read include the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and writers associated with
25197-587: The author, Johannes Climacus is not a Christian and he argues from a non-Christian viewpoint. Anti-Climacus , as mentioned earlier, is a Christian to a high degree and he argues from a devout Christian viewpoint. Kierkegaard places his beliefs in-between these two authors. Most of Kierkegaard's later philosophical and religious writings from 1846 to 1855 were written and authored by himself, and he assigned no pseudonyms to these works. Subsequently, these works are considered by most scholars to reflect Kierkegaard's own beliefs. Where appropriate, this article will mention
25424-453: The basis of probability and partnership and fellow shareholders is the first step toward becoming objective. The love which covers a multitude of sins in never deceived. When the heart is niggardly, when one gives with one eye and with seven eyes looks to see what one will get in return, then one easily discovers a multitude of sins. But when the heart is filled with love, then the eye is never deceived; for love when it gives, does not scrutinize
25651-475: The beast, and it is an advantage which characterizes him quite otherwise than the upright posture, for it bespeaks the infinite erectness or loftiness of his being spirit. The possibility of this sickness is man's advantage over the beast; to be aware of this sickness is the Christian's advantage over natural man; to be cured of this sickness is the Christian's blessedness. In Either/Or , A and Judge William each has one epistolary novel in two volumes. The A
25878-428: The benefits of their labour, with a system of industrial production that converts this labour into concrete products (goods and services) that benefit the consumer. Moreover, the capitalist production system also reifies labour into the "concrete" concept of "work" (a job), for which the worker is paid wages— at the lowest-possible rate— that maintain a maximum rate of return on the capitalist's investment capital ; this
26105-462: The cause of its own, divides and assigns, determines what each can lawfully call his own, judges and punishes if anyone refuses to make any distinction between mine and yours. The individual has the right to so as he pleases with this contentious and yet legally entitled mine; and if he seeks his own in no other way than that which justice allows, justice has nothing with which to reproach him and has no right to upbraid him for anything. As soon as someone
26332-457: The city. On the day before the battle, Napoleon entered the city of Jena. Hegel recounted his impressions in a letter to his friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer : I saw the Emperor – this world-soul [ Weltseele ] – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over
26559-426: The classic procession, one would evidently have to choose as a basis for such a distinction, something that was not essential; for if the basis were essential, the difference itself would become an essential difference; from that it would again follow that the word "classic" was wrongly predicated of the group as a whole. The more abstract the idea is, the smaller the probability of a numerous representation. But how does
26786-517: The classics than to any thing modern." During this early period of his life "the Greeks – especially Plato – came first." Although he later elevated Aristotle above Plato, Hegel never abandoned his love of ancient philosophy, the imprint of which is everywhere in his thought. Hegel's concern with various forms of cultural unity (Judaic, Greek, medieval, and modern) during this early period would remain with him throughout his career. In this way, he
27013-429: The concepts of good and evil did not come into existence before Adam ate the fruit, which is now dubbed original sin , Adam had no concept of good and evil, and did not know that eating from the tree was evil. What he did know was that God told him not to eat from the tree. The anxiety comes from the fact that God's prohibition itself implies that Adam is free and that he could choose to obey God or not. After Adam ate from
27240-425: The contingency that a roof tile happens to blow down and kill me; for in that case, I cannot attend." This is jest as far as Kierkegaard is concerned. But there is also earnestness involved in the thought of death. Kierkegaard said the following about death in his Three Upbuilding Discourses, 1844 : We shall not decide which life fights the good fight most easily, but we all agree that every human being ought to fight
27467-517: The councilor take care that he does not become too much a devil of a fellow and proceed to do both all this and have time to direct his life toward the absolute τέλος. In other words, this both-and means that the absolute τέλος is on the same level with everything else. But the absolute τέλος has the remarkable quality of wanting to be the absolute τέλος at every moment. If, then, at the moment of resignation, of collecting oneself, of choice, an individual has understood this, it surely cannot mean that he
27694-621: The definitive modern articulation of the divisions that must be overcome. This led to his engagement with the philosophical programs of Fichte and Schelling , as well as his attention to Spinoza and the Pantheism controversy . The influence of Johann Gottfried von Herder , however, would lead Hegel to a qualified rejection of the universality claimed by the Kantian program in favor of a more culturally, linguistically, and historically informed account of reason. The Phenomenology of Spirit
27921-462: The details, the basic strategy by which it attempts to make good on its introductory claim is not difficult to state. Beginning with only the most basic "certainties of consciousness itself," "the most immediate of which is the certainty that I am conscious of this object, here and now ," Hegel aims to show that these "certainties of natural consciousness" have as their consequence the standpoint of speculative logic. This does not, however, make
28148-414: The distinction between mine and yours; in the confusion it cannot keep the balance and therefore throws away the scales-it despairs! Terrible spectacle! Yet does not love in a certain sense, even if in the most blissful way, produce the same confusion? But love, it too is an event, the greatest of all, yet also the happiest. Love is a change, the most remarkable of all, but the most desirable-in fact we say in
