Hegel's Philosophy of History

[Music] being given only one lecture to cover the philosophy of hegel is a very difficult task it's so huge so comprehensive so exhausting as simply to follow hegel's lines of reasoning and to plow your way through hegel's books makes it a kind of a difficult project woody allen once said that he had gone to a speed reading class and he learned how to read war and peace in 45 minutes and when he was finished he said it was about russia i have some of the same feelings about teaching you hegel in the next 44 minutes you're going to find that it's about the world it's about history it's about everything and all philosophies are about everything if they're any good at all so it's not especially illuminating to find out that it's about the world it's about what is and stuff like that so let me take as my point of departure the idea of spirit in german geist it's central to hegel's philosophy it's central to his conception of reasoning to his conception of history to the big topics in hegel's thinking now geist is translated in german in english as spirit it's the part of the world the part of that which is which isn't nature which isn't matter or isn't exclusively matter isn't exclusively physical it's the part of the world that isn't the tables and chairs the animals and plants simple brute matter geist is exact is exactly everything that isn't nature geist is mind spirit reason and it'd be worthwhile to consider the origins of the word geist it comes from german roots and it has the same roots as two words that are in contemporary english one is gist as in the gist of an argument the kind of logical center the logical marrow of a series of thoughts so somehow the the essence the logical essence of something the gist of an argument is connected to hegel's idea of geist built into the idea and a second word that we have in contemporary english which is derived from the same root as the german word geist is geyser the kind of a natural phenomenon they have in yellowstone park every hour or so old faithful the geyser shoots water under pressure out of the ground on a more or less regular schedule the idea of a geyser the idea of a natural upwelling is also implied in hegel's idea of geist and the combination of logical essence or essentiality logical i don't know marrow of an argument in this case the logical marrow of human existence of human being the plan of all of human life is what he's driving at with the idea of a geist geist is spirit geist is soul geist is mind but geist as hegel uses it is not does not specifically refer to the individual minds or psyches that you and i might have i mean that's part of it but it's a great deal more than that and in order to understand what more it could mean or what its significance is we have to drop back a little bit to my lecture on kant i finished up kant by talking about kant's political philosophy the reason i did that is because i wanted to discuss briefly the idea of subjectivity the idea of personality the idea of being an ego and kant thinks and this is very important for understanding hegel because he's in some respects the next generation of german idealism after kant kant thinks that personality that subjectivity is not just a quality of this person and this person and this person there are other subjects other rational free moral agents that are not people for example god the angels or in gate of the case of kant nations nations of free rational moral agents that's why the categorical imperative applies to them i'll trust you on that the categorical imperative does apply to all free rational agents and kant sees nations as being such rational agents in other words his idea of subjectivity of personality is not limited to the meat that individual human beings are hegel is going to take this idea of a collective subject this idea of a personality that adheres in things larger and more complex than individual human beings but he's going to go beyond kant's idea that individual nations are rational free moral agents that they have moral personality and moral responsibility and instead he's going to view the entire human species as being one enormous collective subject so in other words the whole species of human beings from the very beginning of human history and human existence form a life history which is like the life history of an individual human being it is analogous to that what this means is that the phases of human history are analogized and i think more than analogized actually identified with the phases of development in an individual human being so the human species comes into existence in a kind of infancy ignorance uh superstition and an inadequate understanding of its own qualities of its own capacities and of its own potentials in other words primitive human beings didn't understand the nature of the entire human project of all of human existence for the same reason that five and six-year-olds don't understand what it's like to be an adult because they lack the appropriate experience and they lack the appropriate development and knowledge that comes from experiencing the world hegel holds the view that all human beings taken together on a global universal scale and this emphasis on the global the universal is very much a part of german idealism you hear residences of kant in many parts of hegel hegel thinks that all human beings form one giant collective subject and that means that we can go back and look at the actual phases of human history as the kind of life story of this giant subject and he thinks that it is possible not only to look back on these phases of development but actually discern the process of maturation the process of development the process