On the 250th anniversary of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Abstract

Two and a half centuries since the birth of Hegel give reason to try to understand why he, like other great philosophers irrelevant of how many centuries ago they were born, should not be forgotten. The first part of the article deals with the content of the central and most difficult part of Hegel’s Science of logic — the doctrine of essence. This particular work illustrates that its creator successfully passed between the Scylla of realism, which insists on the immediacy of knowledge, and the Charybdis of constructivism, which advocates its mediation. Hegel curbs the claims of mediation and immediacy to exclusivity revealing their concrete identity. The second part of the article explores the perspective of the theoretical and scientific knowledge of the spirit, discovered by Hegel, which makes it possible to avoid the extremes of historicism and essentialism that prevailed after Hegel in the sciences of the spirit. Historicism dissolves the unified essence of various spiritual phenomena in the flow of history, which it considers a purposeless element of change. Essentialism asserts the existence of this essence, but leaves it undefined. Hegel logically determines what is historical in the existence of the spirit, and what transcends history as its absolute goal. The last part of the article indicates the reason for the obvious underestimation of Hegel’s achievements by figures of modern philosophical culture. The place of the Hegelian system in the historical development of philosophy and its actual significance for modernity as a model of philosophical knowledge of truth, nature and spirit, without which the history of philosophy is not complete and cannot be understood as a whole, is determined.