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Introduction to the Hegelian World

Plato believed that human reason could explain the world, individual morality and social life. Descartes also believed in reason, but severely restricted its ability to explain phenomena. Scientific reason could explain the laws of the physical universe, but could explain the nature of external objects. Hume destroyed the foundation of scientific knowledge by showing us that cause and effect did not relate to anything in physical nature, but was a psychological trick of the mind.

Intellectual thought, therefore, moved from a faith in reason to an extreme skepticism about the ability of reason to explain anything. Hume argued that there was not much that anyone could say with certainty; the best strategy for the human being was to enjoy life and try not to ask to many questions. Humean philosophy elevated the agreeable companion over the scientist and philosopher.

After Hume, it may have seemed that system building was dead. This turned out not to be the case, partly because the British empirical tradition never took a firm hold on the continental consciousness, and partly because new systems were built on the supposedly fragile foundation of the human mind. Continental thinkers argued that the human mind created its own reality; logical categories were not simply a way of understanding the world, they were the only genuine laws of the universe. It was even possible to think that individual minds were linked to a universal mind that operated and realized itself in human history. Enter Hegel.

If you were to hire a movie producer to film Hegelian philosophy, you would have to get someone like Cecil. B DeMille. So grand is the scope, so extensive the panorama, so comprehensive is the subject matter, that Hegel’s philosophy comes on like a tidal wave that never lets up. Hegel sets out to explain all of human life, all of history, and the meaning of the past that allows us to predict the future.

Hegelianism in a Nutshell

Hegel’s foundation is the realization that all of our reality, past and present, is a mental production. Our individual minds are limited, but history is the product of all minds over time. The universal mind moving through history is God’s mind. God moves through history with one goal – to realize himself and his essence. God’s essence is an Idea and the content of that idea is Freedom.

You will recall that the enlightened philosophes believed in progress, reason and nature. But their ideas of reason and progress seem puny in comparison with Hegel’s vision. Hegel argued that the Enlightenment was fundamentally flawed because it associated progress with individual freedom and happiness. Historical progress was only tangentially related to economic growth and the rule of law, Hegel argued. It was about the evolution of Ideas. While individuals might believe in these ideas or ideals, they were embodied in social culture. Every significant society embodies a particular idea. The historical role of society was to nurture that idea at a particular time in history. Sometimes that idea would be associated with a great hero, an individual who best personified the ideal of his time and used the force of his will to bring that idea to fulfillment. Caesar and Napoleon are examples of these world historical figures who put living flesh on ideas.

But it was the Idea that moulded history, not the men who helped move it forward. Men and women were merely the vehicles through which ideas expressed and realized themselves. The Idea was Freedom. It evolved from ancient times and, like a Cecil B. DeMille spectacle, it used a cast of millions to flesh itself out. Whereas a few heroic individuals were significant in the sense that they realized their particular stage in evolution and pushed the Idea forward, the great mass of people were hired extras in the spectacle of history. In fact, Hegel referred to the majority of people as victims on the slaughter bench of history, as various sub-ideas fought it out in the historical arena and contributed to the development of the one really big Idea – absolute Freedom.

Sound Complicated?

It gets worse before it gets better. Hegel is one of those writers who are difficult to appreciate until you grasp the big picture. His writings really do resemble a historical spectacle full of sub plots, twists and turns, flashbacks and a cast of stars supported by thousands of extras. Fortunately, Hegel doesn’t write like Hume. He doesn’t expect us to get it in lock-step fashion. He’s more than willing to repeat scenes and use different camera angles to get across his fundamental idea. This is a good thing, because some of his language is tortuous and his Teutonic sentences appear very convoluted to English (and presumably other) ears.

Hegel uses the terms Idea, God and Freedom as synonyms. The important think to know about Hegel’s God is that He is pure thought. He is the Idea that drives universal history. His essence is absolute freedom. All history is nothing more or less that the story of the Idea actualizing itself through mankind. Our world, therefore, is not merely created by God; it’s an extension of God. God is using the world and human history as the vehicle for self-reflection. Men and women, as thinking beings, are not merely created in God’s likeness, but are extensions of the Divine mind. Thought is the only thing that matters. God’s thought in history is the only thing that counts. Most phenomena and the vast majority of historical facts are chimeral; they are insignificant dross. The only thing that is significant is the Idea. The rich tapestry of history is woven by a divine master, whose design can only be appreciated when it is complete. “The owl of Minerva,” writes Hegel, “flies only at dusk.”

