Hegel

The story opens with an anecdote: a painter who wanted to portray the most celebrated man of his age was sent by Goethe to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Although Hegel helped shape modern philosophy, he is still widely misunderstood, and his life is often imagined as calm and orderly.

Klaus Vieweg, himself a philosopher, shows a different picture. Hegel developed his ideas slowly and with great caution, yet his path was full of unexpected turns, tense moments and real danger. The book evokes the times and social circles in which his thought took shape and offers close, careful readings of his four major works.

Building on extensive archival research, Vieweg draws on documents and handwritten notes that had not been studied before, and traces Hegel's exchanges with thinkers and writers such as Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hölderlin. Reading Hegel through the concepts of reason and freedom, the author corrects common clichés and makes the case for the progressive side of Hegel's philosophy, presenting him as a figure whose ideas still bear on the present.