1001Philosophers

Friedrich Nietzsche vs Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Nietzsche and Hegel are the two most influential German philosophers of the nineteenth century, and Nietzsche's mature philosophy is in important respects a sustained turning against the Hegelian inheritance. The contrast between them is the contrast between two competing accounts of what philosophy is for.

At a glance

Friedrich NietzscheGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Dates1844 – 19001770 – 1831
NationalityGermanGerman
EraModernModern
Movements Existentialism, Continental Philosophy German Idealism, Continental Philosophy
Profile Friedrich Nietzsche → Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel →

Where they agree

Both held that philosophical inquiry is inseparable from history — that thought has a development and that the philosopher's task is to come to terms with where his civilization stands. Both treated Greek antiquity, Christianity, and modernity as decisive moments of cultural formation that philosophy must analyze. Nietzsche's vocabulary of slave morality, ressentiment, and overcoming is unintelligible without the Hegelian framework of historical dialectic in the background.

Where they disagree

Hegel held that history is the self-realization of reason: the development of consciousness toward the absolute self-knowledge of Spirit, with the modern state as the political form in which freedom achieves its concrete actuality. Nietzsche held the contrary: history is not the unfolding of reason but the contingent record of competing wills, and the apparent rationality of modern institutions is the late stage of a Christian-democratic morality whose critique is overdue. Where Hegel's history culminates in self-realized freedom, Nietzsche's culminates in nihilism — and only the cultivation of higher individuals can answer it.

Representative quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

  • “Postcard to Franz Overbeck , Sils-Maria (30 July 1881), tr. Walter Kaufmann , The Portable Nietzsche (1954)”

    I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor , and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza : that I should have turned to him just now , was inspired by "instinct." Not only is his overtendency like mine—namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect — but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely

  • “Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.”

    Letter to Elisabeth Nietzsche, Bonn, 1865-06-11, [ specific citation needed ] quoted as epigraph in Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic (1961)

  • “Letter to Elisabeth Nietzsche, Bonn, 1865-06-11, [ specific citation needed ] quoted as epigraph in Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic (1961)”

    Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  • “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”

    Only one word more concerning the desire to teach the world what it ought to be. For such a purpose philosophy at least always comes too late. Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counter

  • “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”

    What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

  • “Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.”

    Often abbreviated to: Nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion. | Variant translation: We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without enthusiasm.

Continue reading