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WorkGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline

The only book in which Hegel set out his whole system — logic, nature and spirit — in numbered paragraphs written for his students to hold while he lectured.

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel1,660 passages held

  • German, the original language
  • English, a translation held here, and your language
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Original title
Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse
First published
(aged 47)
Original language
German

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Overview

In 1816 Hegel left the Nuremberg school he had run for eight years and took a chair at Heidelberg, choosing it over offers from Erlangen and Berlin. His students needed a text to follow, and in May 1817 he signed the preface to a guide for them, admitting that the need had brought his survey of the whole of philosophy into print earlier than he had intended. The book is built of numbered paragraphs, each stating a step of the argument in a few lines, often with a remark beneath it; the detail, Hegel said, was reserved for the lecture room. Its three parts cover everything he taught: a logic sets out the categories of thought, in a shorter form than the Science of Logic he had just finished; a philosophy of nature moves from space and time to the living organism; a philosophy of spirit (Geist, mind in its widest sense) rises from the soul and consciousness through law, morality and the state to art, religion and philosophy. Hegel's claim is that the parts are not separate subjects: thought, nature and human life are one reason working itself out, so each part forms a circle that opens into the next, and the closing paragraphs bring the whole back to its starting point. Hegel took the book to Berlin in 1818 and went on rewriting it. The second edition, of 1827, was nearly twice as thick, and its preface answered the Pietist theologian August Tholuck, who had repeated the common charge that such philosophy was pantheism. The third, of 1830, has 577 paragraphs and ends on a passage from Aristotle's Metaphysics. After Hegel died in 1831, his students filled out the short paragraphs with additions drawn from their lecture notes, and later editions and translations carry them. The philosophy of nature did Hegel the most harm: it sided with Goethe's theory of colours against Newton's optics, and through the nineteenth century most scientists treated it as a scandal, which helped to discredit his philosophy as a whole. The logic fared better in Britain: William Wallace, a tutor at Merton College, Oxford, translated it in 1873 as The Logic of Hegel, and his version was still being reissued in 1975. Since 1970 scholars have found Hegel better informed about the science of his day than his critics had assumed.

Key concepts

What does “Encyclopedia” mean in the title of this book?

It means an outline of all philosophy as one connected whole, not a reference work. Hegel contrasts it with the ordinary kind of encyclopedia, a heap of sciences set side by side as they happen to be found. Here each part grows out of the one before: logic, then nature, then spirit. It is an outline because only the beginnings and basic concepts of each science are given, the detail being kept for the lecture room.

What is the Idea, and why is nature its “otherness”?

The Idea is Hegel's name for reason as the structure of everything real, not a notion in someone's head. The logic studies it pure, as thought alone. Nature is the same reason turned outward and spread across space and time, where things lie side by side and accident has room; Hegel calls this the Idea in its otherness. Spirit is the Idea coming back to itself, as when a mind recognises laws in the motion of the planets.

What does Hegel mean by understanding, dialectic and speculative thinking?

They are three sides of every real thought. Understanding fixes a concept and holds it apart from others, as when something is said to be either finite or infinite. Dialectic is the moment at which such a fixed concept, pressed hard, turns into its opposite. Speculative thinking, which has nothing to do with guessing, grasps the two opposites as one whole. Hegel insists that these are not three kinds of logic but three steps within any concept.

What does Geist mean in this book?

Geist, translated as spirit or mind, is Hegel's word for everything that feels, thinks, wills and builds a shared world, from a sleeper's dim sensation to law, art and religion. It is not a ghost inside a body. The book takes it in three steps: subjective spirit is the individual soul and mind, objective spirit is freedom built into law and the state, and absolute spirit is art, religion and philosophy, in which spirit knows itself.

How does the soul differ from consciousness in Hegel's account?