by which this giant subject this ultimate subject realizes the potentials that were in it from the very beginning in some way this is a kind of i mean it's it's an analogy but it has a certain plausibility to it there is something buried deep within children that allows them to eventually become scientists or mathematicians or whatever they have some sort of potential for logical analysis for the comprehensive uh articulation of their experiences and they have also have the ability to learn from their experiences what they are and what the world around them is and that according to hegel is what the career of all of human history amounts to so we could say when you stop and think about it that geist is the soul of all of humanity it's the soul of the human race it's the part of all of human beings which is not material which is intellectual which is rational which is somehow metaphysical okay so he is a metaphysical thinker very much in the german tradition but in addition to that he's going for much bigger game he is trying to do what may well be impossible he's certainly the last philosopher to attempt this project the project that hegel has is to present a comprehensive interpretation of human existence it's an attempt to say this is what human beings are this is what their whole career amounts to and by implication he hopes to kind of plot the trajectory of human history and of human life and find out also where human existence is going he honestly thinks and seriously believes that it is possible to discern the ultimate goal of human existence he believes that it is possible to rationally find out what the goal of humanity is what the point of human existence is and he's certainly the last of the great philosophers to attempt such an perhaps impossible task now we found when we studied kant that in some respects kantian moral theory is a way of taking the biblical moral theories the idea that we ought to do unto others as we would have them do unto us of taking the golden rule of taking essentially christian ethics and putting it in a kind of formulation which allows it to be intellectually respectable in the age of idealistic philosophical systems in other words kant takes christian morality and provides a justification for it which is independent of scripture but which is viewed as being essentially complementary to scripture there's no conflict between scripture properly understood through right reason and the results that we get when we apply reasoning to questions like the categorical imperative the questions of universal morality and universal ethical judgment well hegel is going to do something analogous hegel wishes to take not christian ethics but christian eschatology the idea that there will be an end of the world that the end of the world is part of god's universal plan for all human beings and essentially dip it into the vocabulary and into the patterns of thought characteristic of german idealism so where kant takes christian morals and gives it a logical foundation a logical connection to the trends of enlightenment thought what hegel does is take the idea of an end of the world of a millennial change in the human condition where there'll be a reconciliation between god and man those of you who are familiar with the new testament will know that the book of revelation the last book of the new testament details the end of the world god is going to cash in everybody's chips at some point and say enough is enough finally i'm going to end this pro this progress from the earliest condition of human beings in the garden of eden or moving up the ladder of evolution or wherever they stem from and he is actually going to finish this project what it means is a couple of things first of all there exists a god who has a providential plan for all of human beings what's the phrase not a sparrow falls but not god knows about it well there's something like that built in to the hegelian philosophy of history hegel believes that he can seriously tell us what the ultimate purpose of human history is he can tell us what the whole goal of all of human existence is and what all of human history drives towards now that's a big intellectual project i think most people would hold that he was unsuccessful in doing that i think that's a fairly reasonable assessment but in part it's just the grandeur and the the enormous aspiration of this attempt which at least immediately should should involve our attention now what hegel wants to do is go back and look at all the history he can have access to and that's not very much even though germany put together a very remarkable historical culture in the 19th century the amount of actual historical data that hegel has to work with is not very good not very accurate not very comprehensive and thus his history itself suffers from certain defects with regard to that but he does think that he sees the broad general outlines in the progress of human beings progress is central to hegel's conception of history and concept and his conception of history is central to his conception of philosophy what he adds to the rationalism and idealism of the german enlightenment is the idea of history he has freedom and rationality existing in space and time he brings down the world of metaphysics in other words and puts it here in the realm of physics it's not that there aren't two words two worlds a metaphysical in a physical realm it's just they seem to beautifully overlap there's a sort of pantheism in hegel which you also see in tolstoy those of you who know tolstoy's novels where there's a vast kind of oceanic feeling that you get and you come away with the feeling if you read war and peace that god is really running everything and that