Hegel and Aristotle Aristotle's Belief

Hegel and Aristotle Aristotle's belief that "man is by nature a political animal" and that men are best served when they join together under the aegis of the state was echoed years later by the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Both philosophers would also agree that the process of human thought is intrinsically linked to history and politics. Human thought itself is a process, and both men believed that such a process involved a system of logic.

Aristotle's beliefs perhaps laid the groundwork for the much later ideas of Hegel, and the influence of both mens' philosophies on thought, logic, and politics continued to influence people and schools of thought for years after their deaths. Aristotle was a scholar who was known to have strong opinions on many subjects from drama to politics to science. Because of his insatiable desire for knowledge, Aristotle "poured himself into research with gargantuan passion and energy across an almost incredibly wide range.

He mapped out for the first time many of the basic fields of enquiry" (Magee 33-34). Hegel, too, was a man who studied and taught broadly. He was a student of theology as a young man, a tutor, an editor, a headmaster, and a professor. "He was extremely productive, and by the time of his death he was the dominating intellectual figure in Germany" (Magee 158). Like Aristotle, Hegel also published many books expounding his theories. Aristotle believed in the power of experience and the observation of the world around us.

His work in the field of logic outlasted his time period and he even named the field of study. Aristotle "systematized logic, working out which forms of inference were valid and which invalid -- in other words, what really does follow from what, and what only appears to but doesn't really; and he gave all these different forms of inference names. For two thousand years the study of logic was to mean the study of Aristotle's logic" (Magee 34).

This concept of a logical study of the world was taken up by Hegel in the 18th and 19th centuries. Like Aristotle, he believed in a logical progression of change and development toward reality and self-awareness. "He saw everything as having developed. Everything that exists is the outcome of a process; and therefore, he thought, understanding in any broad area of reality always involves understanding a process of change" (Magee 159).

Hegel was known to be among the most systematic of the philosophers in the period of "German idealism" and "attempted, throughout his published writings as well as in his lectures, to elaborate a comprehensive and systematic ontology from a 'logical' starting point" (Redding 1). Hegel's system of logic is not unlike Aristotle's understanding of the forms that an object takes and his "four becauses" that lead "to an understanding of Aristotle's concepts of soul, form, and final cause" (Magee 37).

Hegel also had a language to describe the thought process he called dialectical process. It was, in his view, a three-part process that consisted of thesis, antithesis, and, finally, synthesis. Conflict is what separates entities, a resolution joins them, but even in the final synthesis, a new conflict arises that causes the process to begin anew. "This, says Hegel, is why nothing ever stays the same.

It is why everything -- ideas, religion, the arts, the sciences, the economy, institutions, society itself -- is always changing, and why in each case the pattern of change is dialectical" (Magee 159). The attempt by both men to define the process of change and growth and apply logic to it is what unites them over the centuries. Politics is a subject intrinsically linked to philosophy because the way men organize and conduct themselves socially and economically affects their ability and desire to use philosophy as a guiding principle.

Aristotle and Hegel both shared strong views on the importance and use of the concept of "the state" as a tool to affect the safety and well-being of the individual man. Aristotle published two famous works that addressed politics directly. Nichomachean Ethics and Politics were originally two parts of the same work, but were eventually separated. In these works, Aristotle argues that "the true purpose of government is to enable its citizens to live the full and happy life discussed in his ethics" (Magee 39).

Because man is, in his famous words, "a political animal," man needs political and social organization to attain the goal of happiness. Isolation might, according to Aristotle, breed selfishness and excess and violate his principle of moderation expressed by "the golden mean." Society, though, represents a balance and is the key to happiness. Because "the state" represents the organization of society, it has the potential to help people develop personal happiness (Magee 38-9).

Like Aristotle, Hegel also draws soundly on the role of the state and society in bringing happiness for the individual person. His book Elements of the Philosophy of Right was a "major work in political philosophy" (Redding 2). Hegel saw the history of the world as a progression from infancy to enlightenment, and the conflict and change that had accompanied history had helped move society closer to a position where the state could engender happiness and fulfillment.

He viewed himself as part of the great historical progression of thought (that had begun with the Greek philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates) and saw in his life "the culmination of the world-historical process, the embodiment of reality's purposes as regards understanding, the very incarnation of our enlightenment" (Magee 161). He saw this progression of the political and social levels as ending in a.