The soul is spirit at its lowest level, still merged with the life of the body: feeling, temperament, sleeping and waking, with no clear line yet between a self and a world. Consciousness begins once that line is drawn and an “I” faces objects outside it. Between the two stands habit, by which the soul trains its body into an instrument. Standing upright is Hegel's example: a posture a person keeps only by willing it, without noticing.

What are the remarks and additions under Hegel's numbered paragraphs?

Each numbered paragraph states one step in a few lines. The remarks printed beneath many of them are Hegel's own, written for publication: there he argues with Kant, with Newton and with his critics. The additions, in German Zusätze, are something else. Editors compiled them after his death from students' lecture notes, so they read easily but are not from his hand, and scholars weigh them differently from the paragraphs he wrote.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

One system, a circle of circles

Can philosophy be learned in pieces, a little logic here and some ethics there? Hegel answers that a thought is justified only by its place in the whole, and the whole is a circle with no privileged starting point.

Each of the three parts is a complete circle that breaks through its own limit and opens the next, so that logic, nature and spirit form one circle of circles. Hegel sets this against philosophising by opinion and assurance: a claim outside the system is, for him, an unfounded presupposition. The closing paragraphs put it to the test by reading the three parts as three chains of inference, each part in turn serving as the middle link, and the book returns to its beginning before it closes on a passage from Aristotle.

  • philosophy
  • truth
  • reason
  • mediation
  • totality
  • unity

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Can thought reach things as they are?

Before the logic proper begins, Hegel asks what thinking can know of the world, and examines three answers his age had given. The stake is whether truth is within the reach of thought at all.

The older metaphysics trusted thought naively and pinned fixed labels on God, the soul and the world. Empiricism and Kant's critical philosophy confined knowledge to experience, and a third party, led by Jacobi, fell back on an immediate certainty of the heart. Hegel finds each one-sided, and no other book of his contains this survey. His own answer is the logic that follows: the categories are not tools applied to things from outside but stages that correct one another, from bare being up to the Idea, each undone by its own contradiction.

  • logic
  • thought
  • concept
  • being
  • objectivity
  • metaphysics
  • empiricism
  • knowledge
  • dialectic
  • contradiction
  • negation
  • identity

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Nature, reason outside itself

If the world is rational through and through, why is nature so full of accident, waste and death? Hegel's answer is that nature is the Idea in the form of otherness, reason scattered across space and time.

From space and time through light, colour and chemistry to the living animal, Hegel arranges nature as a ladder of stages, each the truth of the one below. The ladder is one of thought, not of descent: he expressly rejects the picture of plants and animals emerging from water, or higher species from lower. Nature is too weak to hold fast to the concept, so philosophy cannot deduce every detail and presupposes what physics has found. The same part takes Goethe's side against Newton on colour, the stand that cost Hegel most with scientists.

  • philosophy of nature
  • nature
  • matter
  • necessity
  • finitude
  • individuality

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From the sleeping soul to the thinking mind

Is a mind something a creature simply has, or something it must work its way up to? Hegel follows spirit from the soul still sunk in the body, through habit and consciousness, to the mind that thinks in words.

Spirit begins as soul, barely distinct from the life of the body: it sleeps and wakes, ages, feels, and can fall ill in madness, which Hegel treats as a contradiction within a reason that is still there. Habit is the turning point, where the body becomes an instrument the soul no longer has to attend to. Above it come consciousness facing an object and then intelligence, which thinks in names and not in pictures. Against a psychology that lists mental faculties side by side, Hegel presents each as a stage of one self-liberation.

  • spirit
  • subjectivity
  • consciousness
  • self-consciousness
  • psychology
  • cognition

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Freedom made real, and spirit knowing itself

What is freedom, if it is more than doing as one likes? Hegel finds it first in a shared world of law, morality and the state, and finally in art, religion and philosophy, where spirit knows what it is.