28375-485: The domain of nature and spirit, in which it attains its "verification." Hence the conclusion of the Science of Logic with "the idea freely discharging [entläßt] itself" into "objectivity and external life" – and, so too, the systematic transition to the Realphilosophie . In contrast to the first, logical part of Hegel's system, the second, real-philosophical part – the philosophy of nature and of spirit –
28602-485: The elementary goals of material life in a capitalist economy. In Chapter 4 of The Holy Family (1845), Marx said that capitalists and proletarians are equally alienated, but that each social class experiences alienation in a different form: The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognises estrangement as its own power, and has in it
28829-418: The essay "Fragments on Religion and Love." In 1799, he wrote another essay titled "The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate", unpublished during his lifetime. In 1801, Hegel came to Jena at the encouragement of Schelling, who held the position of Extraordinary Professor at the University of Jena . Hegel secured a position at the University of Jena as a Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer) after submitting
29056-431: The essence of humankind – a conclusion from his 1806–07 Phenomenology that he claims is further verified by the systematic account of the interdependence of logic, nature , and spirit in his later Encyclopedia . He asserts that the Logic at once preserves and overcomes the dualisms of the material and the mental – that is, it accounts for both the continuity and difference marking the domains of nature and culture – as
29283-399: The essential nature of a human being is actualised when an individual— within their given historical circumstance— is free to subordinate their will to the internal demands they have imposed upon themselves by their imagination and not the external demands imposed upon individuals by other people. Whatever the character of a person's consciousness ( will and imagination ), societal existence
29510-440: The existence which he himself is. He must explain how he goes about it-that is, how he as an existing person goes about it, or whether he ceases to be an existing person, and whether an existing person has a right to do that. As soon as we begin to ask such questions, we are asking ethically and are maintaining the claim of the ethical upon the existing person, which cannot be that he is supposed to abstract from existence, but that he
29737-512: The expense of the greater society. Under the collective ownership of the means of production, the relation of each worker to the mode of production will be identical and will assume the character that corresponds to the universal interests of the communist society. The direct distribution of the fruits of the labour of each worker to fulfil the interests of the working class—and thus to an individual's own interest and benefit— will constitute an un-alienated state of labour conditions, which restores to
29964-603: The experience of dread. So, anxiety may be a possibility for sin, but anxiety can also be a recognition or realization of one's true identity and freedoms. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate. … Anxiety is freedom's possibility, and only such anxiety is through faith absolutely educative, because it consumes all finite ends and discovers all their deceptiveness. And no Grand Inquisitor has such dreadful torments in readiness as anxiety has, and no secret agent knows as cunningly as anxiety to attack his suspect in his weakest moment or to make alluring
30191-485: The experiential world depend upon networks of reciprocal recognition. Failures of recognition, then, demand reflection upon the past as a way "to understand what is required of us at the present." For Hegel, this ultimately involves rethinking an interpretation of "religion as the collective reflection of the modern community on what ultimately counts for it." He contends, finally, that this "historically, socially construed philosophical account of that whole process" elucidates
30418-445: The finite, the infinite, a consciousness of the "relationship of the two to itself," and a consciousness of "the power that posited" the self. The finite (limitations such as those imposed by one's body or one's concrete circumstances) and the infinite (those capacities that free us from limitations such as imagination) always exist in a state of tension. That tension between two aspects of the "self" that must be brought into balance. When
30645-435: The generation of products (goods and services) is accomplished with an endless sequence of discrete, repetitive motions that offer the worker little psychological satisfaction for "a job well done." By means of commodification , the labor power of the worker is reduced to wages (an exchange value); the psychological estrangement ( Entfremdung ) of the worker results from the unmediated relation between his productive labour and
30872-418: The genesis of a distinctly "modern" standpoint. Another way of putting this is to say that the Phenomenology takes up Kant's philosophical project of investigating the capacities and limits of reason. Under the influence of Herder, however, Hegel proceeds historically, instead of altogether a priori. Yet, although proceeding historically, Hegel resists the relativistic consequences of Herder's own thought. In
31099-482: The gift, but its eye is fixed on the Lord. When the heart is filled with envy, then the eye has power to call forth uncleanness even in the pure; but when love dwells in the heart, then the eye has the power to foster the good in the unclean; but this eye does not see the evil but the pure, which it loves and encourages it by loving it. Certainly there is a power in this world which by its words turns good into evil, put there
31326-430: The good fight, from which no one is shut out, and yet this is so glorious that if it were granted only once to a past generation under exceptional circumstances-yes, what a description envy and discouragement would then know how to give! The difference is about the same as that in connection with the thought of death. As soon as a human being is born, he begins to die. But the difference is that there are some people for whom
31553-549: The hands of wealth owners, combined with government enforced taxes compel workers to labour. In a capitalist world, our means of survival is based on monetary exchange, therefore we have no other choice than to sell our labour power and consequently be bound to the demands of the capitalist. The worker "[d]oes not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself;" "[l]abor
