HEGEL'S JOURNEY

Of all the post-Kantian idealists, Hegel probably has the greatest name recognition and both the best and the worst reputation. Yet, until he was thirty-five years old, he was an unknown, failed author and only dubiously successful academic. After 1807, though, with the publication of his Phenomenology of Spirit, he became one of the great figures of the post-Kantian movement (even though it took him nine more years before he received university employment), and, at the height of his fame, he managed to do for himself what Kant had done several generations earlier by managing to convince a large part of the intellectual world that the history of philosophy had been a gradual development toward his own view and that the disparate tendencies of thought at work in its history had finally been satisfactorily resolved in his own system.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in 1770 in Stuttgart and died in 1831 in Berlin. Entering the Protestant Seminary in Tübingen in 1788, he had befriended and roomed with Friedrich Hölderlin, and later they shared a room and friendship with Friedrich Schelling (who was younger than them). After graduating from the Seminary, he took a long and awkward path to philosophy; he became a “house-tutor” for two different families and experienced a failed independent career as an author before becoming an unpaid lecturer in philosophy at Jena and a co-editor with Schelling of the Schellingian Critical Journal of Philosophy, which, when it ceased publication, turned Hegel simply into an unpaid lecturer at Jena.