This is a short note I made for some students a while ago, with a view to giving them an overview of Hegel so they could locate him in the landscape of thought. I’m deeply anti-Hegelian in my own thought, including in the way I think with Marx, so this also partially clarifies what I don’t like or what I’m ‘anti’ when it comes to Hegel and philosophy. Hegelians will quite rightly have a different take than this, so bear that in mind.
(All references will be to the text Reason in History, Hegel (translated by Robert S Hartman), Liberal Arts Press 1953, henceforth refered to as RIH. The online extracts are sections 3 and 4 of this text. The text was originally published in 1837 as Lectures on the philosophy of history.)
1. Reason as the authority
Hegel begins with the role that reason has in the world. The Enlightenment had brought forward a new idea of authority, one that locates the authority for an idea within the realm of reason. The idea, for example, of a person's place in the world, their role in a particular hierarchy, is no longer given by the church and the state but now must be justified through reason. Reason is the new authority when it comes to deciding questions that affect our lives. It is also the new authority when it comes to deciding the truth of the world. The Enlightenment brings something new to light but what is this new presence in the world? What exactly is a reason?
For Enlightenment thinkers what is new is the way we see the world in the light of reason itself. Reason was referred to quite often as 'lumens naturale', that is as a natural light. Why should the world seen in the light of reason be more clearly seen? Why is it better to be rational? The assumption is that reason is a positive force that can reveal the truth more accurately than tradition, myth or religion.
To understand Hegel we can ask the rhetorical question, is reason a non-natural feature of the world, some sort of aberration that results from the particular type of being that we are, or is reason itself natural and part of reality? Does reason exist because the world is fundamentally rational? For Hegel the answer to this last question is yes, the world is fundamentally rational – this is encapsulated in something like a slogan attributed to Hegel, "the real is the rational and the rational is the real".
In contrast to Hegel, Kant located reason within the human being. For Kant reason is a faculty of the human mind, one faculty amongst a number and it needs to be balanced with these other faculties, most notably the faculty of understanding. Reason on its own will produce paradoxes, what Kant called antinomies, because it will often be able to provide rational arguments both for and against a position. For example, we might ask whether the universe has a beginning in time. For Kant, reason will be able to give rational arguments that prove the universe has a beginning in time and that prove the universe cannot have a beginning in time. Reason must be controlled, it must not be allowed to dictate everything but must be made use of in a mature way. Autonomy, the sense that the individual is capable of being in charge of themselves, being independent, relies upon the mature use of reason. Pure reason, Kant argues, must be limited by our understanding. Rational speculation is not sufficient for the production of reasonable conclusions. The world is fundamentally a human world and reason must be subservient to this basic fact.
Hegel differs from Kant in believing that the world itself is fundamentally rational. Speculation is exactly what will be needed in order to uncover the fundamental rationality of the world beneath an irrational surface appearance.
2. The real is the rational and the rational is the real.
The famous phrase "the real is the rational and the rational is the real" derives from Hegel's work The philosophy of Right. The crucial thing to remember is not to identify the real with what appears in front of us. What appears in front of us is the result or expression of a more basic dynamic within the world, the real dynamic in fact. For example Hegel argues that "religion is the sphere where a people give itself a definition of what it regards as the true" (Section D, The religious foundation of the state). In this situation religion is a means to express something more fundamental. The first fact about Hegel then is that there is some underlying dynamic that is being expressed in the world around us and in the history that develops through human (and non-human) activity. We have to investigate and reason about the world of appearances in order to uncover, through our theoretical and speculative activity, the underlying logic or reason that is being expressed.
The second fact about Hegel is that this underlying logic or reason has a dynamic that is progressive. The underlying logic or reason of the world is called Geist and Geist has a history. For example, whilst every religion may be an expression of what a people regards as true, some religions are closer to the truth than others because they express more clearly the underlying rationality of the world. This underlying rationality is called the 'Idea'. In the context of Hegel's time he thought that Protestant secularism was the most advanced, the most clear, expression of Geist. The reason that he thought Protestant secularism was the most advanced expression of Geist was that it recognised the role of the state as distinct from the role of religion. For Hegel this recognition was an expression of an underlying logic that was coming to fruition, a logic which needed some formation such as the state in order to fully come to self-understanding. This underlying logic is the history and development of Geist.
Geist can be translated from the German into three English words; spirit, mind and ghost. It is important to remember this trinity of connotations and not reduce Hegel's concept of Geist to spirit alone. You can for example think of Geist in terms of the "Zeitgeist", the spirit of the times but this will not easily give you any sense of the progressive development of Geist. In order to get a grip on the idea of Geist developing it is better to think of a consciousness gradually becoming aware of the world around it and the way in which it fits into that world. The development of Geist is the coming to consciousness of the world. In this understanding it is easier to think of Geist as something like a world mind.
The world (the real) is governed by an underlying logic (the rational). We see the underlying logic by examining the world itself under the assumption that it is not random. We are trying to uncover the "cunning of reason". Why does reason need to employ cunning however? Why is the world not already rational and complete? Well, the world as an Idea is already rational but the world as Actual is not yet complete because the Idea is engaged in a process of waking up to itself as Actual. The Idea is driving to become fully Real by being fully Actual. This process involves experimentation and practice, it involves testing options and correcting mistakes without ever having an all knowing experimenter standing behind the experiment. The world, we might say, 'feels' its way into self-consciousness and is driven towards this self-consciousness, the realisation of which would complete the progress.
The crux is that the world is not random. History, including the history of the political forms that human society has taken, is a history of development. The world can be made sense of, that is to say, it is possible to make sense of the world. It is possible to understand the reasons why one stage of history supersedes another. This is central to Hegel's political philosophy. If we examine the various historical forms we can find the process of experiment, error and correction time and time again. If we take the various experiments as a whole we can discern a dynamic, a gradual progression towards a clearer expression of self-conscious reason, reason that knows why and how it makes its conclusions. This is Hegel's overview of the world. He is holistic, which means that he connects each individual event (both in history and in thought) with other events that preceded it and that went after. By examining the whole we can perceive the underlying law of development. It is this a law of development that is Geist.
Hegel believes, therefore, that a grand narrative of the world can be constructed. The law of history is theoretically accessible, that is, the law of history is accessible by theoretical activity. We examine the events in order to find their real character, a character that expresses the rational but expresses this through the cunning of reason and does so in response to previous errors and mistakes. This underlying law, Geist, is unconscious and operates very much like an unconscious drive. The explanation for the movement or the process of history comes from an examination of that history as a unity, that is, we cannot understand history as a series of events that are isolated and distinct but we must understand history instead as a single, unified story that is being told by a storyteller who knows the end of the story but not every step along the way.
IDEA - > (realised through / as history) - > ACTUAL CONCRETE PARTICULARS
Manifestation is necessary for the idea to be real. At the same time all real manifestations are expressions of the idea. One way to consider this is by examining what Hegel says about the heroes of history. There are three main examples he uses within this text; Alexander the Great, Napoleon and Caesar. Each of these figures is a 'world historical' figure. Their actions cannot be explained, Hegel thinks, by reference to their own individual character but must instead be understood as expressions of Geist. They did "what must be done" rather than what they wanted to do. Their actions followed an inherent necessity and we might say that they were forced to do what they did even if they were happy or keen to take those actions. This underlying necessity that drove the heroes to take the actions they took means that we cannot judge them in human terms but must instead consider what they did in the light of the whole. The actions of Napoleon cannot be explained by some biographical facts about the man but instead Napoleon can only be understood by examining the necessity of in his actions – the actions form the man, not the man forming the actions, and the actions are expressions of Geist.