By Professor Charles Mathewes, University of Virginia
For Hegel, the individual subject’s will—the subject’s capacity to assert itself; it’s capacity for freedom—is both the problem and the potential for the problem’s ultimate ‘sublation’; that is, the problem’s ultimate resolution in a higher synthesis. That gives us some intuition of what Hegel’s view of history is about, and how history is itself, Hegel will say, the working out of the meaning of the problem of evil in time.
Hegel’s View of History
The story of history for Hegel on one level is about the human intellect coming over many generations into its maturity through its struggle to understand history, to understand the story of its own development. In other words, the human comes to grow up as a species—not just an individual—precisely by reflecting on history and coming to see what it means.
This picture is more philosophically contested than it may at first appear. It assumes that history itself is rational, history actually means something that we can understand and render intelligible to ourselves and to one another. History is an activity or a process, but it is in part a process driven forward itself by people attempting to discern just what that process means. History, that is, considered as a whole, is an ongoing intellectual inquiry into the shape of the meaning of what it is to be human through interpreting the events that we undertake and the things that happen to us as an ongoing practice of questioning and finding answers for what this means.
This is a transcript from the video series Why Evil Exists. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Historical Development
This means that the very activity of questioning itself shapes the events that come after that questioning in certain ways. The U.S. Civil War, for example, is itself not just a dumb event, it is in a complicated way an intellectual event; it is an attempt in part by the two sides, the two bodies of competence, to understand the meaning of the American Revolution, as people on both sides of that war recognized. The Civil War was an intellectual struggle as much as it was a military struggle, and that’s why someone like Abraham Lincoln could write in the “Gettysburg Address” a speech—of 600 or 700 words—that was probably more powerful for determining the outcome of that war than any numbers of battles would have been.
History unfolds, and the mind matures—this is kind of the basic philosophical presumption of the story here—in a dialectical relationship. Each new event in history shapes our minds in a new way, and our minds, so newly shaped, in turn shape the new history in new ways as well. It’s like a dance in which each partner’s next step is new, but responds to the other partner’s immediately previous step. History and the human intellect play a game of back and forth where each in turn sharpens and focuses the picture that they are coming mutually to represent.
Learn more about Hegel’s grand vision of history.
Is History Intelligible?
This may sound kind of crazy; it may seem odd to call history “intelligible.” The truth about Hegel is that he sometimes can make things sound really profound that on one level are actually really obvious.
Every time we try to understand history, every time we tell a story about what happened and we leave some things out and keep some things in, highlight some things, downplay other things, we are implying that there is some real story, there is some sense to be made, about our past. On one level, then, Hegel is clearly right; anthropologically, ethnographically, we do this all the time; we do believe history is intelligible.
An Audacious Argument
Others might challenge our confidence or conviction about this, but their challenge is far deeper than it may at first appear; it’s not a challenge to an abstruse philosophical idea that history must be somehow meaningful; it’s a challenge to the very idea that when we tell stories about history we are finding meaning in it.
In other words, Hegel is offering as a very philosophically significant point, something that actually on some level looks like a common place. This is not a criticism of Hegel; in some important way he’s grabbed onto something philosophically very profound that we do all the time, that we never noticed how profound it was.
Hegel goes on to make a more audacious claim even than that, and one that it is significantly easier for us to dissent from; many people have dissented from it without much trauma intellectually, other than Hegel. He says that history is not only the human mind coming to understand itself; more than that, the human mind itself is involved in a much larger working out of something far more vast than merely the human: namely, what Hegel thinks of as God’s unfolding self-understanding.
Learn more about Hegel’s synthesis of Fichte’s idealism.
The Rational World-Spirit
That is to say, for Hegel, reality itself is essentially rational, and the core of history is an intelligible story not just of how the human is coming to know itself, but how the World-spirit is coming to know itself, and know itself as free; that is, as having chosen over many thousands of years this course of history, however filled with evil and mysterious suffering (mysterious at the time) that it may be. The Spirit chooses this history as the story of its own slow realization of its own power.
This story of what Hegel calls the World-Spirit, means that God is actually using the whole of history, and human attempts to understand history, to make sense of itself, of this God. History, then, is the dialectical process—again, the back and forth process—of the Spirit coming to full self-awareness, working out the explicit knowledge of what it had potentially had been all along in the material events of the history of the human race and the history of the world as a whole.
Common Questions About Hegel’s View of History
The story of history for Hegel on one level is about the human intellect coming over many generations into its maturity through its struggle to understand history, to understand the story of its own development. In other words, the human comes to grow up as a species—not just an individual—precisely by reflecting on history and coming to see what it means.
Hegel says that history is not only the human mind coming to understand itself; more than that, the human mind itself is involved in a much larger working out of something far more vast than merely the human: namely, what Hegel thinks of as God’s unfolding self-understanding.
For Hegel, history is the dialectical process of the World-Spirit coming to full self-awareness, working out the explicit knowledge of what it had been all along, in the material events of the history of the human race and the history of the world.