Hegel is one of the first major thinkers to suggest that there are patterns in history and that history is the primary means of understanding the world and the idea of progress. Whereas enlightened thinkers also believed in progress, they tended to dismiss most of the past as a period of superstition and ignorance. Not Hegel. For Hegel, history was the unfolding of the divine plan. Hegel has influenced all writers who see progressive patterns evolving through history, whether or not they buy into all aspects of the Hegelian approach. Hegel was the philosopher who taught us to explore deep historical meaning.

What is the deep meaning of history? For Hegel, the unmistakable message of history is progress to greater freedom. But enlightened ideas of individual liberty and social progress are only a very partial and limited vision of what Freedom really means. A deep examination of history points the state as the most progressive vehicle for freedom. True liberty is positive rather than negative, and is achieved by service to the nation state. At any point in history, it is the state rather than the individual that embodies the most progressive stage of the world spirit that is evolving towards freedom.

In ancient oriental empires, says Hegel, only one man – the despot – could be called free. The despot had complete power over everyone else, either directly or indirectly. Greece and Rome developed a more sophisticated notion – some men could be citizens and enjoy freedom. However, these free Roman and Greek citizens had slaves who did most of the work for them. Anglo-Saxon civilizations were the first to develop the concept that all people were free and equal under the law. Republican and religious thinkers, such as Luther and Calvin, pushed the idea of liberty much further by describing the inherent freedom of conscience and the duties of the free citizen.

Many of the most progressive ideas of freedom, however, still remained ethical or philosophical ideas without historical content. In order for freedom to reach the next evolutionary state, agued German writers like Kant and Hegel, it needed to be actualized within the national state. The individual can attain a high degree of freedom, but only through citizenship and service to the state. The state creates the laws that allow freedom to operate; the state defends the freedom of its citizens; the state enters into conflicts with other societies in order to make its freedoms more universal.

The individual is nothing without the state. But not all states are equal with respect to Freedom. At any point in history, Hegel argues, a particular society or state embodies the most progressive ideas of the age. Once Greece had been the evolutionary leader towards Freedom. The mantle passed to Rome and later to England. Hegel hoped it would soon pass to a united Prussia. But this evolution was hardly smooth and uneventful. Nation states, and ancient civilizations before them, engaged in conflict.

War was one of the more obvious facts of History, and the one most typically used to question the goodness or existence of God. History, from one perspective, was a slaughter bench. Hegel suggested that war, far from being an argument for atheism, was part of God’s divine plan. One shouldn’t think in terms of armies fighting one another, said Hegel. One should view warring societies as the embodiment of conflicting ideas. Wars were the battleground in the conflict between ideas and, in this dialectical struggle, the most progressive idea eventually won out.

Hegel’s theory of the dialectic was a significant contribution to human and natural history. It informed Marx’s concept of class conflict and Darwin’s (more precisely Herbert Spencer’s) theory of the survival of the fittest. While the Hegelian dialectic could be rich and complex, the philosopher Shopenhouer simplified it in ways that made it more accessible. The dialectic consists of three basic parts: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The dialectic process begins when a society elevates an idea or ideal. Once formulated, this idea or thesis will inevitably come under attack from societies or groups that have a different raison d’être. In opposition to the thesis, the opposition is forced to develop an antithesis. Thesis and antithesis enter into a conflict, that appears as the historical conflict between different societies trying to impose their wills on each other. Out of that conflict will come a new idea – a synthesis – that includes the best characteristics of both the thesis and antithesis. The synthesis eventually becomes a new thesis, and the dialectic continues.

This dialectical development was the way the Idea (Freedom, God) actualized itself in history. Particular ideas were always subservient to the Idea (in capital letters), which is God or absolute Freedom realizing its potential in the world.

