The Philosophy of History by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Hegel's philosophy of history is very much a product of its times, the more so for the overarching context of "Reason" in which he interprets history. The Philosophy of History is not a work that Hegel lived to see published. The massive text we have today is a reconstruction of a series of lectures Hegel gave at the University of Berlin in the 1820s. His students, colleagues, and friends were shocked at his sudden death in a cholera epidemic in 1831, and, feeling that he had still had many contributions to make, set about organizing and publishing his lectures. This project resulted in the posthumous publication not only of the Philosophy of History, but also of the Philosophy of Art, the Philosophy of Religion, and the History of Philosophy.

Born in 1770, Hegel lived through a number of major socio-political upheavals: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the aftermath of those wars (in which Europe began to be re-structured according to early nationalist principles). Hegel followed all these events with great interest and in great detail, from his days as a seminary student in the late 1780s through his various appointments in high school philosophy departments and on to his days as the foremost intellectual of his time. The Philosophy of History, like his first major work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, strives to show how these major historical upheavals, with their apparent chaos and widespread human suffering, fit together in a rational progression toward true human freedom.

The Introduction to the Philosophy of History does not go into much specific historical detail--Hegel is laying the groundwork for that pursuit, insisting on iron-clad basics like the idea that Reason rules history. He does, however, make a few brief references to contemporary intellectual projects and theories from which he wants to distance himself. Chief among these is a loose school of formalism, which was becoming increasingly popular in Germany. Formalism, for Hegel, includes those theories that seek to universalize certain elements of culture across the globe and across time. The most common approach such theories were taking was to posit an originary, united human culture and to argue that our contemporary culture consists of the separated fragments of this original whole.

Thus, Hegel dismisses the "state of nature" arguments of his contemporary, Friedrich von Schlegel, and disparages similar schools of thought that seek to link Greek culture with ancient Indian culture or contemporary western ethics with Confucian morality. (Sanskrit had been "discovered" only twenty years prior to these lectures, and much new work was being done on Indian philosophy). Hegel is careful to distinguish his own theory (which involves a series of truly unique cultural stages) from this "Catholic" (i.e., universal) theory about common human culture; this universalizing of culture, he says, proceeds only on the basis of similarities in the form of culture, and ignores cultural content (which is what really makes cultures distinct).

It must be emphatically noted that translating Hegel is notoriously difficult. Translations take a wide range of approaches to Hegel's conceptual vocabulary (which depends partly on a certain overlapping of terms)--some translate each German word as one English word, and some vary the translation of each term according to its changing context and emphasis. In addition, many translators capitalize words like "Spirit" or "Reason" to show when Hegel is referring to absolute, large-scale concepts and when he is not (in German, all nouns are capitalized all of the time). The translation used for this note is by Leo Rauch (see bibliography), who borrows tactics from various translations and comes up with a solid, contemporary version. Nevertheless, be prepared for some degree of confusion if you are working with another translation. If you are using this note to assist you with a different translation, it may be helpful to pick up a copy of Rauch's translation for comparison.

Hegel sets out these three main divisions of recorded history in order to clear the decks for his own method of "philosophic" history. That concept receives very little clarification in this introduction to the Introduction, but what is said about it depends heavily on the notion of Spirit that Hegel has already begun to build.

Spirit is Hegel's best-known and probably most difficult concept. The basic idea is that all of human history is guided by a rational process of self- recognition, in which human participants are guided to greater and greater self- awareness and freedom by a rational force that transcends them (Hegel will emphasize that we need not think of Spirit as God). The only interest of this force, Spirit, is to realize its own principle of true freedom. It does this by unfolding as human history, where the consciousness of freedom is the driving force. Each type of history that Hegel addresses here participates in this Spirit-guided process to some extent, and so each allows Hegel to set up some of the groundwork for his idea of Spirit.

We first encounter this idea in the context of original history, in which the spirit of the historian's writing is identical to the "spirit" of the times covered. (If the translator has used a small "s" for spirit here and a capital one elsewhere, it's because Hegel is referring to the "spirit of the times" rather than Spirit as a whole, transcendent force). A fundamental feature of the operation of Spirit in history is that its nature is self-reflective. Human history progresses as humans become increasingly self-aware, and as they correspondingly become aware of their freedom (through the state). The stages of this progress seem to correspond roughly to the types of history Hegel sets out. Thus, original history seems to be the most basic with regard to Spirit, since it has little or no capacity to reflect on the spirit of the times--it is of the times, and therefore cannot transcend them.