we're all just atoms in this vast flux this vast pattern put together according to some rules that we ourselves are incapable of completely discerning well hegel kind of holds that view except that he believes that he is completely able to discern these which is again the perhaps the the vanity of the philosopher but give him credit just for the project that he attempts now when we're dealing with hegel's philosophy of history what we're going to be dealing with is the geist the human soul the human spirit how did it get to be the way that it is and how is it that we can account for the fact that the geist used to be different that human self-consciousness that human society that human culture all of which are expressions of the geist incidentally that it develops and that it changes how is it that something perfect ultimately rational ultimately real where the capital r the german philosophers are famous for capitalizing their nouns to make them abstractions it doesn't actually happen in the german language all german nouns get capitalized but in order to get the sense of how they're using words in unusual and unfamiliar ways we usually capitalize hegelian rationality geist and things like that well the special use of the geist demands in a way that we inquire how the geist could have come to have the properties that it does and how it is that it's changed over time and are there laws by which we can describe and then implicitly predict the future development of human history and hegel thinks that we can according to hegel's understanding of human history and human spirit each time each epoch each historical moment has its own geist has its own level of maturity and each great historical epoch makes a contribution to the to the development of this overall human spirit uh it's something analogous to i don't know if you know ralph waldo emerson the idea of an oversoul right that connects us all well the oversoul has been developing over time emerson was a great fan of german idealism and the geist the spirit has been developing over time and it hasn't been developing in a haphazard fashion it's been developing according to its own necessary laws and these laws are the laws of rationality and freedom one thing you'll want to note when you study german philosophy particularly german idealism is that all the german metaphysicians kant as well as hegel connect the idea of freedom and rationality freedom and rationality are always closely bound up now the geist is the essence of human existence it's the part of human beings that isn't meat that isn't the corpse that we carry around with us it's our spirit our soul and each historical epoch has a different spirit or soul and that spirit is expressed in the characteristic cultural productions of that time now this is not so far-fetched most of us can see some sort of connection between the renaissance humanism of say machiavelli's political theory and the development of say renaissance humanism in the arts for example the development of perspective in visual art is something we don't see in the visual art of the middle ages well this emphasis on humanism is something that carries over into the various products of the renaissance and you can see a consistent sort of spirit of the times in the characteristic cultural products think of the enlightenment the typical philosophers of the enlightenment or the german rationalists or the french rationalists and the english empiricists both of these have a kind of scientific orientation to the world that brings them into line with the physical with the developments in physical science that are being made in roughly the same time and then if we look at the art that's characteristic of the enlightenment if you know the box brandenburg concertos it's like walking into a giant clockwork we're walking into the newtonian universe when we hear the brandenburgs so the idea of a spirit of the time however nebulous and amorphous has a certain plausibility to those who can kind of make these kind of broad generalizations and up to a point you see it or you don't but i think most persons can get a sense that common intellectual concerns common intellectual questions interact with each other and influence each other in the same concrete historical moments so we have these abstract ideas of moving our intellectual orientation to say from god to nature which is characteristic of the enlightenment well you can see those concerns not just in physical science but also in political science in moral theory and also in visual art in music in all the cultural products and the cultural products of our society are the expressions of its spirit we often in kind of everyday terms talk about things that are consistent with the spirit of the times and inconsistent that seem out of step with the times well what we're really saying there is that it doesn't seem consistent with the general trend of the culture and its orientation it's not so far-fetched hegel takes it a long way but this is basically what he's talking about now the idea of a spirit of the times means that there's one spirit that all of these kind of coalesce into and what that is is the universal mind of humanity the soul of humanity and it turns out that the soul of humanity that the spirit is becoming progressively more knowledgeable both about the world around it and about itself as spirit which is the kind of general collective universal human soul becomes more conscious of itself it becomes more conscious of its essential characteristics and the essential characteristics of spirit are that it's not nature in other words that it's free and that it has the potential for autonomous rationality again this harks back to khan's conception