G. W. F. Hegel · Philosophy
Hegel saw world history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom - the rational self-development of Spirit, advancing from the ancient world (where one was free) through the classical world (where some were free) to the modern world (where all are recognized as free).
In his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel advances one of the boldest claims ever made about the human past: that world history is not a meaningless succession of events, not ‘merely one damned thing after another’, but a rational process with a direction and a goal. And he names the goal with great precision. “The History of the world,” he declares, “is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom.” The whole vast drama of civilisations rising and falling, of empires, wars, religions, and revolutions, is, beneath its turbulent surface, the story of Spirit gradually coming to consciousness of its own essential freedom, and bringing that freedom to realisation in the world. History is going somewhere; it is the working-out of freedom.
Hegel gives this a famous schematic shape. In the ancient Oriental world (he is thinking of the great early empires of the East), only one was free - the despot, the emperor - while all others were unfree subjects; freedom was not yet understood as belonging to human beings as such. In the classical world of Greece and Rome, some were free - the citizens - but this freedom rested on slavery and excluded most of humanity; freedom was real but limited and not yet universal. And in the modern, Germanic-Christian world, the principle emerges that all are free - that freedom belongs to the human being as such, to every person as a rational, spiritual being. This is the trajectory: from the freedom of one, to the freedom of some, to the freedom of all. The consciousness of freedom deepens and widens across history until it reaches the modern recognition of universal human freedom and dignity - a recognition that must then be realised in just institutions, in the rational state.
How can Hegel claim that history is rational when the actual historical record is so full of cruelty, accident, folly, and catastrophe? He acknowledges the horror unflinchingly - history, he says, is a ‘slaughter-bench’ on which the happiness of peoples and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed. Yet he insists that “Reason governs the world, and that therefore in world history things have come about rationally”. The reconciliation of these two claims lies in the ‘cunning of Reason’: Spirit achieves its rational ends not by acting directly, but through the passions, ambitions, and conflicts of human beings who pursue their own private aims with no notion of the larger purpose they serve. The conqueror seeks glory, the nation seeks power, the revolutionary seeks his cause - and out of the clash of all these particular wills, something none of them intended emerges: the advance of freedom.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that for Hegel world history is ‘the progress of the consciousness of freedom’: a rational process in which Spirit develops from a world where one is free, through one where some are free, to one where all are recognized as free. Explain this view and Hegel’s claim that reason rules history.
Leads to Augustine of Hippo.
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