Reflective history, then, takes us up a level to the point where the historian is capable of reflection on earlier times. The most advanced method of reflective history is specialized history, since it splits history along conceptual, thematic, and therefore universal lines (by choosing to focus on law, religion, etc). By bringing this universal viewpoint to bear, specialized reflective history comes closest to Hegel's own project (philosophic history), in which universal principles truly come first. Philosophic history taps directly into the Spirit that guides world history, because this Spirit is essentially a force of Reason. Philosophy (particularly in pure logic) comes to know the characteristics of Spirit first, then looks for them in the events of history. The characteristics of Spirit that it comes to know are, roughly, that Spirit seeks only to realize its own nature, which is freedom.

Thus, Hegel is already marking the rough outlines of what he means by Spirit, and is setting up his historical method (philosophic history) as the best one for understanding this guiding force in history (because philosophy knows it beforehand). We should note that this already gives Hegel a justification problem: he can only argue that he is right about Spirit based on 1) the logical analysis of Reason itself; or 2) the detailed study of history. There's no time for the former proof, and the detailed proof must come later (remember, this whole text is an introduction). Thus, Hegel says, for now we must simply have "faith" that history is rational.

Hegel's discussion of the means of Spirit allows him to bring us closer to the kind of "common sense" history we know, even as he advances some extremely intricate metaphysical theory. Hegel uses both of these aspects to continue his running battle against the apparent improbability of his proposition that Reason runs world history.

It may come as a relief to begin to hear about actual human beings, with their selfish drives, interests, and "passions." This seems suddenly to be a much more down-to-earth approach, especially when Hegel admits that history presents itself as a "slaughter-bench" inspiring "grief" and "helpless sadness." Unjust wars spring to mind as soon as any discussion of Reason in history is raised, and Hegel was witnessing his share of upheaval at the time of writing. The American and French Revolutions, each with their apparent advancement of human society and their simultaneous wanton butchery, were fresh in his mind (though we should keep in mind that neither of the World Wars were even on the horizon).

Nonetheless, Hegel cites these horrors of history only in passing, and one suspects that he wishes to dispose of the most difficult challenges to his theory at one blow--hence, Hegel immediately returns to his theory, implying that it is the only viable choice besides despair or irresponsible aloofness. We must, that is, believe that these tragedies are "sacrifices" to a higher purpose.

If this emotional discussion leaves us feeling that Hegel is more aware of the problems of concrete history than we thought, the next discussion launches us directly back into nearly total abstraction. Hegel wants us to grasp the sense in which human activity is the means used by Spirit to realize itself. What is particularly challenging about this proposition is that Hegel must explain precisely how Spirit "uses" humans for its own ends; in short, he must show a connection or even a unity between abstract Spirit and real human action. Hegel bases this unity on a proof that he attributes here only to "metaphysical logic": truth is the unity of the universal with the subjective particular. This actually makes intuitive sense (we might think of the framers of the U.S. constitution, who, through a unity of their own interests with a universal Idea of freedom, wrote the document taken as the essential truth of the State (whose purpose in history went on to transcend the purpose of any of the framers). Hegel wants to show that history unfolds only in as much as there is a relationship between human passion and universal ideas--a union of extreme opposites.

The metaphysical version of this union is complex. Spirit has freedom as its central principle, but this is a different sort of freedom than arbitrary human free will. The freedom of Spirit can also be called a necessity, since Spirit finds its freedom simply in realizing itself--it's almost as if it's free to do one infinite thing. In contrast, human will is free in a very finite, fickle, and particular sense; it is subjective, serving only its subject. The union of these two, the universal and the subjective, is the means of history. What they accomplish together (the founding of States, etc.) is history itself. We should note that this unity of opposites has much to do with what Hegel refers to elsewhere as the "dialectic": universal Spirit knows itself as an object, and struggles against itself (its particular, subjective aspect). In more worldly terms, humans struggle to know themselves, and progress by negating some particular aspect of themselves in favor of a universal (the principle of the State). Thus, there is a dialogue, a progressive back-and- forth, between the subjective particular aspect and the objective universal aspect of this spiritual unity that drives history.