Idealism

Because of his stress on dialectical development of the idea of freedom in history, Hegel and his followers were called idealists. The idealist tradition focuses on values and ideas rather than empirical facts or the material conditions in life. Many artists and intellectuals who were disillusioned with the clockwork universe of the scientists or the materialistic ethic of capitalism gravitated towards idealism. Because of the close connection between idealism and religion, idealistic factions developed within Roman Catholicism and various branches of Protestantism. In an important way, idealism provided a higher meaning for intellect in an increasingly mechanical world. But the most important link for the idealists was the nation state that became the patriotic locus of idealistic desire.

All of this must sound strange and mystical to some of you. Certainly, there is an important sense in which such a teleological and theological approach is alien to our twentieth century ears. If you believe in God, and want to make sense of God’s plan for human history, you will be more comfortable with Hegelian analysis. But you don’t really need to make that stretch. Anytime that you assume that society is necessarily improving because freedom is spreading to all societies – and most of you have held similar ideas at one time or another – you are engaging in Hegelian thinking. If you view the spread of Western capitalism and the demise of communism as inevitable – you are engaging in Hegelian thinking. If you view the welfare state as a good compromise between selfish capitalism and selfless socialism – you are engaging in Hegelian thinking. Take away a few of the theological trappings and the long sentences with the verbs at the end, you have been influenced by Hegel.

People who believe in the concept of Canada, as an ideal of a multicultural society, you are probably more Hegelian than you think. Those who espouse the manifest destiny of the United States of America clearly view history in terms of a divine plan, which is perilously close to the most negative aspects of Hegelian thought. All the best selling history books that pretend to show how history is evolving or that argue that history is coming to an end, have a fundamentally Hegelian theoretical framework.

It is sometimes difficult to appreciate just how much the writings of Hegel and his admirers have affected our analytical processes. Like many of the old ideas of the Enlightenment, they new float around in our mental universe. One of the reasons for the longevity of these ideas is that thinkers on the right and the left can adapt them. Hegel himself was a political conservative who believed that it was difficult for any individual to predict the future and that the safe approach was to stick to the past. However, many of Hegel’s followers, particularly a group of radical German students who called themselves the Young Hegelians, emphasized the element of progressive change in the Hegelian system. And you may have heard the name Karl Marx more than once, who was one of these, emphasized the element of progressive change in the Hegelian system. And you may have heard the name Karl Marx more than once, who began his intellectual development as one of these Young Hegelians. Hegel’s philosophical approach lent itself to different perspectives and political movements.

For our purposes, it is important to stress the historicity of Hegelianism. It was this historical approach, and lack of interest in the isolated rational individual, that distinguished Hegel from the Enlightenment tradition. A few enlightened philosophes were interested in history, but the main purpose of philosophical history was to demonstrate the idiocy of the past. There is also a concept of civilizations and the nation state in enlightenment, but the enlightened state is basically a collection of free and equal citizens. Hegel’s approach is truly historical in the professional sense. Professional historians focus on communities, groups, classes and societies rather than individuals. As distinct from non-professionals, most professional historians shun biography and personal narrative as meaningless unless tightly contextualized. It’s the context rather than the individual that really counts.

Hegelian Metaphysics

In order to contextualize Mr. Hegel himself, we need to explore his place in the history of metaphysics. Metaphysics – or the explanation of being and reality – was a contradiction in terms for someone like David Hume. All we could ever know were individual sense impressions. To try to understand something as grant and complex as reality was presumptuous given our faulty reasoning. With Hume, we appear to be caught in an intellectual cul de sac.

Immanuel Kant agreed that we could never understand external reality (phenomena) but we could understand another reality, that of the human mind. The mind was dependent upon a finite number of categories that we could define and explore. Hegel built upon this insight of Kant, but radically modified Kant’s message. The human mind was now the key to all knowledge. But the concepts and categories contained by the human mind were evolving. They could not be circumscribed within a finite number of categories. Moreover, they conformed to an empirical reality outside of the mind, which, in turn, was a manifestation of the mind of God.

