Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Germany (1770-1831) Book

Hegel created a vast speculative and idealistic philosophy, where truth is found not in the part but in the whole. Nature is an organic whole shot through with rationality akin to the reason in ourselves.

Hegel's famous "dialectic" is an organic process of growth and development in three stages: beginning, advance and resolution. It has two sides: the rational patterns that determine all growth in the world and the logical form of reason.

Each person is both a one and a many, a coexistence of opposites (unity and diversity). Self-consciousness (the self as subject knowing the self as object) requires mutuality - social interaction with others. And our minds have two functions: the understanding distinguishes between things, and reason synthesizes them.