Examine Hegel’s philosophy of history

Hegel was born in Stuttgart on August 27, 1770, the son of Georg Ludwig Hegel, Hegel soon became thoroughly acquainted with the Greek and Roman classics while studying at the Stuttgart Gymnasium (preparatory school) and was familiar with German literature and science. History,” Hegel emphasizes, has a double meaning: it refers both to the course of human events, and to the writing that strives to comprehend those events and impress their significance upon human consciousness. These two senses of “history” are necessarily linked, according to Hegel, for the course of events transforms human consciousness our understanding of the world and ourselves and human consciousness informs the contributions we make to the ongoing course of events.

The following are explanations about the Hegel’s philosophy of history;

Hegel regards human beings as thoroughly historical creatures. What we are is determined by what we do; what we do is determined by what we understand ourselves to be; and what we understand our-selves to be is determined by what we have been. Our history the events that have led to our present condition, and our awareness of those events generates the possibilities we envision for that which we might become .Our historical nature is manifest, Hegel thinks, in all of our endeavors. We actualize our self-understanding (“objectify our spirit”) in our legal, moral, social, economic, and political practices and institutions. At the same time, we express our self-understanding in aesthetic, religious, and philosophical forms. Our appreciation of the truths presented in art, religion, and philosophy makes our self-understanding increasingly explicit, which hastens its transformation. Our transformed self-understanding motivates further upheavals in the practical arenas of law, morality, social custom, economics, and politics. These intertwined developments of human self-understanding and its worldly objectifications are the stuff of history. Wilhelm, G (1953)

Hegel’s philosophy of history aims to comprehend the trajectory and most important moments of human development. The key to such comprehension, Hegel claims, is the concept of freedom. Hegel believes that the capacity and desire for freedom are definitive of humanity, and that all humans therefore seek to establish the conditions in which they can be free. Because freedom can be understood in many different ways, however, people have produced a great variety of cultures, despite sharing the same ultimate goal. Hegel attempts to make sense of this cultural variety by ordering the possible understandings of freedom from the least to the most adequate, from those that grasp the truth only partially (or abstractly) to those that grasp it most fully (or concretely). He then identifies cultures that have actualized these understandings of freedom in their legal, moral, social, economic, political, aesthetic, religious, and philosophical endeavors. Hegel employs the resulting mapping of cultures onto understandings of freedom to define historical epochs. These epochs, he concludes, are constitutive of the historical process through which human beings have gradually come to understand the freedom that is their own defining characteristic, and in so doing have been able to achieve an increasingly complete liberation.

Hegel’s account of history contains some of his most famous claims and formulations, almost all of which remain controversial. It is in history, for example, that the equivalence of the rational and the actual which Hegel notoriously asserts in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right is said to emerge. History reveals the actualization of freedom and, Hegel contends, everything that actualizes freedom is “rational” (despite the fact that the proximate causes of liberation are often accidental, violent, and even immoral). Hegel recognizes that human endeavors frequently make no contribution to freedom, and are sometimes positively detrimental to it, but he refuses to grant that such undertakings, though undeniably real, deserve to be called “actual” in the proper sense of the term. “History,” in other words, does not include everything that happens (no matter how important such happenings may be to the people who experience them) but is limited to those events that play a part in the actualization of freedom. Wilhelm, G (1953).

The fact that human development and freedom have been advanced by events causing intense and widespread suffering leads Hegel to refer to history as a “slaughter bench.” Within the apparently meaningless slaughter, however, Hegel discerns the “cunning of reason,” a colorful personification of the idea that actions often serve the rational end of freedom even when the people carrying them out have no intention of doing so. The cunning of reason is a secular version of the religious myth of divine providence, according to which the apparently incomprehensible. And painful course of events is in fact accomplishing the plan of God. By comprehending and bringing to consciousness the necessary operation of reason within the world, the philosophy of history functions, according to Hegel, as a theodicy, an account that reconciles the existence of suffering and evil with the ultimate goodness of the world. The agents of reason, those whose deeds do the most to further the actualization of freedom, Hegel calls “world historical” individuals and peoples. In the course of time, they have inspired and led humanity to fulfill its potential for self-determination. Hegel traces the path of this fulfillment from East to West, asserting that the consciousness of freedom and its objectification in the world first appeared in Asia and then spread to Europe, intensifying in ancient Greece before culminating in modern Germany. Dudley w, (2009)

Hegel refers to humanity’s achievement of an adequate understanding and actualization of freedom as “the end of history,” and the claim that history has such an end in the dual sense of both a goal toward which it aims, and a moment in time at which it accomplishes that goal is among his most controversial of all. Hegel’s Account of the Present: An Open-Ended History, this is because Hegel acknowledges, according to de Boer, that modernity confronts us with economic and political conditions that might prove impossible to comprehend. Indeed, these conditions give rise to conflicts especially those between poverty and wealth, individual citizens and the state that threaten freedom with destruction. Hegel calls for the development of institutions capable of mediating these conflicts, but acknowledges that their successful mediation cannot be guaranteed. Wilhelm, G (1953).  

The Philosophy of History and Religion, the relationship between religion and Hegel’s philosophy of history .In “Hegel’s Philosophy of World History as Theodicy: On Evil and Freedom, Hegel’s claim that the philosophy of history is also theodicy. Hegel does not claim to have solved the classical problem of evil in the monotheistic tradition, that of explaining how evil is compatible with the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent deity, but rather to have shown how evil can be reconciled with the goodness of the world. Hegel, in religious term intended to personify the idea that reason is at work in history, and that the goodness of freedom can enable the transcendence of evil, on his view, believe that evil is justified in virtue of being a necessary means to the end of freedom.  is neither philosophically compelling because much of the evil in the world clearly fails to advance freedom at all nor proposed in Hegel’s texts. Freedom can transcend evil without justifying it, that Hegel holds that the blessedness of freedom, which is enjoyed through participation in ethical life, actually reduces the suffering we experience in the world. Dudley w, (2009).

The Hegel’s philosophy of history has the great contribution on the ways of describing the history and the historical events in the process of studying history.

REFERENCES

Wilhelm, G (1953). General Introduction to the Philosophy of History; Liberal Arts Press Book:                            Bobs-Merrill Company.

Dudley w, (2009). Philosophy of history; New York: Albany publishing company.