Objective spirit is freedom built into a common world: right, morality, family, civil society, the state and world history, a compressed outline of what the Philosophy of Right sets out at length. A long remark binds politics to religion and calls it folly to change a corrupt constitution while leaving the old religion standing, a revolution without a reformation. Absolute spirit follows, in which art shows the truth to the senses, religion pictures it and philosophy comprehends it. Here Hegel also answers the charge that his philosophy is pantheism.

  • freedom
  • will
  • objectivity
  • universality
  • religion
  • spirit

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Within this work

passages held
1,660
distinct concepts
1,263
by passages held, corpus-wide
#33

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “objectivity” and “subjectivity”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 86 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
objectivitysubjectivity30
conceptobjectivity15
freedomreligion14
freedomreason12
conceptdialectic11
conceptreason11
dialecticobjectivity10
freedomsubjectivity10
dialecticfreedom9
reasonreligion9
reasonsubjectivity9
dialecticreason8
dialecticsubjectivity7
religionsubjectivity7
conceptfreedom6
dialecticmediation6
conceptmediation5
conceptsubjectivity5
freedomobjectivity5
mediationreligion5
mediationreason3
objectivityreason3
conceptreligion2
mediationobjectivity2
dialecticreligion1
mediationsubjectivity1
objectivityreligion1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1801 The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy (Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie)

    The book that opened Hegel's Jena years and first put his name before the public — as Schelling's ally, a role his essays for their Critical Journal continued.

     DE
  2. 1802 Faith and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen)

    Written at the height of the alliance with Schelling: the longest of Hegel's pieces for their journal, and his fullest early reckoning with Kant.

     DE
  3. 1802 How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy (Wie der gemeine Menschenverstand die Philosophie nehme)

    Of Hegel's reviews for the Critical Journal, the most openly mocking: the journal's programme of severity turned on a single named Kantian.

     DE
  4. 1802 On the Essence of Philosophical Criticism (Über das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik überhaupt)

    Unsigned, and claimed for both editors ever since: the programme at the head of the journal Hegel and Schelling ran in 1802–03, which Hegel's reviews in its later issues put into practice.

     DE
  5. 1802 On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law (Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts)

    Spread across the Critical Journal's last two issues: Hegel's longest published early writing on law and the state, composed while he was still an unsalaried lecturer at Jena.

     DE
  6. 1802 Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy (Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie)

    Between the Krug review and Faith and Knowledge in the Critical Journal's run, the essay in which Hegel first says what doubt does for philosophy.

     DE
  7. 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (Die Phänomenologie des Geistes)

    Written as Napoleon's army entered Jena and published in 1807, the book Hegel meant as the doorway into his system — and the one many readers still enter him through.

     DE
  8. 1812 Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik)

    The larger of Hegel's two versions of the Logic, written away from any university while he ran a Nuremberg school; the metaphysical core the rest of the system rests on.

     DE
  9. 1817 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline (Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse) you are here DEEN
  10. 1821 Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts)

    The last book Hegel published in his lifetime apart from new editions of the Encyclopaedia: the textbook of his Berlin law lectures, and the one of his books most argued over by political readers.

     DE
  11. 1831 On the English Reform Bill (Über die englische Reformbill)

    Some three decades after his first, unpublished pamphlets on Württemberg and on the German constitution, Hegel's last venture into the politics of the day.

     DE
  12. 1833 Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie)

    Among the posthumous lecture books, the course Hegel carried through nearly his whole teaching life, and the one that closes on his thanks to the students who had followed it.

     DE
  13. 1835 The Philosophy of Fine Art (Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik)

    Not a book Hegel wrote but Berlin lectures assembled by a student after his death — the most influential philosophy of art of the nineteenth century, and a contested reconstruction of it.

     EN
  14. 1835 Who Thinks Abstractly? (Wer denkt abstrakt?)

    Hegel in the manner of a magazine essayist: short, comic and aimed at the general reader, though he never published it himself.

     DE
  15. 1837 Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte)

    For decades the most widely read of Hegel's works, and now the most contested — lectures on world history, published after his death, reading it as the growth of human freedom.

     DE
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