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Reading:

Now read Books I – III (inclusive) of Hegel’s Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History and answer the following questions:

Questions:

1. What kind of history does Hegel say that he’s definitely not interested in?

2. Why does Hegel think that early myths and folk tales amount to useless information?

3. What is the importance of speeches of leading lawgivers and politicians in history?

4. What is good objective history?

5. What is reflective history and what are its main types?

6. What is philosophical history and why is it superior?

7. What is the Idea of Reason?

8. What is wrong with memorizing the ‘facts’ of history for Hegel?

9. Why is factual history ultimately impossible anyway?

10. How is doing history like doing science?

11. What is the law that we discover when we understand the progress of Reason in history?

12. In what sense is history providential?

13. What radical revolution has modern thought wrought for religion?

14. What do you think Hegel would say about most of the organized religions of his day?

15. If Hegel had so much contempt for religion, why does he term his philosophical history a Theodicy?

16. What huge religious problem does Hegel say that his Theodicy solves?

17. What is the only permanent thing about the human species, and what differentiates us from animals and nature for Hegel?

18. Why did God create the world and the human species according to Hegel?

19. What nature can we discover in spirit and mind?

20. How is the universal Spirit, or God, different from human spirit or consciousness?

21. How does history illuminate the progress of the idea of Freedom? What popular view of history is Hegel relying on here?

22. What is the role or significance of the individual in liberal history and in philosophical history?

23. Why is the world a sad place?

24. In what unusual ways does Hegel discuss the laws of history?

25. What does Hegel mean, when he says that nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion?

26. What is the difference between Ego and atom for Hegel?

27. In what sense do human passions operate on a latent level?

28. Why is virtue such a weak force in human affairs?

29. Why is it difficult for a person ever to be really ahead of their times in any meaningful sense?

30. Why are world historical individuals, like monarchs, usually unhappy folks?

31. What does Hegel mean when he says those world historical beings make the unconscious conscious?

32. What perishes and what remains in human history?

33. When do individuals get in the way of progressive evolution of freedom?

34. How does providence organize these fallible individuals with their subjective and partial understandings in the progress towards freedom?

35. How does the state create universal meanings? In other words, where do we look for these meanings?

36. How do we know that Hegel interprets Spirit as a dynamic entity rather than a fixed absolute? What word does he use to describe the feeling that Spirit contains?

37. How does Hegel describe the state in relation to the Spirit?

38. What does Hegel have against patriarchal societies? What’s more important – citizenship or family membership?

39. What is the historical significance of a government’s constitution?

40. What does Hegel say is the highest form of social consciousness? What does he mean?

Sample Answers:

1. He’s not interested in “particular examples” or facts but the nature of history itself.

2. He’s only interested in societies “who knew who they were and what they wanted”, in other words fully developed societies or civilizations.

3. These documents are the maxims, principles and spiritual ideals of a people.

4. Good objective history is a recounting of events that have been immediately observable or are very recent. This allows for accuracy of detail and completeness. Such histories are closely linked to the people that write them and are mainly useful for the insights that they give us into the spirit of those societies.

5. Reflective histories are divided into universal, pragmatic, critical, and fragmentary varieties. What makes it interesting is that it goes beyond the present time and a particular society. It can be a survey of the world or the history of a nation (universal); it looks at the past through the eyes of the present to learn a lesson (pragmatic); it evaluates the truth and methodologies of history (critical); and it can look at one thing in depth, such as art, to see its connection to the whole (fragmentary).

6. Philosophical history treats history as the raw material for speculation on the nature of life, humanity and thought. This, says Hegel, seems to contradict the concern with reality and specificity in History, but it is his agenda to show why this conceptually oriented approach is the best one throughout the rest of his book.

7. The Idea of Reason is the way that God, or ideal form and power, works itself out in human history. History is the objective substance that the ideal uses to put potentiality into actuality.

8. An academic discipline is only meaningful to the extent that it provides us with “rational insights”; facts by themselves are meaningless. To focus on the facts of history obscures the majesty, scope and deeper meaning of history, which is the evolution of divine and human reason.