31780-430: The higher, highest, and the supremely highest. Think of the most cultured person, one of whom we all admiringly say, "He is so cultured!" Then think of Christianity, which says to him, "You shall love the neighbor!" of course, a certain social courtesy, a politeness toward all people, a friendly condescension toward inferiors, a boldly confident attitude before the mighty, a beautifully controlled freedom of spirit, yes, this
32007-514: The hour of the separation, when the pilgrimage begins, it is as if he were emigrating to a foreign country where nothing but the contrast reminds him, by the loss, of what he wished; it can seem to him as if he were emigrating to a foreign country even if he remains at home perhaps in the same locality—by losing the wish just as among strangers, so that to take leave of the wish seems to him harder and more crucial than to take leave of his senses. Apart from this wish, even if he still does not move from
32234-436: The human reality they reflect." In other words, it is not enough to consider propositions, or even the content of consciousness; "it is worthwhile to ask in every instance what kind of spirit would entertain such propositions, hold such views, and have such a consciousness. Every outlook in other words, is to be studied not merely as an academic possibility but as an existential reality." The Phenomenology of Spirit shows that
32461-474: The idea become concrete? By being permeated with the historical consciousness . The more concrete the idea, the greater the probability. The more abstract the medium, the smaller the probability; the more concrete, the greater. But what does it mean to say that the medium is concrete, other than to say it is language, or is seen in approximation to language; for language is the most concrete of all media. The idea, for example, which comes to expression in sculpture
32688-459: The ideal appears opposite the real and reconstructs this real world, which it has grasped in its substance, in the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its gray in gray, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the gray in gray of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk. Marx%27s theory of alienation Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes
32915-564: The individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses , and, hence, a power beyond all doubt . ... Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx distinguishes four results of alienated labour: alienated labour alienates the worker, first, from the product of his labour; second, from his own activity; third, from what Marx, following Feuerbach, calls species-being ; and fourth, from other human beings. The design of
33142-401: The individual revels in their own despair and sees their own pain as lifting them up above the base nature of other humans who do not find themselves in this state. This is the least common form of despair and Kierkegaard claims it is mostly found in true poets. This despair can also be called the despair of defiance, as it is the despair that strikes out against all that is eternal. One last note
33369-414: The individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but also, merely, to safeguard their very existence. That humans psychologically require the life activities that lead to their self-actualisation as persons remains a consideration of secondary historical relevance because the capitalist mode of production eventually will exploit and impoverish
33596-470: The influence of early Romanticism, he underwent a sort of reversal, exploring, in particular, the mystical experience of love as the true essence of religion. Also in 1797, the unpublished and unsigned manuscript of " The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism " was written. It was written in Hegel's hand, but may have been authored by Hegel, Schelling, or Hölderlin. While in Frankfurt, Hegel composed
33823-534: The institutions of the modern social world, but to change the way in which society is understood by its members. People are completely alienated if they are both subjectively and objectively alienated. Where Hegel believes this to be a condition unique to people in ancient Rome and medieval Europe , Marx sees this as the condition of contemporary society. Marx stated that in a capitalist society , workers are alienated from their labour - they cannot decide on their own productive activities, nor can they use or own
34050-461: The issue of how one exists. One of Kierkegaard's recurrent themes is the importance of subjectivity, which has to do with the way people relate themselves to (objective) truths. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments , he argues that "subjectivity is truth" and "truth is subjectivity." Kierkegaard conveys that most essentially, truth is not just a matter of discovering objective facts. While objective facts are important, there
34277-483: The lecture hall, not as a substitute for its proper, book-length exposition. Hegel presents logic as a presuppositionless science that investigates the most fundamental thought-determinations [ Denkbestimmungen ], or categories , and so constitutes the basis of philosophy. In putting something into question, one already presupposes logic; in this regard, it is the only field of inquiry that must constantly reflect upon its own mode of functioning. The Science of Logic
34504-469: The length of the text itself. The fourth chapter of the Phenomenology includes Hegel's first presentation of the lord-bondsman dialectic , the section of the book that has been most influential in general culture. What is at stake in the conflict Hegel presents is the practical (not theoretical) recognition or acknowledgement [ Anerkennung , anerkennen ] of the universality – i.e., personhood, humanity – of each of two opposed self-consciousnesses. What
34731-518: The local Bamberg beer. However, Hegel bore contempt for what he saw as "old Bavaria", frequently referring to it as "Barbaria" and dreaded that "hometowns" like Bamberg would lose their autonomy under new the Bavarian state. After being investigated in September 1808 by the Bavarian state for potentially violating security measures by publishing French troop movements, Hegel wrote to Niethammer, now
34958-416: The logic. Michael J. Inwood states, "The logical idea is non-temporal and therefore does not exist at any time apart from its manifestations." To ask "when" it divides into nature and spirit is analogous to asking "when" 12 divides into 5 and 7. The question does not have an answer because it is predicated upon a fundamental misunderstanding of its terms. The task of the logic (at this high systemic level)
