Hegel’s Realization of the Spirit in History
Hegel is the first thinker to treat history as a matter of philosophical and theological study. He made a distinction between individual existence and social existence, so that history refers primarily to our social life, not individual, private lives. The spirit moves the individual, but history is primarily society in its temporal process – and Hegel’s basic social unity is the nation/state.
The spirit works through history in bringing together freedom and necessity, subjectivity and objectivity. There is a rational pattern that can be discerned in history, as the spirit continues to move forward toward freedom. The progression is necessary, because development is necessary in all levels. In nature, organic matter develops, as a seed becomes a tree; in human beings, children develop, and by necessity a three year old child cannot think and behave like a thirty year old adult.
In the same manner, the spirit develops through the thoughts and actions of nations and civilizations. The spirit actualizes itself in the self-consciousness of human beings and in their progressive consciousness of freedom. For Hegel, it is a discernible pattern of history that the more ancient civilizations had a more limited concept of freedom, whereas democracy only appears in modern times. He argues that in ancient Oriental civilizations, the general pattern was that only the ruler was free, whereas in the later Greek civilization there was an oligarchy of the few who were free – and finally modern nations have the awareness that all should be free. There were exceptions to the rule, and breaks in the general chronology, but the exceptions only prove the rule.
History is not a mere succession of sheer contingencies – not just one random thing after another. For Hegel, if one looks at the world rationally, the world will look rationally back. There is a development of reason in the pattern, since for Hegel reason is substance and infinite power, the infinite material of all natural and spiritual life and the infinite form which activates this material content.
There are for Hegel three basic levels of the activity of the spirit:
1. First, the spirit becomes conscious and seeks freedom in the individual spirit.
2. It also moves individuals together as it sublates contradictions and seeks freedom in the level of the nation – the nation spirit.
3. Thirdly, the spirit will also move not only through individuals and nations, but also in guiding the totality of world history – the world spirit.
Philosophy of Religion | Luminous Darkness