Key Ideas
The true is the whole.
Substance is also subject.
Lordship and bondage — the struggle for recognition.
The unhappy consciousness — the soul split between itself and an unreachable God.
Absolute knowing — Spirit knowing itself as Spirit.
Finished, legend has it, the night before the Battle of Jena. Its “Preface” is one of the most quoted and least understood texts in philosophy. See Lordship and Bondage.
Great Scenes
1Lines to Remember
1 quotationsThe true is the whole.
Das Wahre ist das Ganze.
Context & when to use it
For holism against piecemeal truths.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsDialectic
The movement of thought — and for Hegel, of reality — through contradiction toward a richer unity.
German Idealism
The extraordinary philosophical movement after Kant — Fichte, Schelling, Hegel — that tried to complete his revolution by showing reality itself to be the work of mind or Spirit.
Karl Marx
Philosopher, economist and revolutionary who turned Hegel’s dialectic into historical materialism — the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
The Leap of Faith
Kierkegaard’s claim that faith cannot be reached by reasoning — it is a passionate decision made in the face of the absurd.
Simone de Beauvoir
French existentialist philosopher and novelist whose The Second Sex (1949) — “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” — founded modern feminist philosophy, and whose ethics of ambiguity argued that my freedom requires the freedom of others.
Geist (Spirit)
Hegel’s name for reality as self-knowing mind unfolding through nature, history, culture and philosophy.