Stop right there, you say. How can Hegel posit a correspondence between the mind and external reality when this has already been shown to be nonsense by Hume and Kant? On the face of it, Hegel’s conceptual leap appears to be confusing, contradictory and illogical. In order to appreciate the Hegelian leap, we need to understand Hegel’s concept of God. Hegel’s God was closer to that of the Romantics than the Enlightenment philosophes. For the Enlightenment writers, God was best viewed as a First Cause and the creator of a clockwork universe. For the Romantics, God was much more than the creator of the universe; he was its very soul. The spirit of god could be discovered in every aspect of nature; nature embodies the spirit of God. Hence the very different worship of nature by the Romantic poets, who saw God in every leaf and daffodil.

Hegel agreed that God manifest himself in the empirical world and filled it with meaning. But the Romantic worship of emotion and spirit was plurile. God was mind and his spirit was rational. The Enlightenment philosophes were correct in pointing to the rationality of nature, but they made a big mistake in believing that nature’s rationality was intuitive and static. In order to discover the rational spirit of God, one needed to penetrate deeply into nature. In the past, said Hegel, it was impossible for limited human understanding to identify God’s tapestry. Only now that the basic features of Freedom were emerging, was it possible to identify the basic pattern that was evolving.

The best place to look for evidence of God’s pattern wasn’t a leaf or a daffodil; it was in the historical life of the highest species – Homo sapiens. Humans alone had minds that were faint reflections of the Mind of God. The human mind was programmed to search for deeper meaning than that provided by empirical reality. It was programmed to remove the veil of ignorance in order to gain insight. Particular cases or facts won’t tell us anything. If we want to understand God’s message, we have to look into human history.

The trouble with empirical history is that it is either a meaningless jumble of facts or a tale of continual injustice and suffering. That’s what happens when historians focus on individuals who, after all their struggles, and no matter how heroic they may be, simply end up dead. Why bother studying dead people?

Philosophical history, on the other hand, scans a larger scope; searches for a deeper meaning; and focuses on the role of providence in human affairs. The providence that Hegel seeks is not that of revealed religion. Hegel has no time for religious dogmatists or fundamentalists. They base all their arguments on faith and love. What is more, they devalue reason. Hegel argues that the pious and the humble are “narrow souls” and “empty heads.” Providence implies a rational plan and the task of philosophical history is to discover rational patterns in human history.

To those, like Hume, who would suggest that this kind of world history is conducted on far to grand and abstract a scale to discover meaning, Hegel suggests that the alternative is to be an irrelevant simpleton. Why bother doing philosophy at all unless one can tackle the big questions. One of those questions that have bothered serious thinkers from the dawn of philosophy is the existence of evil in the world. Here’s what Hegel says about evil:

The evil in the world was to be comprehended and the thinking mind reconciled with it. Nowhere, actually, exists a larger challenge to such reconciliation than in world history. This reconciliation can only be attained through the recognition of the positive elements in which that negative element disappears as something subordinate and vanquished.

Hegel, of course, is talking about the dialectical process that generates a positive from the reconciliation of negatives. In particular, he’s referring to providence working itself out through social ideals. Different societies, and groups within societies, came into inevitable conflicts. These conflicts were the cauldron from which new and more transcendent ideas emerged. The actors in this clash of ideas were not isolated individuals but members of entire societies and nations. The actors on the stage of history were civilizations and nations.

Freedom cannot be achieved at the level of the individual. Individuals are subjective beings whose actions are largely determined by their personal feelings and irrational appetites. Individuals, says Hegel, only achieve a degree of freedom from their subjective feelings by serving an ideal. Isolated individuals are not rational beings but the slaves of their appetites. It is only by joining a society or belonging to a state that people achieve a rational identity and a degree of freedom. Hegel says:

This must not be understood as if the subjective will of the individual attained its gratification and enjoyment through the common will and the latter were a means for it – as if the individual limited his freedom among other individuals, so that this common limitation, the mutual restraint of all, might secure a small space of liberty for each. (This would only be negative freedom.) Rather, law, morality, the State, and they alone, are the positive reality and satisfaction of freedom. The caprice of the individual is not freedom. It is this caprice which is being limited, the license of particular ideas.

Note that Hegel is making an enormous contribution to the discipline of sociology here by suggesting that individuals develop their identity through society and that group life is the basis for all freedoms. The state, or if you prefer, society creates individuality, freedom and morality.