35185-487: The love of a beautiful girl or his fame, no, but he would envy him his money. Give me money, the young man will say, and I will be all right." But Kierkegaard thinks this emphasis on money leads to a denial of the gifts of the spirit to those who are poor and in misery. Do not forget to do good and to share – Hebrews 13.16 – But do not forget either that this incessant talk by worldliness about beneficence and benevolence and generosity and charitable donations and gift upon gift
35412-464: The many activities that promote mutual human survival and psychological well-being, by means of emotional connections with other people, with society. The psychic value of a human consists in being able to conceive (think) of the ends of their actions as purposeful ideas, which are distinct from the actions required to realise a given idea. That is, humans are able to objectify their intentions by means of an idea of themselves as "the subject" and an idea of
35639-477: The maxim, Love Thy Neighbour . Kierkegaard stressed that it was Christianity that "discovered the neighbor". Test it, place as the middle term between the lover and the beloved the neighbor, whom one shall love, place as a middle term between two friends the neighbor, whom one shall love, and you will immediately see jealousy. Yet the neighbor is self-denial's middle term that steps in between self-love's I and I, but also between erotic love's and friendship's I and
35866-399: The merely ethical, i.e., he practices an inner spirituality that seeks to be "before god" rather than seeking to understand himself as an ethically upright person. His God requires more than being good, he demands that he seek out an inner commitment to him. If Abraham were to blithely obey, his actions would have no meaning. It is only when he acts with fear and trembling that he demonstrates
36093-424: The modern social world. There are three forms of alienation: objective , subjective , and complete. People are objectively alienated if the social world they inhabit is not a home. Individuals may live in a world that is not a home without experiencing feelings of alienation. Conversely, they may experience feelings that the world is not a home while also accepting this experience as a metaphysical fact , as
36320-400: The moment of choice, he is in complete isolation, for he withdraws from his social milieu, and yet at the same moment he is in absolute continuity, for he chooses himself as a product. And this choice is freedom's choice in such a way that in choosing himself as product he can just as well be said to produce himself. At the moment of choice, he is at the point of consummation, for his personality
36547-401: The most common cause of alienation. People are subjectively but not objectively alienated. They reject the modern social world because it appears to them as not a home, even though it objectively is. Hegel sees acceptance that subjective alienation is a persistent feature of modern social life as part of the task of becoming reconciled to the modern social world. He wishes not to reform or change
36774-455: The multitudinousness of sin, or does a man need to love very long to produce these outside of himself! But when joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and temperance dwell in the heart, what wonder, then, that a man, even if he were surrounded by a multitude of sins, remains an alien, a stranger, who understands only a very little about the customs of the country, even if these were explained to him? Would not this, then, be
37001-415: The narrow interests of a bourgeois capitalist class, but instead will be directed to meet the needs of each producer and consumer. Although production will be differentiated by the degree of each worker's abilities, the purpose of the communist system of industrial production will be determined by the collective requirements of society, not by the profit-oriented demands of a capitalist social class who live at
37228-457: The new semester began in October, Hegel returned to Berlin in the mistaken belief that the epidemic had largely subsided. By 14 November, Hegel was dead. The physicians pronounced the cause of death as cholera, but it is likely he died from another gastrointestinal disease. His last words are said to have been, "There was only one man who ever understood me, and even he didn't understand me." He
37455-473: The next as denoting thought-determinations only extrinsically connected to one another. The categories of Essence reciprocally "shine" into one another. Finally, in the Concept, thought has shown itself to be fully self-referential, and so its categories organically "develop" from one to the next. It is clear then, that in Hegel's technical sense of the term, the concept ( Begriff , sometimes also rendered "notion," capitalized by some translators but not others )
37682-401: The next world if you have not wept?" Perhaps someone else comes in a different way, but to the same place. Albert Camus wrote about the idea of being a stranger in the world but reversed Kierkegaard's meaning. A stranger for Camus was someone living in the world who is forced to exist in a Christian way even though the individual does not want to be a Christian. But Kierkegaard was discussing
37909-678: The notion of alienation, although he phrases it and understands it in his own distinctly original terms. For Kierkegaard, the present age is a reflective age—one that values objectivity and thought over action, lip-service to ideals rather than action, discussion over action, publicity and advertising over reality, and fantasy over the real world. For Kierkegaard, the meaning of values has been removed from life, by lack of finding any true and legitimate authority. Instead of falling into any claimed authority, any "literal" sacred book or any other great and lasting voice, self-aware humans must confront an existential uncertainty. Humanity has lost meaning because
38136-399: The opening dialectic of the Logic , Hegel claims to display that the thought of " being, pure being – without further determination" is indistinguishable from the concept of nothing , and that, in this "passing back and forth" of being and nothing, " each immediately vanishes in its opposite. " This movement is neither one concept nor the other, but the category of becoming . There is not
38363-474: The opiate of the masses ". The concept of alienation does not originate with Marx. Marx's two main influences in his use of the term are Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach . For Hegel, alienation consists in an "unhappy consciousness". By this term, Hegel means a misunderstood form of Christianity , or a Christianity that hasn't been interpreted according to Hegel's own pantheism . In The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel described
