Georg Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel — Stuttgart seminarian, private tutor, newspaper editor, and finally Berlin's reigning professor — completed the Phenomenology of Spirit in Jena in 1806, by his own account finishing as Napoleon's cannon sounded; he had seen the emperor ride through and called him "the world-soul on horseback."

His system is the most ambitious ever built: reality is not substance but subject — Geist, spirit, coming to know itself through history. Truth is the whole, and the whole develops dialectically: every position (the Phenomenology's famous master and slave; the Logic's being, nothing, becoming) generates its own contradiction and is aufgehoben — cancelled, preserved, and raised — in a richer one. History is "the progress of the consciousness of freedom": one free under Oriental despotism, some in Greece, all — in principle — in the modern state. "The rational is the actual and the actual is the rational," says the Philosophy of Right (1821), a sentence read as both consecration of Prussia and coded promise of reform.

Religion, for Hegel, is no enemy of reason but its picture-language: Vorstellung, representation, of the same content philosophy grasps as concept. Christianity is "the absolute religion" precisely because its story — God emptying into a human being who dies, even the death on the cross, and rises as universal Spirit — IS the dialectic, imaged. The Incarnation means the divine and human are not alien; "the death of God" (his phrase before Nietzsche's) is the moment infinite Spirit takes finitude into itself.

He died of cholera in 1831, and his school split like an inheritance: Right Hegelians kept the theology; Left Hegelians — Strauss dissolving the gospels into myth, Feuerbach inverting theology into anthropology, Marx standing the dialectic "on its feet" — manufactured modern secularism from his tools. Both sides were using his fire.