Kant had left German philosophy a wall. The Critique of Pure Reason argued that the mind supplies the order it seems to discover: space, time, cause and effect are the terms on which experience arrives, not properties of whatever lies behind it. Something remained out there, unreachable and unknowable, and a generation broke itself trying to get past it. Fichte proposed one route, Schelling another.
Hegel proposed that there was nothing behind the wall. Thought and the world have the same structure, and the way to prove it is to follow thinking as it fails. That is his one claim; everything else in him is machinery for it.
He came to philosophy late and from underneath. At eighteen he entered the Tübingen seminary and shared quarters with the poet Hölderlin and Schelling, both of whom became known before he did — Schelling held a professorship at twenty-three. Hegel spent the seven years after his theology certificate as a house tutor, in Bern from 1793 and in Frankfurt from 1797, teaching other people's children in other people's houses. His father's death in 1799 left him money, and he spent it on Jena: he arrived in 1801, at thirty, an unsalaried lecturer paid only by the students who chose to show up. Readers took him for Schelling's assistant.
His breakthrough came under a deadline. He had promised the manuscript of the Phenomenology of Spirit by October 1806. Napoleon's army reached Jena that month, the battle was fought on 14 October, and the last sheets went to the publisher in Bamberg through French lines. Hegel watched the emperor ride through the occupied town and afterwards called him the world-soul on horseback. The book he had just finished does what no philosophy book had done: it stages consciousness collapsing, over and over. A form of certainty is put in its strongest version, discovers on its own terms that it does not hold, and the wreckage produces the next form. Contradiction, in this telling, is not the mark of a mistake but the way anything moves at all.
No reward followed. He edited a pro-French newspaper in Bamberg, then ran a secondary school in Nuremberg from 1808 to 1816 — a headmaster writing the Science of Logic between terms. The chairs came afterwards: Heidelberg in 1816, then Berlin in 1818, where he took the seat Fichte had held and became the most powerful philosopher in Europe. He was rector of the university at fifty-nine and dead at sixty-one.
His followers split within a decade. Ludwig Feuerbach, the critic of religion, and the young Marx kept the engine and threw out the spirit, turning a philosophy in which history comes to understand itself into a demand that history be changed. Prussia summoned the elderly Schelling to Berlin in 1841 to stamp the school out. After 1848 the whole system seemed to collapse, and the Cambridge philosophers Russell and Moore founded analytic philosophy partly by attacking it. Then it came back — through the Paris lectures of Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-born philosopher, in the 1930s, through the Frankfurt School, the German Marxist critical theorists, through a wave of English-language scholarship from the 1970s on.
What survives is still contested: readers divide over whether Hegel described a cosmic mind coming to know itself or something far soberer — how human commitments come to have authority over us at all.