Hegel implicitly criticizes all contract theorists, such as John Locke, who suggest that the purpose of society is to serve the interest of individuals and that individuals have a right to opt out of the state if they decide that it is not serving their interests well. For Hegel, and for thinkers such as Durkheim and Weber after him, society makes individuals what they are.

In the state or society, particular wills are swallowed up in the general will. This is a necessary condition if any universal ideas are going to exist. Only in rationally ordered societies can ideals, culture and civilization emerge. Neanderthal man had few principles and fewer ideals; he was basically a wandering savage without art, culture, or religion. His values were neither universal nor transferable. His social life is unworthy of serious scholarly examination. It will tell us zero about the pattern of history.

You may now be wondering what Hegel would say about social rebels. Some of the greatest individuals of their age who individuals who were critics of the societies in which they lived. Socrates is an obvious example of such an individual. Hegel suggests that these individuals were significant because they advanced, rather than rejected, the intellectual and cultural tools of their society. They “assimilated what the state had already provided.” While they may have been alienated intellectuals, they were also the products of the times in which they lived.

Human societies or states were the places where providence manifests itself. The entire spirit at a given time in history – ideas, culture, values, religion, etc. – is part of the universal spirit of God. It is patently incomplete, precisely because it is not the full realization of the spirit of God itself, but contains aspects of the spirit of God within it. That is why Hegel refers to society or the state as the spiritual individual or the world historical individual. As such, it must be viewed as an organic entity, rather than a sum of individual parts. This spiritual individual is rich and complex like a fine cream; unlike a fine cream, however, it cannot be separated into parts.

If the scholar wants to understand the spiritual individual, he or she should not engage in the minute examination of externals such as customs, traits, geography, or fashion. The scholar should not even focus unduly on the laws or norms of particular societies. A true scholar will go deeper in order to understand the spirit of the people. The spirit is the holy bond that gels a society together.

Society “is the end and they (individuals) are the means,” Hegel wrote. Society is more important than the individual, and without society men and women are merely animals. Only by belonging to society does an individual become an authentic and ethical person. Only by following the rules of society, and subjecting their individual wills to the law, do they realize the substance of their own being. Real freedom is positive freedom and consists in doing one’s social duty. If you put the rights of the individual over their duty to society or the state, you will never be a friend of Hegel.

Hegel goes even further. He agrees with the empiricists that the individual mind is subjective and flawed. But society or the state is the objective actualization of reality at a particular point in time. It is the concrete representation and working out of the abstract Idea of Freedom. The latter is the goal and absolute end of human history. Human history is the spirit of God working itself out.

Let’s jettison the religious rhetoric for a moment. Hegel’s fundamental point is that we need to understand the cultural context before we can understand its particular form. A society’s culture embodies the spirit of the people, and whether or not one believes in God, this culture is fundamentally spiritual. We relate to the values and ideals of our society on a spiritual plane. It is almost impossible to conceive of a purely secular society, said Hegel. A secular society would only be concerned with self-interest and the here and now of existence. Its ethics would be a matter of convenience, and it would be subject to continual corrosion.

The insight that society is fundamentally spiritual in character is one that many sociologists since Hegel have argued. Like Hegel, sociologists suggest that when the moral ideals of a society decline, that society is in serious trouble by anomie, alienation and social decay. Emile Durkheim, for example, argued that the state must have a spiritual or moral character. People bond together because of their respect for shared universal values that are fundamentally religious in nature. Although Durkheim did not view the relationship between the individual and society in exactly the same way as Hegel, he was so struck by the spiritual character of society that he posited religious belief as the paradigmatic source of moral obligation and social solidarity.

Even when one subtracts God from the framework, considerable strength remains in Hegel’s argument that the foundation of society is spiritual in nature. Hegel, of course, had no intention of leaving out God, who represents universal reason and Freedom in his philosophy. Society was more than a spiritual bond; it was world historical individuals who played out God’s will. The immediate end of Freedom could not be the individual who with a few exceptions was meaningless; it was society.