of the distinction between nature and mind or phenomena and pneumonia well hegel is going to connect these over have phenomena in some respects overlap but hold on to certain metaphysical tinges here in other words he wants to have it all he wants an entirely this worldly historically comprehensive treatment of human existence and he wants to have god freedom spirit rationality with a capital r uh continental sense of the term so he wants it all now spirit in developing its consciousness and becoming more conscious of itself learns essentially modern newtonian physics it learns how to push nature around which is what physics is you apply it to your physical knowledge of the world what you get is technology the ability to push nature in ways that satisfy you the other thing that spirit learns is about itself and what it learns is that it's free that it's rational and it's somehow separate from nature now it's a commonplace of enlightenment thought goes back at least as far as descartes that knowledge is power and what that means is that since our knowledge both of the world around us and of ourselves has increased throughout history has been a progressive addition of new elements of knowledge to the human spirit by implication we have also increased the amount of power that we have because knowledge is power and progressively increasing knowledge means progressively increasing power now we have to ask ourselves what happens when we calculate out the trajectory of this to use a sort of newtonian image when we figure out more or less graphically where this gradual increase of knowledge and power goes what it goes is to the absolute completion of all of knowledge and all of power where else would it go if you stop and think about it if we continue this on more or less forever because although individual human beings die the species seems to go on without much of a chance of dying well then add the idea of not just temporality but eternal temporality to this process what does that mean it means that human beings are progressing in self-consciousness which means that they are progressing in their knowledge of themselves and the things around them which means that they are gradually increasing their knowledge which means that they are gradually increasing their power and the final limit the final end the ultimate purpose of human existence is the finishing of this project of increasing our knowledge and our power now there's a being that's all knowledgeable and all powerful you may have heard of him it's god now when i said earlier that what hegel's philosophy is is christian chiliasm or christian millennialism or christian eschatology the end of the world the unification of god and man god's final ultimate judgment on human existence well what hegel has done is taken that idea and said that he has rationally discerned the ultimate pattern of all of human existence all of human culture all the products of the human mind and spirit gradually allow us to climb the ladder of self-consciousness and when we complete the product of self-consciousness we have completed purpose of spirit hegel says makes a beautiful line in the philosophy of history that the owl of minerva only flies at dusk now we'll add the owl of minerva to our philosophical bestiary we'll have plato's philosophical dogs we'll have a whole bunch of them there hegel's particular contribution to our philosophical zoo the owl of minerva is the idea that we really only understand things in hindsight that you're really only able to comprehend what's going on after you've done it and you can retrospect about it and think about it you look for example at um the events of your own life you go back and read your own diary or you look at your own photographs from your sweet 16 party and you say if only i knew then what i knew now or what i know now then i was at one particular point in my development and i was doing the best i could but now i've moved on beyond that and i can see what was coming now i understand much better now than i did then what was really going on well hegel thinks that that's true right across the board for all of human history and that means that we all participate in the geist and we all move the geist further we all manage to add to this general global universal progress of the human spirit when we connect with the spirit of the times and push it a little bit further you can hear also the echoes of the sort of ruthlessness that's characteristic of all rationalistic thought push it further could be thought of as the motto of the ruthless rationalistic thinker and hegel pushes it about as far as it's going he's told you all what your purpose is and he's told everybody what their purpose is to the end of time that's quite a project you don't see that very often it is in fact a kind of mythology but it's a profound sort of mythology and one that deserves our close consideration and respect now let's take it a little bit further let's consider the characteristic on-the-job difficulties of the philosopher of history and perhaps vico is the first of them but hegel is the one who really brings it together hegel not only thinks that he's telling you about the geist hegel thinks he is the geist what else could he think the geist has coalesced it has consolidated itself on his writing table he is not writing the geist's history he is writing the geist's autobiography because he's the first guy at the time at the very tail end of the enlightenment to say i finally figured out what the enlightenment means it means that human beings as a species collectively finally understand what they really are and what they really and capital are really here what they really are is geist in the world of space