The German Genius

write as if there were an “inner” reality that, as it were, existed “behind” the world of ordinary experience and expressed the truth of things “without husk,” but this was a logical relationship revealed in pure thought rather than a separate existence. Explanation of these logical relations was for him the proper subject matter of philosophy. 6
    What he tried to show, what he thought was the most vital question, was that subjective consciousness and objective existence must always involve an “irreducible duality.” It was the task of philosophy to go beyond this outlook, to the point where “our familiar conceptual schemes dissolved.” Like Schelling, only more so, Hegel conceived spirit as an entity involving development toward an end “in which it might be said to achieve confirmation of its own being.” 7 In everyday terms, the history of the world was to be understood as a teleological process, whereby spirit first revealed itself in some form that expressed its eventual possibilities. This was a process that occurred at two distinct levels. In one, spirit manifested itself “unconsciously” in producing natural phenomena, not just individual objects but societies and civilizations, entities that represented concrete expressions of different stages of evolution toward a progressively fuller consciousness and self-understanding. At the second level, Hegel emphasized that development could be understood historically, the successive patterns in life and culture being the successive embodiments of spirit. Hegel’s fundamental idea was that, as distinct (social) forms and institutions evolved, together with advances in thought that provided fresh modes of interpreting experience, “spirit gradually moved toward an ever deeper comprehension of its own nature.” The end point was what he called “absolute knowledge,” a state of philosophical understanding “in which spirit finally came to recognise that the entire world, in all its varied manifestations, was the product and articulation of itself.” “Absolute knowledge” marked a form of understanding in which spirit, as a result of philosophical reflection and understanding, “returned to itself.” In this way, the external objective world, and the internal subjective world would be unified, and the original condition of self-estrangement, or self-alienation, was overcome. 8
    There are fairly obvious parallels here with the traditional Christian dogmas of the Fall, atonement, and redemption. Hegel himself conceded as much and even admitted a correspondence between the idea of God and his notion of absolute spirit. He was, if you like, struggling with a post-Christian/pre-Darwinian understanding. But in fairness, Hegel’s absolute spirit was not seen as a transcendent personality, over and above the universe or independent of it. 9 This was a very important sense in which Hegel’s philosophical system was not religious.
    The details of his system were set out in two principal works: in the early (and fairly abstract) Phenomenology of the Spirit ; and the more explicitly historical Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte ( Lectures on the Philosophy of History ), published posthumously. 10 The crucial aspect of man’s condition, according to Hegel, is a repeated oscillation between man’s “self-created social world” and his evolving attitudes toward that environment. There is a continual “dialectic” between the creative and critical periods of the process. As social and political circumstances evolve, spirit reveals itself in the deeper understanding of the essence of man, which Hegel identifies as the development of freedom. History manifests itself in successive civilizations which reveal an increasing self-consciousness and freedom as men acquire “a fuller grasp of their own needs and a profounder recognition of the relations in which they stand to one another.” 11 “Master-slave” societies give way to individualistic ones, which are in turn displaced by the notion of a social order where “mutual respect between persons supersedes antagonism and distrust.” True freedom would be achieved insofar as an individual’s inner potentialities are realized in a world he himself had created and in which he found himself “at home.” 12
    Hegel’s philosophy was comprehensive and intended to be (Nipperdey called it “the tyranny of abstraction”). It was, nonetheless, in social and historical theory that he