38590-405: The other I. .... Love for the neighbor is therefore the eternal equality in loving. Equality is simply not to make distinctions and eternal equality is unconditionally not to make the slightest distinction, unqualifiedly not to make the slightest distinction. The essential Christian is itself too weighty, in its movements too earnest to scurry about, dancing, in the frivolity of such facile talk about
38817-533: The other. Furthermore, the final sections of Hegel's Encyclopedia suggest that to give priority to any one of its three parts is to have an interpretation that is "one-sided," incomplete or otherwise inaccurate. As Hegel famously declares, "The true is the whole." Hegel's concept of logic differs greatly from that of the ordinary English sense of the term. This can be seen, for instance, in such metaphysical definitions of logic as "the science of things grasped in [the] thoughts that used to be taken to express
39044-401: The permanence of the despair. The despair in this group arises from the nature of sensate things and physical desires. These three sub groups are also grouped under the heading "Despair over the earthly." The second level of conscious despair under the heading "Despair over the eternal." Someone in this level views themself in light of their own weakness. Unlike in the upper level, this weakness
39271-416: The philosophy of fine art, the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of history, and the history of philosophy were published posthumously from students' notes. In spite of his notoriously terrible delivery, his fame spread and his lectures attracted students from all over Germany and beyond. Meanwhile, Hegel and his pupils, such as Leopold von Henning , Friedrich Wilhelm Carové , were harassed and put under
39498-405: The point—humans are not motivated and do not find meaning in life through pure objectivity. Instead, they find it through passion, desire, and moral and religious commitment. These phenomena are not objectively provable—nor do they come about through any form of analysis of the external world; they come about through a direct relationship between one and the external world. Here Kierkegaard's emphasis
39725-676: The poor and miserable person for whom he procured relief by means of the money of wealthy generosity. Bear this I mind, that if poverty and misery disturb us with their pleas, we can of course manage to get help for them through generosity; but bear this in mind, that it would be much more appalling if we constrained poverty and misery "to hinder our prayers," as Scripture says (1 Peter 3:7), by grumbling against us to God-because we were atrociously unfair to poverty and misery by not telling that they are able to practice mercifulness. We shall now adhere to this point in this discourse about mercifulness and guard ourselves against confusing mercifulness with what
39952-531: The possibilities of life. He's reflecting on what he could become if he only threw himself into the power of his own choice. As long as he stands there he stands at the crossroads of life, unable to make a decision and live within its boundaries. The mere fact that one has the possibility and freedom to do something, even the most terrifying of possibilities, triggers immense feelings of dread. Haufniensis called this our "dizziness of freedom." Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into
40179-538: The principle of immanence , that is, in assessing claims always according to their own internal criteria. Taking skepticism seriously, he contends that people cannot presume any truths that have not passed the test of experience; even the a priori categories of the Logic must attain their "verification" in the natural world and the historical accomplishments of humankind. Guided by the Delphic imperative to " know thyself ", Hegel presents free self-determination as
40406-406: The problem of alienation. In these works, Feuerbach argues that an inappropriate separation of individuals from their essential human nature is at the heart of Christianity. Feuerbach believes the alienation of modern individuals consists in their holding false beliefs about God. God is not an objective being, but is instead a projection of man's own essential predicates. Christian belief entails
40633-422: The product and how it is produced are determined, not by the producers who make it (the workers), nor by the consumers of the product (the buyers), but by the capitalist class who besides accommodating the worker's manual labour also accommodate the intellectual labour of the engineer and the industrial designer who create the product in order to shape the taste of the consumer to buy the goods and services at
40860-442: The promotion of his philosophical adversary Jakob Friedrich Fries ahead of him. Hegel attempted to enlist the help of the poet and translator Johann Heinrich Voß to obtain a post at the renascent University of Heidelberg , but he failed. To his chagrin, Fries was, in the same year, made ordinary professor (salaried). The following February marked the birth of Hegel's illegitimate son, Georg Ludwig Friedrich Fischer (1807–1831), as
41087-476: The pseudonymous authors write from perspectives which are not Kierkegaard's own, some of the philosophy mentioned in this article may not reflect Kierkegaard's own beliefs. Just as other philosophers bring up viewpoints in their essays to discuss and criticize them, Kierkegaard assigns pseudonyms to explore a particular viewpoint in-depth, which may take up a whole book or two in some instances, and Kierkegaard, or another pseudonym, critiques that position. For example,
41314-485: The pseudonymous works are written from perspectives which are not his own: while Kierkegaard himself was a religious author, the pseudonymous authors wrote from points of view that were aesthetic or speculative. One exception to this is Anti-Climacus , a pseudonymous author developed after the writing of The Point of View : Anti-Climacus is a religious author who writes from a Christian perspective so ideal that Kierkegaard did not wish it to be attributed to himself. Because
41541-408: The readers learn, but what the self-consciousnesses described do not yet realize, is that recognition can only be successful and actual as reciprocal or mutual. This is the case for the simple reason that the recognition of someone you do not recognize as properly human cannot count as genuine recognition. Hegel can also be seen here as criticizing the individualist worldview of people and society as