and time gradually realizing its own potential aristotle has an idea of entoleki what entoleki means is natural purpose that somehow inside every acorn is a natural purpose to become an oak tree you may not see it there but it's hidden there and if you give it the right conditions those potentials are realized what hegel thinks is true about human beings is that they have buried within them on the species level and entoleki that back at the time of the greeks or even before before were a kind of acorn that contains with it in the entirety of human self-consciousness in other words all roads lead to hegel's writing desk all of history leads up to the point where we finally understand what we are and he's the one who did it so he is the geist for a moment and he is essentially ending human history in other words history ends when we finally reconcile ourselves with the divine mind when we finally understand what we really are when we finally come to the culmination of the development of freedom and rationality and it finally happens when human beings as a species become conscious of their own entoleki and that is what hegel thinks he has done in other words he has capped off the entire history of human existence makes you want to stop and take a breath so it's somewhat i mean in other words i wasn't being entirely facetious when i said at the beginning of the lecture that it's like reading war and peace in 45 minutes and saying it's about russia hegel's philosophy is about everything it's about what it means it's about where it's going it's about what its intrinsic properties are it's about how you connect to it it's about nature it's about spirit it's about mind it's about rationality it's about freedom it accounts for all of human doings it accounts for the rest of human development as well hegel has been an enormously influential thinker those who objected to the metaphysical essentially kantian elements in hegel give it a new twist later on in the career of philosophy they adopt a materialistic naturalism which tries to discern the progressive laws of history based upon a one-world naturalistic ontological orientation this is called marxism right marxism in that respect is an extension of the hegelian project of discerning what the ultimate laws of historical development are the difference between marxism and hegelianism is this hegel thinks that there are no laws of history in the sense of causative laws which makes one thing happen in a determinate way after another those are the laws of nature the laws of history are not the laws of causal determination again here's a kantian difference we're splitting the world into phenomena and pneumonia the laws of history are the laws of freedom the laws of rationality human beings do not do the things they do because they they have to in a determinant causal physical necessary way they do it because that's their nature that's their potential there is something free and rational in human existence in human society that is begging to get out and over time as human beings come to know what they are as they come to know what their intrinsic purpose is they become more divine they become freer they become more rational and they're climbing the ladder of progress we finish this when we finally understand that this is what the human condition is that we are essentially not just spirits in a material world but we are part of a giant spirit which is the only thing in existence that is not nature you can see kind of tolstoyan elements here those of you who are familiar with war and peace especially the second epilogue of war and peace the idea essentially that was articulated by emerson we lie in the lap of an immense intelligence well we not only lie in the lap of an immense intelligence we are a part of that immense intelligence we reconcile god and man when we finally realize the potential that human beings have buried within them by nature and realizing this potential is coming to our own self-consciousness and we finally come to our own self-consciousness only when we understand the career of spirit in human history it's a remarkable intellectual achievement i think to be honest it is more poetic than it is logically satisfactory general totalizing discourses have gone out of fashion in a skeptical age and certainly one of the difficulties with it is that it is essentially christian theology it is essentially the idea that god ultimate the ultimate purpose of human existence is the reconciliation of god and man it is that thought given a new logical form so it has been very influential and the difficulty that people have repeatedly had with it is that it seems too closely associated with mythology the attempts to create a naturalistic approach to human progress and human history will wait the middle of the 19th century marx will attempt to do it and in some respects all of the evolutionary naturalism that we find in the philosophy of the 19th century is a part of this hegelian attempt to bring into historical into philosophical consideration history and the pro and the process of human development what hegel shows us is a big turning point in the history of western philosophy and the turning point comes from the fact that we have changed our orientation back in the time of aquinas in the middle ages our primary concern was with god all real intellectuals spent most of their time thinking about theology and trying to organize their thinking about god theology is foundational as an intellectual project for the thinkers of the middle ages after the middle ages kind of wayne i mean the summer theologica is here there's not a lot more we can do with that if thomas aquinas doesn't want to take it any further i don't