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G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the
Philosophy of History (1840 edition) G.W.F. Hegel has summarized much
of his all-encompassing system of philosophy in the introduction to a series
of lectures on world history. He sees an inevitable progress taking place
through history: the coming-into-its-own of consciousness, which he also
calls "spirit." That word covers both the mind of the individual
person and what we might call the "mind of an age," which is the
whole of what people think and value, as passed on and developed through
culture (i.e., shared language, morality, science, art, religion and
philosophy). The self-understanding of such spirit is liberating;, in that our realization that we are free (or can be
free) actually makes us free! Just as a single human being progresses from
childhood through youth to maturity, so, Hegel thinks, human cultures have
progressed from what he calls the "Oriental world" through the
Greek and Roman experiences and into the "Christian world," by
which he means medieval and modern Europe. Hegel's vision of the whole world developing toward
freedom, rationality, and understanding was typical of one strain of
nineteenth-century European thought. Today we might ask ourselves whether, in
spite of a current appreciation of diversity, the world isn't inevitably
moving toward homogeneity, and if so, whether that homogeneity will embody
the ideals which Hegel posited or some other conditions. What socio/economic condition among the Greeks and Romans
does Hegel cite as seeming to belie his thesis about progress toward freedom?
How does he explain that such a practice lingered on even into the Christian
world? Universal history is the
exhibition of Spirit in the process of working out the knowledge of what it
[Spirit] potentially is. Just as the seed bears in itself the whole nature of
the tree, including the taste and form of its fruit, so do the first traces
of Spirit virtually contain the whole of its own history. The Orientals did
not attain the knowledge that Spirit, in the form of mankind, is free. They
only knew that "one is free." But in those terms, the freedom of
that one person was only caprice, whether exhibited as ferocity, a brutal
recklessness of passion, or as mildness and tameness of the desires, either
of which is merely an accident of nature. That "one" was thus only
a despot, not a really free man. The consciousness of freedom first arose
among the Greeks, and therefore they were free, though they, just as the
Romans, knew only that "some are free," not man as such. Even Plato
and Aristotle did not know that. Thus the Greeks had slaves, and the whole of
their life and the maintenance of their splendid liberty was
implicated with the institution of slavery. That fact, on the one hand, made
their liberty only an accidental, transient and limited growth and, on the
other hand, constituted it a rigorous thralldom of our common nature, i.e.,
of the human. The Germanic nations, under the influence of Christianity, were
the first to attain the consciousness that man, as man, is free, that it is
the freedom of Spirit which constitutes Spirit's essence. This consciousness
arose first in religion, the most inward region of Spirit. But the
introduction of the principle [of consciousness] into the various relations
of the actual world has involved a more extensive problem than did its simple
implantation [into the soul], a problem whose solution and application have
required a severe and lengthened process of culture. In proof of this, we may
note that slavery did not cease immediately on the reception of Christianity.
Still less did liberty predominate in states or did governments and
constitutions adopt a rational organization or recognize freedom as their own
basis. The application of the principle to political relations and its
thorough molding and interpenetration of the constitution of society is a
process identical with history itself. . . . The history of the world is none
other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom. . . . Translated by J. Sibree, adapted by Michael Neville |