41768-421: The rearranged status quo of production-relations. Despite the ideological promise of industrialisation—that the mechanisation of industrial production would raise the mass of the workers from a brutish life of subsistence existence to honourable work—the division of labour inherent to the capitalist mode of production thwarted the human nature ( Gattungswesen ) of the worker and so rendered each individual into
41995-417: The relative ends, because resignation's absolute distinction will at every moment safeguard the absolute τέλος against all fraternizing. It is true that the individual oriented toward the absolute τέλος, is in the relative ends, but he is not in them in such a way that the absolute τέλος is exhausted in them. It is true that before God and before the absolute τέλος we are all equal, but it is not true that God or
42222-445: The respective author, pseudonymous or not. Alienation is a term philosophers apply to a wide variety of phenomena, including any feeling of separation from, and discontent with, society; feeling that there is a moral breakdown in society; feelings of powerlessness in the face of the solidity of social institutions; the impersonal, dehumanised nature of large-scale and bureaucratic social organisations. Kierkegaard recognizes and accepts
42449-462: The result of an affair with Hegel's landlady Christiana Burkhardt née Fischer. With his finances drying up quickly, Hegel was under great pressure to deliver his book, the long-promised introduction to his philosophical system. Hegel was putting the finishing touches to it, The Phenomenology of Spirit , as Napoleon engaged Prussian troops on 14 October 1806 in the Battle of Jena on a plateau outside
42676-460: The sacrifice, the practical denial or repression, of essential human characteristics. Feuerbach characterises his own work as having a therapeutic goal – healing the painful separation at the heart of alienation. In Part I: "Feuerbach – Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook" of The German Ideology (1846), Karl Marx said the following: Things have now come to such a pass that
42903-419: The same time as the apprehension) of a truth which eventually bursts forth in the last works: Kierkegaard likewise takes the leap. Kierkegaard's view that despair is not a fact but a state: the very state of sin. For sin is what alienates from God. The absurd, which is the metaphysical state of the consciousness of man, does not lead to God. Perhaps this notion will become clearer if I risk this shocking statement:
43130-479: The search for an externally objective criterion of truth is a fool's errand. The constraints on knowledge are necessarily internal to spirit itself. Yet, although theories and self-conceptions may always be reevaluated, renegotiated, and revised, this is not a merely imaginative exercise. Claims to knowledge must always prove their own adequacy in real historical experience. Although Hegel seemed during his Berlin years to have abandoned The Phenomenology of Spirit , at
43357-450: The self is out of balance, i.e., has the wrong understanding of who it is because it conceives itself too much in terms of its own limiting circumstances (and thus fails to recognize its own freedom to determine what it will be) or too much in terms of what it would like to be, (thus ignoring its own circumstances), the person is in a state of despair . Notably, Anti-Climacus says one can be in despair even if one feels perfectly happy. Despair
43584-435: The semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated, this means that they cease to exist in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and in the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement, the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which
43811-430: The sermon, mercifulness. Preaching should indeed be solely and only about mercifulness. If you know how to speak effectually about this, then generosity will follow of itself and come by itself accordingly as the individual is capable of it. But bear in mind, that if a person raised money, money, money by speaking about generosity-bear this in mind, that by being silent about mercifulness he would be acting mercilessly toward
44038-595: The spot, his life's troublesome way is perhaps spent in useless sufferings, for we are speaking of those who suffer essentially, not of those who have the consolation that their sufferings are for the benefit of a good cause, for the benefit of others. It was bound to be thus—the journey to the foreign country was not long; in one moment he was there, there in that strange country where the suffering ones meet, but not those who have ceased to grieve, not those whose tears eternity cannot wipe away, for as an old devotional book so simply and movingly says, "How can God dry your tears in
44265-598: The stages in the development of the human Geist ('spirit'), by which men and women progress from ignorance to knowledge of the self and of the world. Developing Hegel's human-spirit proposition, Marx said that those poles of idealism — "spiritual ignorance" and "self-understanding"— are replaced with material categories , whereby "spiritual ignorance" becomes "alienation" and "self-understanding" becomes man's realisation of his Gattungswesen (species-essence). The middle-period writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, where he critiques Christianity and philosophy , are pre-occupied with
44492-460: The subject of issuing instructions on how the world ought to be: philosophy, at any rate, always comes too late to perform this function. As the thought of the world, it appears only at a time when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its completed state [ sich fertig gemacht ]. This lesson of the concept is necessarily also apparent from history, namely that it is only when actuality [ Wirklichkeit ] has reached maturity that
44719-497: The surveillance of Prince Sayn-Wittgenstein , the interior minister of Prussia and his reactionary circles in the Prussian court. In the remainder of his career, he made two trips to Weimar , where he met with Goethe for the last time, and to Brussels , the Northern Netherlands , Leipzig, Vienna , Prague, and Paris. During the last ten years of his life, Hegel did not publish another book but thoroughly revised
44946-495: The term demonic is used in the Classical Greek Sense, not the modern sense). In this form of despair, the individual finds him or herself in despair, understands they are in despair, seeks some way to alleviate it, and yet no help is forthcoming. As a result, the self becomes hardened against any form of help and "Even if God in heaven and all the angels offered him aid, he would not want it." At this level of despair
