Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Hegel

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In different epochs, different Folk-Spirits are the primary manifestation of the progress of the World-Spirit.The people to which it belongs will be, for one epoch, the dominant people in the world history.

For each nation, thehour strikes once and only once.

In Hegel's time the hour had struck for the German nation.

Whereas the Englishcan say ‘we are the men who navigate the ocean, and have the commerce of the world', the German can say ‘TheGerman spirit is the spirit of the new world.

Its aim is the realization of absolute Truth as the unlimited self-determination of freedom'.German history is divided into three periods: the period up to Charlemagne, which Hegel calls the Kingdom of theFather; the period from Charlemagne to the Reformation, the Kingdom of the Son; and finally the Kingdom of theHoly Ghost, from the Reformation up to and including the Prussian monarchy.

Though Prussia is almost therealization of the ideal, it is not to be the last word of the World-Spirit.

One might expect, given the preferencewhich Hegel commonly shows for wholes over their parts, that nation-states would eventually give way to a worldstate.

But Hegel disliked the idea of a world state, because it would take away the opportunity for war, which hethought had a positive value of its own as a reminder of the transitory nature of finite existence.

Instead, thefuture of the world lies in America ‘where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the world's history shallreveal itself' – perhaps in a great continental struggle between North and South.Hegel's philosophy of history, he claimed, could be deduced from his metaphysics.

Only there can we see the fullmeaning of his invocation of World-Spirit, for the references to it are not meant to be mere metaphors for theoperation of impersonal historical forces.

Spirit, in Hegel's metaphysical system, resembles Kant's transcendentalunity of apperception in being the subject of all experience, which cannot itself be an object of experience.

Kantseems content to assume that there will be a separate such focus in the life of each individual mind.

But whatground is there for this assumption? Behind Kant's transcendental self stands the Cartesian ego; and one of the firstcritics of Descartes' cogito put the question to him: how do you know that it is you who thinks, and not the world-soul that thinks in you? Hegel's spirit, then, is meant to be a centre of consciousness which is prior to any individualconsciousness.

One Spirit thinks severally in the thoughts of Descartes and in the thoughts of Kant, perhaps ratheras I, as a single person, can feel simultaneously toothache and gout in different parts of myself.The existence of Spirit is said, by Hegel, to be a matter of logic.

Just as he sees history as a manifestation of logic,so he tends to see logic in historical, indeed military, terms.

If two propositions are contradictories, Hegel willdescribe this as a conflict between them: one proposition will go out to do battle against another, and achievedefeat or victory against it.

This is called ‘dialectic', the process by which one proposition (the thesis) fights withanother (the antithesis) and both are finally conquered by a third (the synthesis).

Let us illustrate how Hegel usesthis dialectical method in practice.The subject matter of logic is the Absolute, the totality of reality, familiar to us from earlier philosophers as Being.We start from the thesis that the Absolute is pure Being.

But pure Being without any qualities is nothing; so we areled to the antithesis ‘The Absolute is nothing'.

This thesis and antithesis are overcome by synthesis: the union ofBeing and Unbeing is becoming, and so we say ‘The Absolute is Becoming'.

The Absolute has a life of its own, whichpasses through three stages, Concept, Nature, and Spirit.

These three stages are studied by three differentbranches of philosophy, logic, philosophy of nature, and philosophy of spirit.Hegel often refers to the Absolute by the word ‘God', and a modern Christian might think to identify the threestages in the life of the Absolute with (i) the existence of God alone before the world began, (ii) the existence ofthe natural creation before the evolution of man, and (iii) the history of the human race.

But this would be far toosimple.

Hegel does make use of Aristotle's definition of God when he describes the Absolute as being the Thoughtwhich thinks itself.

But it turns out that the self-awareness of the Absolute comes at the end, not at the beginning,of this life-cycle, and it is brought into existence by the philosophical reflection of human beings.

It is the history ofphilosophy which brings the Absolute face to face with itself.

Reader, I hope you realize what is happening as youare reading!If we take Hegel seriously, however, we should stop the book at this point.

For Hegel thought that with his ownsystem, the history of philosophy comes to an end.

In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy he displays earlierphilosophies as succumbing, one by one, to a dialectical advance marching steadily in the direction of GermanIdealism.

A new epoch has now arisen, he tells us, in which finite self-consciousness has ceased to be finite, andabsolute self-consciousness has achieved reality.

The sole task of the history of philosophy is to narrate the strifebetween finite and infinite self-consciousness; now that the battle is over, it has reached its goal.. »