_012 Hegel & History

Hegel was a 19^th Century German philosopher and perhaps one of the most complicated writers of all time. According to Hegel, history is not simply the recording of past events, but rather it has a purpose and direction, which is to bring humanity towards “rational freedom”. In this sense, history can end once it has accomplished its goal. He defines this as philosophic history.

So what does “rational freedom” mean? Hegel often uses another term: Geist which loosely translates to mind, spirit or reason. So rational freedom is the self-actualisation of this Geist. All men can be, by nature, free. But only once we recognise this truth and utilise reason can we truly be free.

For Hegel, reason both rules and drives history and the world. Reason functions without the need for anything else and it appears in the natural world too. Mathematical formulas can describe all universal laws within the universe. Since it is not reliant on other things, reason is the only thing that is definitively free and independent. Like Spinoza, he thinks that only The Whole can be true, since it has no boundary placed by other objects.

He believes that reason guides history and history is nothing more than the self-development of reason. History is pushed forward by reason. As we become more conscious of this fact, we become more rational and thus freer.

In fact, the world is no more than the projection of reason within our minds. Once this has been actualised and we realise that all of reason is within us, we no longer have to struggle against it. We can move away from an ignorance of why things happen and the mind can rationally order the world.

Reason progresses through the dialectic method, which was employed by Socrates. To solve a problem, we form a thesis which is questioned via an antithesis. It is this conflict between the two that allows reason to reach a solution and causes progression in history.

We can analyse history in the past to realise where history ought to be going. In China there was no freedom except for the ruler. In Greece, a few had freedom but there were still slaves without it. In Rome, we had abstract freedom whereby people did whatever they wanted. In Germany, freedom began to reach its peak. Hegel went as far as to say his own philosophical discovery marked the beginning of the end of history, since his work meant the actualisation of reason.

Abstract freedom is simply the liberty to do whatever you wish. But Hegel proposed that real freedom is to align our desires with reason. If we have an understanding of why we desire something we can make truly free decisions, rather than simply being slaves to our passions, unaware of how our emotions are manipulated.

When a society becomes rational, the process of philosophic history will end and we will reach utopia, whereby our physical freedom is guided by rational understanding.

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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1857. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, translated by H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.