Hegel’s historical system was profoundly influential. Not only did Hegel give Continental history a distinctive flavour, but also he encouraged historical practitioners to try to understand societies of the past in holistic terms. Cultural and intellectual history, particularly as it is practiced on the Continent, encourages students to understand the complex connections between various levels of culture and to make links between art, literature, religion, law, morality and, of course, philosophy. They try to establish the spirit or mentality of a people.

Hegelian philosophy also explains a particularly thorny historical problem. Why is it, for example, that some people become recognized as heroes or the embodiment of the spirit of their times, and other equally talented people don’t? Why is it that the genius of so many artists and writers is only recognized after their death? Hegel tells us the answer. If an individual is so far ahead of his time that his work, ideas and projects make no sense in terms of the mentality of the age, that person will never be recognized. There is no such thing as genius or hero apart from the time in which he or she lived. If a person appears to be modern and unique, like an Einstein, that’s only because we haven’t looked deeply enough to see how his ideas of scientific relativity and curved space fit into the mental map of his age. To represent any historical individual as uniquely apart from his or her social context is to commit the historical sin of anachronism.

The Cunning of History

Now that we have a good sense of Hegel’s basic historical and metaphysical approach, it will be more interesting to explore Hegel’s many forays into history. In particular, I want to show you how Hegel describes the cunning of history that uses the passions of individuals for its own greater purposes. Hegel believed that individuals were only the means by which the spirit of reason moved in history. But that didn’t mean that these highly subjective physical organisms did not play a critical role. Men and women, pursuing what they regarded as their own selfish interests, were the chief instruments that the cunning of history adopted. If the spirit relied on the intellectual ideas and cultural ideals of society; its progress would be slow and tortuous. By manipulating men and women’s negative features, the progress was much more rapid.

Hegel observed that people were always whining about the workings of providence. They got upset about the existence of evil in the world. The completely misread the plan of providence. Of course, the world is unjust, said Hegel, and good people often suffer. So what. People are dispensable. They are particular, transitory, finite and of little importance except in so far as they advance reason. Reason and Freedom have their own principles and timetables, and are immune to these criticisms. Poets and philosophers would spend their time more valuably exploring those principles than complaining about human suffering.

In any case, the people who suffer the most in life are not the philosophers or the poets but world historical beings. These are the heroes such as Caesar, Alexander and Napoleon who were ambitious and needed to dominate the times with their personality. What makes them interesting to Hegel is that these were not merely dominant personalities but individuals who had an intuitive grasp of the needs of the time and the willingness to act to effect the changes that were needed. These are the closest things to individuals that Hegel is willing to discuss. Even then, their success was totally dependent on the fact that they acted in accordance with the plan of universal reason. Had Caesar lived at an earlier period of history, his attempt to create the Roman Empire would have been a crackpot scheme. The hero must be a product of his times.

Hegel’s characterization of the hero is fascinating. Generally, he is an unhappy, driven individual who only lives for the establishment of his purpose and then suffers a wretched demise. This unhappiness may appear to be a failing, but not for Hegel. It is precisely the dissatisfaction that drives the hero to accomplish his or her greatest deeds; it is this dissatisfaction that sets him apart from his fellow men; it is his pain and need to find meaning that stimulates creative individual action. However, it is the time that creates the hero, not the hero who creates his time.

Unlike the hero, the average person is capable of happiness. If they successfully internalize the values of their society and respect them, they can be fulfilled as well as happy. Their happiness consists largely in the fact that they don’t kick against the grain and, unlike the tragic hero, they don’t experience alienation. Their happiness, of course, implies that they are fairly passive and accepting of the status quo. Without passive, generally contented, citizens, society and the state could not exist.

Kant suggested that these citizens had an ethical nature that they could develop. They had rights, dignity and should not be treated as a means to an end. Hegel agreed with Kant, but he downplayed the historical significance of ethics. There have been moral men in every age, Hegel claimed, but their actions did not usually advance history, at least not in very visible ways. The selfish actions of human beings were another matter all together. History was the story of selfish men, not good men. Fortunately, selfish men and women outnumbered good men and women.

