Hegel is a famous German thinker who has made a huge contribution to philosophy. His works to this day are very popular. Hegel's philosophical system has its own distinctive characteristics. It was built on the basis of the rationalism of Descartes, the mysticism of Jacob Boehme, the elements of dialectics in the writings of Didro and many other teachings. Hegel, unlike most other thinkers, made philosophy an absolute measure, and not an auxiliary tool of cognition. He did not subordinate his works to the study of any independent object (for example, God or nature). On the contrary, for Hegel, even the creator was a philosophizing spirit.
The thinker adhered to the theory of an absolute idea. That is, the subject and the object completely coincide, reality appears in the form of universality and unity. For the German thinker, the objective spirit is the same absolute idea expressed in the objective world. By this concept, Hegel meant morality, morality and laws. The thinker called the absolute spirit, expressed in philosophy, art and religion, the most finite form of alienation of an absolute idea.
As already mentioned, Hegel's philosophical system implies complete universality. Alienation, according to the writings of the thinker, is nothing but the embodiment of absolute spirit in the objective world (in particular, in nature and history).
Hegel's philosophical system is based on such an important concept as the triad. It means that for each development process three stages are characteristic: thesis (initial statement), antithesis (refutation of the initial content), synthesis (combination of two initial opposite statements).
The works of the German thinker are characterized by a special way of cognition. In particular, this is a transition from the abstract to the concrete. Hegel's philosophical system implies initial statements, which can be described as the most general, from which the transition to deeper knowledge differs in content.
Extremely important in the works of the thinker is the principle of historicism. It consists in the idea that each subject has its own path of development. In order to know the object, it is necessary to reconstruct its history.
Why is Hegel considered the greatest thinker of all time? The philosophy of the spirit, considered in his works, was not revolutionary, but systematized previous knowledge and gave a new direction to this discipline. Consider the main ideas of the German thinker. “Phenomenology of the spirit” is one of his central works. Its main idea is that the surrounding world is hostile to man. However, the individual and being are not alien to each other. The surrounding reality directly depends on the actions of man, it is actually built by him. The principle of the triad applies here. The thesis (the world and people are inextricably linked with each other), the antithesis (reality is hostile to man), and the synthesis of both contradictory statements (the study of being through historical reconstruction).
Hegel's idealistic dialectic also carries basic principles. The German thinker believed that true knowledge can be described as the identity of the object and subject. In his writings, he noted that the absolute idea should be studied, given the community of all things. The comprehension of being in the theory of the thinker occurs when finding the identity and differences of the whole objective and subjective. The absolute idea acts as a universal tool that is able to embrace the development of society, nature and knowledge. Hegel also wrote that philosophy is the basic and most appropriate form through which the mind is able to know itself.