It's the birthday of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (books by this author), born in Stuttgart, Germany (1770). He started out as a philosopher of Christianity, and he was particularly interested in how Christianity is a religion based on opposites: sin and salvation, earth and heaven, church and state, finite and infinite. He believed that Jesus had emphasized love as the chief virtue because love can bring about the marriage of opposites.
Hegel eventually went beyond religion and began to argue that the subject of philosophy was reality as a whole. He wanted to create a philosophy that described how and why human beings created communities and governments, made war, destroyed each other's societies, and built themselves up to do it all over again.
What Hegel came up with was his concept of dialectic, which is the idea that all human progress is driven by the conflict between opposites.
At the time of his death, Hegel was the most prominent philosopher in Europe, and his school of thought gave rise to a group of revolutionaries, including Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, who argued that the most important dialectic of history was between worker and master, rich and poor, and their ideas lead to the birth of Communism.
Hegel said, "Reason is the substance of the universe ... the design of the world is absolutely rational."
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Samwaeil Boules
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