Hegel's Reception in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Thought

Hegel's immediate German reception, beyond the Right/Left Hegelian split treated separately, included fierce contemporary hostility from Arthur Schopenhauer, who lectured with little success at Berlin in the 1820s in deliberate competition with Hegel's far more popular courses and later denounced him in print, in the preface to the second edition of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation, 1844), as a 'clumsy charlatan.' A second major line of critique came from Søren Kierkegaard, whose Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1846), published under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, attacked the Hegelian system's claim to comprehensive, objective completeness as fundamentally incompatible with the situation of the concrete, existing individual, especially with respect to religious faith — an attack that became a founding text of later existentialist philosophy.