Hegelian Ethics

Abstract

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in 1770 at Stuttgart, which was then the capital of the Duchy of Würtemberg. His father was an official in the Duke’s service. Hegel received his basic education at the local grammar school and then went on to study philosophy and theology at Tübingen, where the poet Hölderlin and the precocious philosopher Schelling were his closest friends. The institution they attended was a seminary for intending pastors in the Lutheran Church, but Hegel seems to have had no serious thoughts of entering the ministry. On leaving Tübingen in 1793 he spent several years working as a private tutor, first at Bern in Switzerland and later at Frankfurt. A small legacy he received on the death of his father in 1799 enabled him to give up this work, and in 1801 he became a Privat-dozent teaching philosophy at the University of Jena. Hegel stayed at Jena until 1807, when the university was closed by the invading French forces. After eighteen months as editor of a local newspaper in Bamberg, Hegel was appointed headmaster of a grammar school in Nuremberg. He held this position for eight years, teaching his pupils philosophy as well as classics and mathematics, and writing his formidable Science of Logic in his spare time. It was not until he was forty-six, in 1816, that he held a regular professorship in a university. He went in that year to be professor of philosophy at Heidelberg; two years later he left Heidelberg to become professor in the recently founded University of Berlin. Hegel was still professor of philosophy at Berlin when he died in a cholera epidemic in 1831.