What criticisms did later thinkers make of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s claim that reason shapes reality?

Later thinkers offered several significant criticisms of G.W.F. Hegel’s claim that reason shapes reality, often challenging his "pan-logism"—the assumption that rational categories necessarily underlie all of existence.1

• Logical and Empirical Critiques: Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg argued that Hegel’s dialectic relied on a "spurious dependence" on empirical movement rather than pure logic. He further contended that Hegel mistakenly treated "contraries" (real, concrete oppositions) as "contradictories" (abstract logical opposites), rendering his system’s movement arbitrary.2
• Existential and Individualist Critiques: Søren Kierkegaard famously rejected Hegel’s attempt to reconcile all oppositions through universal reason. He argued that the individual’s existence is irreducible to abstract systems and that true meaning is found through subjective "leaps of faith" rather than rational synthesis.23
• Materialist Critiques: Karl Marx inverted Hegel’s idealism, arguing that it is not consciousness or reason that determines being, but rather material social conditions and the methods of production that shape human consciousness.4
• Pessimism: Arthur Schopenhauer reacted against Hegelian idealism by proposing a metaphysical doctrine centered on the "will" rather than reason, establishing a philosophy of pessimism in direct opposition to Hegel’s optimistic view of historical progress.5