see anybody that really wants to finish off the book so instead of continuing god as our central intellectual focus what's characteristic of the renaissance and particularly characteristic of the enlightenment is an increasing movement in our focus from god to man or in the case of the enlightenment from god to nature nature is the big target of the enlightenment nature in terms of our physical theory nature in terms of our moral theory nature in terms of our political theory that's why social contractarianism and the state of nature are big parts of enlightenment political thought hegel represents a new twist to that instead of having nature be his fundamental intellectual concern his foundational problem for hegel and for many of his devotees and also for the people that criticize him for his critics in the 19th century their primary concern will not so much be with nature as it will be with history all of the great intellectual or most of the great intellectual movements of the 19th century were concerned with articulating some sort of archetectonic plan to human history we've done a pretty good job with nature by the time we've wrapped up newtonian mechanics there are still things to do we can add uh maxwell's equations and things like that in the 19th century but for the most part the big concern of the 19th century is not tidying up physics they've done a pretty good job with that the big concern is history so uh utopian socialists guys like compt and fourier are people who are interested essentially in ending history they said look the previous centuries the previous way societies the previous governments and the way they've treated human beings has been a scandal it's been a disgrace we have now gotten to an enlightened state of consciousness where we can put together a new society we can abolish that earlier history and have true human relations and a truly human world marx's philosophy is shot through with that idea that the industrial revolution makes possible a new epoch in human history which is fundamentally different from all the other phases in human history in some respects although hegel is not a widely cited philosopher today and even though very few people would describe themselves as practicing hegelians he is the most important thinker of the 19th century because he bring he throws into play the big intellectual ball of the 19th century the problem of history even in some respects darwin with his naturalistic orientation will be concerned with not just connecting human beings to nature but with also explaining human history from a naturalistic point of view adding the idea of time of temporality to our logical categories that's what hegel does and that's what makes hegel so important in that respect he is the scientific thinker or the philosopher of the 19th century he's the last person to actually try and tell us what the meaning of history is to explain what the whole significance of human life what the purpose of human existence is and if he fails at that he's still significant because of his later intellectual influence we now are five or maybe six generations separated from hegel and still every one of those generations since hegel has been concerned with the end of the world essentially with the end of human history and here i don't mean end in the sense of the end of my lecture or the end of the movie i mean the end and sense of the purpose and once we achieve this purpose once we realize this purpose then we can turn the corner and live the life of true felicity we can totally change the world it seems to me for example that marxism and all of utopian socialism is an attempt to do this it seems to me that most of the reforms of the late 19th century things like social darwinism are also attempts to fundamentally change our conception of human history and to bring into being a new more rational and in that respect more free society to fundamentally change history or to change society because the earlier history is different from what we have now think of the apocalyptic elements in things like woodrow wilson's war to end wars it's the millennium and woodrow wilson was more than aware of the german philosophical tradition he himself is an intellectual idealist the war to end wars the first world war for that generation they thought of it as essentially a secular apocalypse and this connects back into the millennial elements the chileastic elements hegelian philosophy of history and it also connects back to the idea that us now have finally broken free of the earlier constraints we're the first new generation the problem is the first new generation has been around now for five maybe six generations ever since hegel as a matter of fact every generation since hegel has been ending history they did it in the 19th century they did it in the beginning of the 20th century think of something like daniel bell's end of ideology in the 1950s at the end of the first world war it's the end of history i would also say that modern intellectual trends and practices are in very with varying degrees of comprehension the heirs to hegel's end of history argument for example the idea of the slippage of the text the idea of the breakup of not just objectivity but of subjectivity the idea that we can no longer articulate our views and we can no longer argue or articulate thought in quite the way we had before because of the slippage of the text the uncertainty of translation because of the messiness and contingency of human life what i think that amounts to in thinkers of the 1980s and 90s and i bring this in because somebody in one of my lectures last weekend talked about a deconstructionism and talked about uh what was the other uh derrida i believe