Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831): The most inflluential philosopher of the 19th century, he constructed an idealist system in which Spirit or God actualizes itself through the course of human history through progressive revelations until the true science of Spirit, the perspective of the Whole, is eventually revealed.
Hegel’s influence was incomparable. He had presented a total system of the world, which included not only physics and the sciences, religion, ethics, but even a history of the world; a total system that was supposed to be ultimately religious, while at the same time actually describing in scholarly detail what had happened in the history of the world. It was truly a theory of everything—not only everything metaphysical, but everything historical. We could really say this was the last great system, and the rest of the 19th century was a period of dealing with Hegel, either pro or con.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855): A religious philosopher who was one of the early influences on existentialism.
Kierkegaard loathed Hegel; he is one of the clearest examples of the anti-Hegelian reaction of the mid-19th century. Kierkegaard once famously quipped that “If Hegel had written his whole Logic,” one of the crucial works of Hegel, “and in the preface disclosed the fact that
it was merely a thought experiment,” then Hegel “would have been the greatest thinker than has ever lived; as it is he is merely comic.” That’s about the worst put-down one can hear of one philosopher by another. Kierkegaard wrote that rationality is fundamentally social, but religion is a matter of the individual’s relation to the Absolute. The name of that relation is faith, and faith is literally irrational and asocial: The knight of faith cannot explain or justify herself. For Kierkegaard, the role of philosophy is to bring us to the point of recognizing the mystery of faith, not to explain it. Kierkegaard remains the most radical philosophical critic of Reason itself.
Source credit: Professor Lawrence Cahoone, Holy Cross College
Hegel’s influence was incomparable. He had presented a total system of the world, which included not only physics and the sciences, religion, ethics, but even a history of the world; a total system that was supposed to be ultimately religious, while at the same time actually describing in scholarly detail what had happened in the history of the world. It was truly a theory of everything—not only everything metaphysical, but everything historical. We could really say this was the last great system, and the rest of the 19th century was a period of dealing with Hegel, either pro or con.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855): A religious philosopher who was one of the early influences on existentialism.
Kierkegaard loathed Hegel; he is one of the clearest examples of the anti-Hegelian reaction of the mid-19th century. Kierkegaard once famously quipped that “If Hegel had written his whole Logic,” one of the crucial works of Hegel, “and in the preface disclosed the fact that
it was merely a thought experiment,” then Hegel “would have been the greatest thinker than has ever lived; as it is he is merely comic.” That’s about the worst put-down one can hear of one philosopher by another. Kierkegaard wrote that rationality is fundamentally social, but religion is a matter of the individual’s relation to the Absolute. The name of that relation is faith, and faith is literally irrational and asocial: The knight of faith cannot explain or justify herself. For Kierkegaard, the role of philosophy is to bring us to the point of recognizing the mystery of faith, not to explain it. Kierkegaard remains the most radical philosophical critic of Reason itself.
Source credit: Professor Lawrence Cahoone, Holy Cross College