45173-664: The text which has become known as the Life of Jesus and a book-length manuscript titled "The Positivity of the Christian Religion." His relations with his employers becoming strained, Hegel accepted an offer mediated by Hölderlin to take up a similar position with a wine merchant's family in Frankfurt in 1797. There, Hölderlin exerted an important influence on Hegel's thought. In Berne, Hegel's writings had been sharply critical of orthodox Christianity, but in Frankfurt, under
45400-897: The theory of Entfremdung relies upon The Essence of Christianity (1841) by Ludwig Feuerbach , which states that the idea of a supernatural god has alienated the natural characteristics of the human being . Moreover, Max Stirner extended Feuerbach's analysis in The Ego and its Own (1845) that even the idea of 'humanity' is an alienating concept for individuals to intellectually consider in its full philosophic implication. Marx and Friedrich Engels responded to these philosophical propositions in The German Ideology (1845). The terms Entfremdung ("alienation" or "estrangement") and Entäusserung ("externalisation" or "alienation"), derived from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , indicate that people are "alienated" because they are not at home in
45627-413: The thing that they produce, "the object." Conversely, unlike a human being, an animal does not objectify itself as "the subject" nor its products as ideas, "the object," because an animal engages in directly self-sustaining actions that have neither a future intention, nor a conscious intention. Whereas a person's Gattungswesen does not exist independently of specific, historically conditioned activities,
45854-437: The thought of death comes into existence with birth and is present to them in the quiet peacefulness of childhood and the buoyancy of youth; whereas others have a period in which this thought is not present to them until, when the years run out, the years of vigor and vitality, the thought of death meets them on their way. Who, now, is going to decide which life was easier, whether it was the life of those who continually lived with
46081-442: The time of his unexpected death, he was in fact making plans to revise and republish it. As Hegel was no longer in need of money or credentials, H. S. Harris argues that "the only rational conclusion that can be drawn from his decision to republish the book… is that he still regarded the 'science of experience' as a valid project in itself" and one for which later system has no equivalent. There is, however, no scholarly consensus about
46308-586: The transitional period between the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement in the Germanic regions of Europe, Hegel lived through and was influenced by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars . His fame rests chiefly upon The Phenomenology of Spirit , The Science of Logic , his teleological account of history, and his lectures at the University of Berlin on topics from his Encyclopedia of
46535-436: The trap in which he will be caught, and no discerning judge understands how to interrogate and examine the accused as does anxiety, which never lets the accused escape, neither through amusement, nor by noise, nor during work, neither by day nor by night. Most emphatically in The Sickness Unto Death , Kierkegaard's author argues that the human self is a composition of various aspects that must be brought into conscious balance:
46762-614: The tree, sin was born. So, according to Kierkegaard, anxiety precedes sin, and it is anxiety that leads Adam to sin. Haufniensis mentions that anxiety is the presupposition for hereditary sin. However, Haufniensis mentions that anxiety is a way for humanity to be saved as well. Anxiety informs us of our choices, our self-awareness and personal responsibility, and brings us from a state of un-self-conscious immediacy to self-conscious reflection. ( Jean-Paul Sartre calls these terms pre-reflexive consciousness and reflexive consciousness.) An individual becomes truly aware of his or her potential through
46989-417: The trilogy. Quite right. But how does it do it? Is abstraction a something that does it, or is it not the act of the abstractor? But the abstractor is, after all, an existing person, and as an existing person is consequently in the dialectical element, which he cannot mediate or merge, least of all absolutely, as long as he is existing. If he does do it, then this must be related as a possibility to actuality, to
47216-457: The tripartite structure of his system) also owes much to the hermetic tradition, in particular, the work of Jakob Böhme . The conviction that philosophy must take the form of a system Hegel owed, most particularly, to his Tübingen roommates, Schelling and Hölderlin. Hegel also read widely and was much influenced by Adam Smith and other theorists of the political economy . It was Kant's critical philosophy that provided what Hegel took as
47443-415: The truth lies in the identity of the two. The person who has ethically chosen and found himself possess himself defined in his entire concretion. He then possesses himself as an individual who has these capacities , these passions , these inclinations , these habits , who is subject to these external influences, who is influenced in one direction thus and in another thus. Here he then possesses himself as
47670-663: The university in October 1829, but his term ended in September 1830. Hegel was deeply disturbed by the riots for reform in Berlin in that year. In 1831 Frederick William III decorated him with the Order of the Red Eagle , 3rd Class for his service to the Prussian state. In August 1831, a cholera epidemic reached Berlin and Hegel left the city, taking up lodgings in Kreuzberg . Now in a weak state of health, Hegel seldom went out. As
47897-414: The value of what they produce. In the " Notes on James Mill " (1844), Marx explained alienation thus: Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings . . . In my production I would have objectified my individuality , its specific character , and, therefore, enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also, when looking at the object, I would have
48124-521: The violence of the 1793 Reign of Terror dampened Hegel's hopes, he continued to identify with the moderate Girondin faction and never lost his commitment to the principles of 1789, which he expressed by drinking a toast to the storming of the Bastille every fourteenth of July. Schelling and Hölderlin immersed themselves in theoretical debates on Kantian philosophy , from which Hegel remained aloof. Hegel, at this time, envisaged his future as that of
