Hegel’s Innovation About The Concept Of Life

The concept of "Life" is a core concept in Hegel. At an earlystage in order to solve the problem of alienation Hegel raisedthe "life" which is unity of the soul and body and the unityof subjective and objective to realize the free of human life.At a late stage Hegel taken the life logical and thought thelife as a direct of philosophy. At last he raised the logic oflife, natural life, spiritual life of three view of life, makingthe generalization of the concept of life, the whole world andthe whole ideological system as an organic life.Marx believes that the reasonable core of Hegel’s thoughtis the dialectical thought. Hegel puts the dialectics and ideastogether to discuss, so the pure thought of dialecticsdiscussed in Hegel’s works is not very much. But we can notoverlook the important status of Hegel’s thought of dialectics,which is the core and soul of Hegel’s idea. Dialectics is theintrinsic nature of concept and the innermost part of life andspirit. The immediate idea in Hegel’s concept of Life which makes the dialectic become speculative dialectics is a self-reflection, self-improvement, and returning to self freemovement of the inner source of Hegel dialectics. The soul ofthe dialectics is the motion of life and spirits themselves.The kernel of dialectics lies in the negation of the selfinitiative. Negation ensures the possibility of thedialectical movement of the concept. Hegel said in the "Logic":"the negative is negative relation own simple point, the allactivities--life and the spiritual movement itself--theinner source, and the dialectic of the soul..."The concept of "Life" in today’s daily life, mostly comesfrom the view of the biological, of which definitionemphasizing on physical activity and physiological changes incell biology. The spirit of the factors of life is rarelydiscussed, because it is difficult to conduct quantitativeanalysis. The philosophical discussion about "Life" conceptcan be traced back to earliest Thales. Thales on the one handsaid that the water is the origin of all things, on the otherhand stressed that all things have souls, implying thebeginning of the idea about which life is "unity of soul and body". Heraclitus said on the one hand fire has its morphologycontaining the states of combustion and extinguishing, on theother hand, combustion was controlled by logos. This idea isthe embryonic form of “soul" governing the body movement.Empedocles starts discussing "Love" and "Hate" which is thespiritual element in the life. Aristotle thought that lifetransformed from potential life to a realistic one on accountthat life has the soul. Soul is considered to control the bodyin Christianity. Soul and body are all entities of theproposition, which is accepted by Descartes. But Descartesproposed the parallelism of mind and body, and the body and soulare two non-interference entity.Hegel’s discussion on the concept of life is affected bythe previous philosophers. He accepts the ideas that life isunity of the soul and the body. At the same time, Hegel’sdiscussion on the concept of life is much influenced by religion.He thinks that the real life is God and Jesus and people havelives because of getting the deity. But people are not true tolife. Besides, he distinguishes between animals and plants,Jews and Jesus’"people" and so on. In the early days, Hegel has the idea of prototype about life is a process and he thinksthat person should divine divinity and recognize the divinity,which makes his life to be reflected and freedom.After the ideological system being built in his late times,Hegel defines the concept of life again which life has beenintegrated into his philosophy system as a part of his thoughtsystem. Life defined as a process of thinking was furtheraffirmed, in the later at the same time, Hegel believes thatit’s a process of speculations, which is in accordance withthe process of dialectics in his speculative movement. Life isfurther discussed in his natural philosophy, logic philosophyand the philosophy of spirit, respectively. But in naturalphilosophy and logic philosophy life is not completely realizedthemselves. Till in the spirit of philosophy, life is truly freelife. Life here is the core and soul of dialectics anddialectics is the core of the whole thought system. Hegelconstructed his ideological system starting from Life, whichis not only unified by freedom and necessity, but also combinedgenerality with specificity.