it was it seems to me that all of these arguments are essentially disguised end of history arguments that something fundamentally different and new and important is happening to us right now that makes us totally different from all the other generations who have been stuck and in chained to the earlier traditions of western philosophy the problem is is that this is nothing new we've been doing this ever since hegel and in that respect all of these end of history or these crypto end of history arguments are in fact homage to hegel homage to the idea that not only or that even if human history can no longer be viewed as a necessary progression towards an ideal state towards a final state of human existence there is something fundamentally different about us which allows us to recognize that fact well the idea that we fundamentally turned a corner with us sounds like it's real new and really exciting and it thrills undergraduates when you tell them stuff like that my point is is that it is probably at least 150 years old and when you stop and consider that it takes a lot of the sting and i think a lot of the force out of the uh the rumors that western philosophy and the western intellectual tradition has declined on account of the de-centering of of speech and things like that in fact we've been de-centering things we've been ending the world we've been turning the corner we've been starting something totally new for a century and a half now and that most of the people who think that they are breaking this new ground are actually traveling well-worn paths and changing the vocabulary with which they articulate that and not only that but most of them don't recognize that fact and if you point it out or if you told them that most of this is implicitly hegelian they would laugh at you and say that you don't understand and i suspect that this is a misapprehension not just characteristic of our own culture not just characteristic of our own time ever since hegel gave us the idea that history had a meaning and that all of human existence has some cohesion to it everyone has felt that they were in a privileged position of knowing that they were somehow at the end of this it has to do as i said with earlier with hegel earlier with the occupational hazards of being a philosopher of history every philosopher of history cannot help but believe that the history of philosophy leads up to them thinking about the history of philosophy what else would it lead up to it leads right up to here and now and what i'm doing here now is thinking about the history of philosophy and also the philosophy of history and it turns out to be me and so we must forgive hegel his perhaps megalomania the idea that he had finally broken through the cosmic egg that he had cut the gordian knot that he finished solving the ultimate mystery of human existence it has to do with something with a sort of myopia with a sort of intellectual distortion that is introduced into thinking about the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history of temporalizing the development of rationality when you temporalize and turn the history of philosophy into a series of phases the last phase has to be you and the last phase has been asked for about 150 years now i have no doubt that in the next century again here's charting out that hegelian trajectory there's going to be a whole new generation of philosophers that want to get tenure that are going to have to get rid of this earlier generation and really turn the corner and have a new totally changed end of history it could be that we'll never get beyond hegel in that respect that we all feel the need to create a novelty that is spurious but entertaining and that is our homage to hegel i would say so even if it is a little presumptuous to explain the true reconciliation of god and man even if it's just a tad implausible to write the geist's autobiography to actually be the geist all of our intellectual concerns and all of the intellectual concerns since the time of hegel have been one way or another dealing with his legacy either by accepting it and trying to reformulate it in such a way as it's consistent with the dominant intellectual trends of the time and what could be more hegelian than that or rejecting it and saying that we've totally changed the corner we have to throw out all this again stuff and what could be more hegelian than that either way they're stuck with hegel and for all the limitations for all the poetry for all the kind of metaphysical lapses in it it's the last great attempt to articulate the meaning and the significance of all of human existence he tells us that we are all one not just in the flesh because we're not all one in the flesh we come and go but we are all one in the spirit it's the final kind of apotheosis of christian theology which is dressed up in the clothing of enlightened political and social and historical theory and for that reason hegel is perhaps the last and perhaps the greatest of the synthesizers of the tradition of athens in jerusalem you may never guess it by reading in because it looks like more technical dry german philosophy what it really is is a poetic attempt to explain to everybody what it all means it's what people think philosophers do for a living well the last one that actually tried to do that for a living was hegel and for better or worse we're living with his legacy and probably will never get beyond it homage to hegel

Channel: Michael Sugrue

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Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Great Minds, Hegel, Philosophy of History

Id: _xbZzxet9Cs

Length: 43min 11sec (2591 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020