48351-422: The wages paid to him for the labour. The worker is alienated from the means of production via two forms: wage compulsion and the imposed production content. The worker is bound to unwanted labour as a means of survival, labour is not "voluntary but coerced" (forced labour). The worker is only able to reject wage compulsion at the expense of their life and that of their family. The distribution of private property in
48578-441: The words of one scholar, "It is Hegel's insight that reason itself has a history, that what counts as reason is the result of a development. This is something that Kant never imagines and that Herder only glimpses." In praise of Hegel's accomplishment, Walter Kaufmann writes that the guiding conviction of the Phenomenology is that a philosopher should not "confine him or herself to views that have been held but penetrate these to
48805-409: The worker the fullest exercise and determination of their human nature. Capitalism reduces the labour of the worker to a commercial commodity that can be traded in the competitive labour-market, rather than as a constructive socio-economic activity that is part of the collective common effort performed for personal survival and the betterment of society. In a capitalist economy, the businesses who own
49032-609: The workers to the means of production would be equal and non-conflictual because there would be no artificial distinctions about the value of a worker's labour; the worker's humanity ( Gattungswesen ) thus respected, men and women would not become alienated. In the communist socio-economic organisation, the relations of production would operate the mode of production and employ each worker according to their abilities and benefit each worker according to their needs . Hence, each worker could direct their labour to productive work suitable to their own innate abilities, rather than be forced into
49259-542: The world and masters it. Hegel biographer Terry Pinkard notes that Hegel's comment to Niethammer "is all the more striking since he had already composed the crucial section of the Phenomenology in which he remarked that the Revolution had now officially passed to another land (Germany) that would complete 'in thought' what the Revolution had only partially accomplished in practice." Although Napoleon had spared
49486-412: The world because it actually belongs to God. Kierkegaard has no interest in external battles as Karl Marx does. His concern is about the inner fight for faith. Let us speak further about the wish and thereby about sufferings. Discussion of sufferings can always be beneficial if it addresses not only the self-willfulness of the sorrow but, if possible, addresses the sorrowing person for his upbuilding. It
49713-456: The world historical, the general, to the single individual, the specific. The first from the esthete and the second from the ethicist in Either/Or and the third from the book that explained all his previous works; Concluding Unscientific Postscript . As has already been noted above, all classic productions stand equally high, because each one stands infinitely high. If, despite this fact, one were to attempt to introduce an order of rank into
49940-409: The wrong conception of what a self is, i.e., is ignorant of how to realize the self one already potentially is. In this sense, the person does not recognize his own despair because he often measures the success of his life based on whether he himself judges himself to be happy. Regardless of whether you know you are in despair or not, Kierkegaard asserts, you can still be in that state. He notes that this
50167-475: The yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom , which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything
50394-458: Was a German philosopher and one of the most influential figures of German idealism and 19th-century philosophy . His influence extends across the entire range of contemporary philosophical topics, from metaphysical issues in epistemology and ontology , to political philosophy , the philosophy of history , philosophy of art , philosophy of religion , and the history of philosophy . Born in 1770 in Stuttgart , Holy Roman Empire, during
50621-414: Was also a typical product of early German romanticism . "Unity of life" was the phrase used by Hegel and his generation to express their concept of the highest good. It encompasses unity "with oneself, with others, and with nature. The main threat to such unity consists in division ( Entzweiung ) or alienation ( Entfremdung )." In this respect, Hegel was particularly taken with the phenomenon of love as
50848-628: Was buried on 16 November. In accordance with his wishes, Hegel was buried in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery next to Fichte and Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger . Hegel's illegitimate son, Ludwig Fischer, had died shortly before while serving with the Dutch army in Batavia and the news of his death never reached his father. Early the following year, Hegel's sister Christiane committed suicide by drowning. Hegel's two remaining sons – Karl , who became
51075-680: Was published in 1807. This is the first time that, at the age of thirty-six, Hegel lays out "his own distinctive approach" and adopts an "outlook that is recognizably 'Hegelian' to the philosophical problems of post-Kantian philosophy". Yet, the book was poorly understood even by Hegel's contemporaries and received mostly negative reviews. To this day, the Phenomenology is infamous for, among other things, its conceptual and allusive density, idiosyncratic terminology, and confusing transitions. Its most comprehensive commentary, scholar H. S. Harris 's two-volume Hegel's Ladder ( The Pilgrimage of Reason and The Odyssey of Spirit ), runs more than three times
51302-543: Was the daughter of a lawyer at the High Court of Justice at the Württemberg court Ludwig Albrecht Fromm (1696–1758). She died of bilious fever when Hegel was thirteen. Hegel and his father also caught the disease but narrowly survived. Hegel had a sister, Chistiane Luise [ de ] (1773–1832); and a brother, Georg Ludwig (1776–1812), who perished as an officer during Napoleon's 1812 Russian campaign. At
51529-586: Was the only authority. Camus called the existential attitude "philosophical suicide." He put it in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Writings : Now, it is admitted that the absurd is the contrary of hope, it is seen that existential thought for Chestov [ Lev Shestov , 1866–1938] presupposes the absurd but proves it only to dispel it. Such subtlety of thought is a conjuror's emotional trick. When Chestov elsewhere sets his absurd in opposition to current morality and reason, he calls it truth and redemption. Hence, there
#147852