Greed, envy and the spoils of war, for example, motivated the barbarians who stormed the gates of Rome. But the cumbersome feudal society that they developed eventually advanced the ideal of constitutional government and new concepts of freedom. The desire for riches led to a huge conflict between Europe and Arabia that led to an exchange of ideas. The desire to imitate rich aristocrats led to the creation of a commercial class. The selfishness of this class, and the concomitant conflict with the aristocracy, improved the rule of law, led to international trade, and created new and more peaceful relations between peoples. The restless, selfish, and sometimes vicious passions of men and women unwittingly developed civilization, advanced the rule of law, and increased the wealth that could be transferred to cultural activity.

History was not about ethics. Ultimately, it was not about happiness either. Hegel suggested that “history is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages within it.” It was naïve on the part of individuals to look for happiness in this life or the next. Only through a long evolution, a horrible and painstaking development, did the world spirit reveal itself.

Some scholars regard Hegel as a pessimist, and criticize his theories as justifying the violence and injustice in human affairs. Hegel really was more optimistic than that. In spite of the continual clash of individual passions, history was evolving towards greater Freedom. Hegel was the first thinker to explain why evil existed in the world and how it served a higher purpose. While he did not respect individual freedom, he saw progress in the more general evolution of mankind and the spirit. Also, Hegel pointed out that human beings had spiritual natures that connected them to the evolution of the historical spirit. While we only have a partial sense of our connection to the bigger whole, surely it was a consolation to discover that human history was not simply the story of individual egos bashing against each other.

Concluding Remarks

The impulse of materialist and natural philosophy was to transform men and women into pneumatic machines. Hegel was disappointed with the clockwork universe. Physical nature bored Hegel. It operated in a mechanical succession of winter, spring, summer and fall. The planet itself was governed by the restrictive law of gravity. What goes up must come down. How exciting is that?

Philosophical history provided an entirely different perspective. While individual minds could never establishing definitive meaning, there was no need to dissolve into an agreeable Humean stupor. The philosophical approach to history demonstrated that human life was inextricably linked to a bigger and positive purpose, a purpose that could even explain the function of evil in the divine scheme of things.

Hegel liberated the human mind from the Humean cul de sac. While the material body might be sacrificed on the slaughter bench of history, both mind and body served a noble purpose. Our spiritual natures might not be fully comprehensible to us, but our rationalism, our desire for freedom and our ethical beliefs bore a more than passing resemblance to the great momentum of history.

Hegel refused to define or limit the history of humanity, apart from suggesting that the nation state was the present crucible in which God’s Mind was pursuing its voyage of self-discovery. But he did hint that, ultimately, God was on the side of the virtuous. Human history, in other words, was spiritual and superior to natural history. The human struggle was infinitely more meaningful than atoms colliding in space or perceptions bouncing off our senses. The development of human consciousness evolved in tandem with the world spirit. Where the evolution was going was not absolutely clear; the Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk ( i.e. The goddess of wisdom only comes out at night, after the events of the day have ended.)

But Hegel suggested that there must be some significance to the fact that we attach an ethical value to the historical record. We invariably sympathize with the Greeks against the Persians, and with the Romans against the barbarians. We invariably delight in seeing the better side win in the historical panorama. To cite a contemporary example, we identify with the Gladiator in the movie Gladiator who espouses the freedom of a Republic over the tyranny of Commodious. The question is: why do we feel these values so deeply? Why do we have a concept of the good or at least the better? Why do we resist the temptation to simplify human history in terms of the success and most powerful? Hegel thinks that it is because somewhere, deep in our nature, our spiritual nature, we are in harmony with the evolution of spirit in the historical process.

Hegel was too good a historian to attempt to tell us the precise direction that the world spirit was heading. He realized that historians could not predict the future with any accuracy. The analogy that he liked to use was of a tiny seed that would eventually grow into a mighty true. The nature of tree was clearly in the seed – its program of development was already there. But we could not determine its final nature until the tree developed to maturity. Human history is like that seed, Hegel suggested. The significance of what began long ago is only beginning to clarify. Similarly, Mind and Freedom were in the process of actualizing themselves. Or as Hegel put it, universal reason “produces itself, makes itself (actually) into that which it is in itself (potentially).”