9. Even the most “mediocre historian” brings his ideas to the subject matter, selects the data that he thinks is relevant, chooses the organizational form within which the data becomes meaningful. Reason and reflection is involved in the whole process. It is anything but neutral or passive, even when it pretends to be.

10. In science, at least in the modern era, we look for the laws of science. We apply the power of consciousness to the nature outside of us to imbue it with meaning. Nature itself has no consciousness of its laws. We give the laws to nature by discovering them.

11. We discover the law of evolution towards greater and greater freedom. Or, to use Hegelian language “Reason is thought determining itself in absolute freedom.”

12. History is providential in the sense that suggests a divine plan. But Hegel’s view of providential history is opposed to typical religious interpretations of providence. Most religious people take divine providence on faith but Hegel suggests that providence is an issue of cognition. Also, common people use providence to explain the particularities of their lives whereas, for Hegel, providence is all about universals rather than particulars. Individuals are insignificant to the plan of providence.

13. In the past, religious piety meant avoiding questioning. Now it was possible for human beings to begin to understand aspects of God’s plan. Religion was once an outlet for the emotion and the imagination; now it was becoming the stimulus for “intellectual comprehension.” Traditional religious views, based on feeling, were childish and instinctual in comparison with the new mental approaches for understanding the deep meaning of the divine.

14. He would think of them as silly, devoid of serious content, and a purely subjective activity. Religion as it was currently envisioned was not the kind of activity that intelligent people engaged in. Everyone’s view was equal to one another’s.

15. It is a Theodicy in the sense that it is a justification for a rational God with a rational plan.

16. Hegel’s Theodicy shows why evil and suffering exists in the world. It shows why a perfect god created an imperfect world. It reconciles the positives and negatives of human existence. It shows that what appears irrational to a shallow mind is really a dynamic form of Reason.

17. Our minds, especially our “cultured human minds”, which allows us to contemplate ideal forms of perfection, the absolute, and the good in this messy human existence. Mind is in “antithesis” to nature, superior to nature, and our link to something bigger.

18. God created the world as an extension of Himself, but this is primarily as spirit, consciousness and mind. That’s why we shouldn’t get bogged down in the minutiae of physical nature or human history. What we really want to explore is the development of spirit and mind rather than phenomena and matter. Although Hegel’s language becomes virtually unintelligible when he starts talking about God as the Idea in itself, for itself, realizing and objectifying itself, it may help you to consider that God exists as Spirit, the world is the place where he is making that Spirit into an objective entity, that human beings are his tool, and that eventually God will actualize himself in human history.

19. A restless evolution towards greater freedom. Matter is a cage; only spirit is free. Spirit develops on an intellectual plane. First by developing the laws of logic (the Greeks), next through the scientific exploration of physical nature (renaissance science), and, finally, through philosophical history (Hegel).

20. Human consciousness knows that it knows (cogito) and it knows what it knows (science, philosophy). But human consciousness doesn’t know its own nature or why it knows what it knows. The Universal mind, knows itself. To use Hegelian language, God put us on earth to achieve the unity of spirit, to turn potentiality into actuality, to turn dependence into independence.

21. It moves gradually but progressively from the idea that one can be free, to the notion that some are free, and finally to an understanding that all should be free and that freedom is the end point of the entire historical progress. Hegel’s philosophical history obviously has a foundation in the liberal or whig interpretation of history as progress towards greater freedom.

22. In liberal history, the freedom of the individual is the goal. In Hegel’s philosophical history, individuals are dispensable. The ideal of freedom is what counts, not individual liberty. Ultimately, suggests Hegel, individual liberty is simply the license to do whatever one wants. All rights, all freedoms come from society or the state.

23. Hegel says that people view the world as a sad place because they see injustice all around them. History from this point of view becomes “a fearsome picture”. We wonder what the purpose of all of these sacrifices is.

24. He talks about the laws of history both as principles and as purposes. These are not simply abstract physical laws that restrict us, says Hegel, but they are reflections of a divine Will. For Hegel and for many German philosophers after him, the Will was not merely a manifestation of freedom but a vehicle for shaping the world.

25. It is important to recognize that Hegel is not talking about self-interest here, or the wayward passions of the stupid, which he hates. He is talking about the will to accomplish great deeds of historical scope. He’s leading into a discussion of heroes or world historical individuals. These are the only significant individuals apart from the societies or the states to which they belong. They embody the spirit. Their passions are not the petty passions of common people, even when these heroes arise from the common people.

