Hegel

The philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Stuttgart, Germany, 1770 – Berlin 1831) is a synthesis and development of the previous ones elaborated by Fichte and Schelling. In Fichte the “I” produces in itself its dream world, in Schelling this world is nothing but the “I” itself; Hegel addressed to Schelling a criticism that has become famous: this vision, where everything is “I”, is like “the night in which all cows are black”. In Hegel the “I” realizes itself rather in the form of history. History means the political history of the whole world, as well as the small personal histories of every single person; it means dialectic of struggle and overcoming, therefore continuous progress, even war if necessary, ever greater realization of an absolute spirit that is the universal “I”. In this perspective every negative event is nothing but a passage to reach a higher stage, in which the universal reason continues to realize its absoluteness ever better; if, in order to get to this, somebody has to be killed, let’s be patient. What is important is the infinite “I”, represented, for example, by the State, to which the individual “Is”, (meant as a plural of I) who are part of it, must possibly be sacrificed. This is why Hegel’s philosophy was suitable to be exploited in the service of dictatorships, even if this was not its author’s intention, at least at the beginning.
An important aspect of Hegel’s philosophy is the awareness of the world and of existence as history, as a development, a series of overcoming events, which must be read, interpreted, in such a way as to exploit their orientation towards best progress. This way of thinking would lead us to look at nature in the same perspective, where, for example, things go on according to their own laws, including the law of the strongest, ruthlessly sacrificing the weakest beings. However, Hegel diverges about this. According to him nature is not part of the history of the “I”, but only a negative moment that has to be overcome. Hegel’s optimism regarding the history of the “I” does not apply to nature itself. The history of the “I” is in Hegel political history, or the events of single persons, but nature was seen by him as something dead, which has not an “I”; he expressly stated that he felt no interest, for example, when he saw a beautiful landscape: when looking at snowy mountains he felt only a sense of boredom.
In the context of history as a development of the “I”, an interesting point is the interpretation of the relationship between servant and master. When somebody has the courage not to fear death, courage to risk, to invest, then they become a masters; the coward who has not courage, but only knows how to put themselves in the employ of someone, is destined to become a servant, a slave. However, once these respective positions are reached, it happens that the master does not know how to use the objects of work and fails in seeing in the servant a conscious conscience able to stimulate him to a development; then the master, in the absence of further prospects, gets losing his “I”, while instead the servant finds himself in the ideal condition to be motivated to fight for self-awareness; this way the servant realizes himself as “I”, while the master decays. The key to this development is the ability of the work to function as an engine of realization of the “I”. This philosophy prepares that of Marx.