26. Ego is consciousness, which is mental; atom is the smallest particle of nature, which is matter. The two are antitheses of one another. Yet they are together in human history. Eventually, however, consciousness must be pure spirit or idea, because only Spirit or Mind can be absolute, perfect and eternal.

27. They help to further the agenda of reason and the movement towards freedom. Providence uses human passions as a vehicle to achieve its ends. Here, Hegel may sound like he is echoing Adam Smith who argued that our self-interest is pushed by an Invisible Hand of the market to create more wealth for all. In truth, Hegel is much more of a philosopher of a hidden hand than Smith ever was. The latter only referred to a hidden or invisible hand three times in all of his writing. Hegel has providence pushing mind and matter, will and passion, towards freedom continuously.

28. Human beings are creatures of passion rather than goodness. Although they are intelligent and thinking beings, they lack the ability to decide what is right in all cases. Their mental defects and peculiarities make them poor instruments for achieving good ends. Thus, God puts them into societies and moulds those societies towards great nations that can control and harness the human spirit for higher ends.

29. “Each individual is also the child of a people at a definite stage of its development. One cannot skip over the spirit of his people any more than one can skip over the earth.” This is like the law of gravity for Hegel. Individuals only achieve significance as part of society. Only great societies, or nation states, have real significance in terms of the unfolding of the pattern of history. This leads Hegel and those after him to say things like the individual is nothing; the state is everything.

30. They didn’t want to be chosen for these great duties. They have to devote their lives to their cause if they want to be successful. They usually die early.

31. He means that, at particular times in history, the idea of freedom is advanced by individuals who consciously recognize the need for change and imbue that change with their personalities like Caesar.

32. Individuals are finite. They perish. But important ideas created by great societies do not perish. The evolution towards freedom may appear slow and haphazard but it’s a progressive evolution all the same. It is important for philosophical historians not to focus on individuals, especially ordinary individuals in common life, because these individuals have almost nothing to do with the evolutionary process. They are merely the means that history and world historical individuals use to achieve progressive ends.

33. They do this when they confuse their own depraved passions or enfeebled morality with the great patterns of history. Even as idealists, these people miss the boat, because they are too ignorant to understand the sublime pattern of freedom in history. Thus, they are pretentious about their own rectitude, dogmatic in beliefs, and whiney about their perceived lot in life. Their ideals “flounder on the rocks of hard reality” because they are partial and subjective. These folks don’t see the big picture.

34. The state is the entity where all these partial understandings are organized and the human passions are focused on higher ends. Hegel was writing just as the modern nation state was coming into existence and he was impressed by its ability to push culture and civilization to a new stage. He believed that individual interests needed to be subsumed within this greater being. We should beware, however, of thinking that Hegel was a crude defender of modern nation states or a contributor to the myth of the state. He used the term state rather loosely to refer to Greece and Rome as well as Prussia. In many of his passages, the term civilization or society translates his meaning better than state.

35. In the laws, in morality, in what counts as the “common will” or “culture” of the people. Another term that he uses is the “spirit of the people” – a term that was lifted from Hegel by the Romantics. As important fragments of this reality, it was particularly important to study art and religion (non-dogmatic – the essence or spirit of religion).

36. He also refers to it as pure Energy.

37. He says that the “state is the divine Idea as it exists on earth”.

38. Societies that are organized around patriarchy make the family the model of society. These are transitional and highly imperfect societies. Only where society is the focus, and members are citizens first, can the state achieve its divine purpose.

39. The establishment of a constitution demonstrates the significance of freedom in terms of the general will of a given society. It’s in the constitution that the abstract concept of the state takes on life and reality. This way of describing the state shows that Hegel’s conception of the state is simultaneously sociological and political.

40. Religion. What he means by religion, however, is not religious dogmatism. It is culture and spirit within the general belief in God. More important, it means that society or the state is itself a manifestation of the divine. Sociologists like Durkheim would take this point even further and advocate a social religion or religion of society. Society’s essence, in other words, takes the form of God and the Divine.