GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

From Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Philosophy: Essential Selections, by James Fieser

© 2008, updated 1/1/2026, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

 

CONTENTS

Introduction

Three Stages of Spirit: Subjective, Objective, Absolute

Master and Slave: Emergence of Self-Consciousness

History: The Development of Absolute Spirit

War as a Benefit in the Life of a State

Four Empires of World History

Art: Absolute Spirit's Truth Embodied in Beautiful Things

Religion: Reconciling the Sacred and Secular through Philosophy

Philosophy: Absolute Spirit Knowing Itself

Study Questions

 

INTRODUCTION

Born in Stuttgard, Germany, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was the son of a financial official. His mother died when he was 11, and 18 he entered seminary at the University of Tübingen with no intention of going into the ministry. Following graduation, he worked as a tutor for several years and, after a few short-lived university jobs, at age 46 he became Chair of Philosophy at the University of Berlin where he remained until his death. Hegel died at age 61 from cholera during an epidemic that swept Berlin. On his deathbed he said, "Only one man has understood me and even he did not understand me". Hegel's writings fall into three main groups. First are his main philosophical works, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), the three-volume Science of Logic (1812-1816), and The Philosophy of Right (1820). Second is his three-volume Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, in which he presents a methodical arrangement of his full philosophical system. Third are four series of lectures published after his death on Art, the Philosophy of History, the Philosophy of Religion, and the History of Philosophy (1832-1837). The selections below are taken from most of these.

          The easiest way to approach Hegel's system is to see it as a religious philosophy, but with his concept of God differing from the traditional notion in two important respects. First, his view is "pantheistic", insofar as God is identical with the totality of the cosmos and all its contents. He thus rejects the traditional understanding of God as a transcendent being that exists independently of the world that he created. For Hegel, then, anything that you point to in the cosmos, such as a tree, table or person, is some part of God. Second, he held that God developed over time from an unconscious cosmic entity to a self-conscious one with absolute knowledge. This development, Hegel argues, occurs within the progression of human history, through various time periods and cultural activities. That is, humanity's cultural and intellectual progress is God's progress. The trajectory of this progress, though, is jumpy, going from one extreme event or ideology to its opposite. It is a dialectal movement from (1) a thesis to (2) its opposing antithesis, and resolving in (3) a synthesis that resolves and builds upon the first two. This synthesis then becomes a new thesis that is opposed by a different antithesis, creating yet another synthesis. The dialectical development continues until it reaches perfection within the fully-developed spirit-mind of the cosmos. Hegel does not always lay out the three-part dialectical process explicitly, and never actually uses the term "synthesis". However, this three-part dialectical pattern appears repeatedly throughout his writings, and he signals this with terms like "antithesis", "contradiction", "conflict", "refutation" and "limitation". Some scholars prefer the terms of position-opposition-reconciliation to the more traditional designation of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. In any case, he illustrates the dialectical process here:

The bud [thesis] disappears when the blossom [antithesis]breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit [synthesis]comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant's existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. [Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface]

          Hegel uses several terms to refer to this ever-evolving God of the cosmos in its various stages, but his principal term is "Idea", and when God fully achieves perfection it is the "Absolute Idea". As such, Hegel refers to his theory as "Absolute Idealism", that is, nothing exists which is not a manifestation of Idea. The various divisions of his system are as follows, and together they cover all aspects of reality:

 

• Logic (i.e., metaphysics)

Being (Quality, Quantity, Measure)

Essence (Essence, Appearance, Actuality)

Notion (Subjective Notion, Objective Notion, Idea)

• Nature (i.e., physical science)

Mechanics (Space and Time, Matter and Motion, Absolute Mechanics)

Physics (General Individuality, Particular Individuality, Total Individuality)

Organics (Terrestrial Organism, Vegetable Organism, Animal Organism)

• Spirit (i.e., mind)

Subjective Spirit (Anthropology, Phenomenology, Psychology)

Objective Spirit (Law, Morality, Social Ethics)

Absolute Spirit (Art, Religion, Philosophy)

 

The selections below focus on the "spirit" component of the above outline. The German term for "spirit" is "Geist" and is also translated as mind. In its universal sense, spirit is the mind of God, or the "Absolute Idea", and this mind develops through successive stages of human progress.

          In the first selection, from Hegel's Encyclopedia (1817), he describes three stages of spirit-mind that begin with (1) the "subjective spirit" of individual people, which then move to (2) "objective spirit" that emerges within the group consciousness of human communities, particularly laws, morality and social ethics; this then culminates in (3) the Absolute Spirit, which emerges within the human social expressions of human art, religion and philosophy. This is only bare outline, and the subsequent selections below flesh out the most important themes of how spirit develops from individual human minds into Absolute Spirit.

          The second selection below is Hegel's most famous discussion, titled "Master and Slave" (also translated "Lordship and Bondage") from his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). It describes how, within individual people (subjective spirit), true self-consciousness arises when two minds come in conflict with each other. Think of it like a woman and a man battling it out for recognition by proving that she or he is self-sufficient. When they meet, they are each inclined to assert their own existence in a battle to the death. However, she realizes that she can't do that since her very existence as an individual consciousness depends upon her being recognized by the man, and vice versa. So, rather than annihilate each other, they do the next best thing: the winner in this conflict enslaves the loser, where the loser caves in because he values his life more than he values recognition from her. But this master-slave relationship is also unsatisfactory. For, she (as master) becomes dependent upon the material goods that the man provides her, so she essentially reverts to a lower grade of human existence. On the other hand, he (as slave) advances his humanity by transforming nature as he produces those material goods, essentially creating art and science. He is still unfulfilled, though, since he has never gained full recognition.

          In the next selection, from Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837), Hegel describes how human history constitutes the development of Absolute Spirit. As such history is the domain of spirit-mind (the "objective spirit" of society in the above outline). He thus explains the relation between history and spirit by answering three questions. First, what is the nature of Spirit? The answer is that Spirit actualizes potential knowledge, and history is the process by which this takes place. Second, how does Spirit actualize this knowledge? The answer is that it does so through a dialectic process:

• Thesis: Universal Being is opposed by

• Antithesis: private interests of individual people (i.e., subjective spirit), which results in

• Synthesis: laws of the state (i.e., objective spirit)

On Spirit's developmental path to maturity, it is motivated through the passions and natural impulses of individual people (subjective spirit). Such human passions, though, often result in suffering with no clear good coming from it. But this is only an initial step of Spirit's development, and, as further steps are taken, the aim of Spirit becomes more evident. The next step is the development of the laws of the state (objective spirit), but even here there are many conflicts through its political history, and it still may not be immediately clear what Spirit's aim is. In this process, the default consequence is human misery, and any periods of happiness that occur results from Spirit just taking a break in its relentless march forward. Throughout Spirit's dialectical development, there are unintended consequences to all our actions that serve some long term good, even though we cannot see it in our present stage.  The third question is, what is the shape that Spirit takes in its development? The answer is that it takes shape in the state. Through the laws and moral principles, the state creates a context for individuals to exercise their freedom in a productive way, rather than just impulsively following their passions with no overall aim. As history progresses, all its past stages are contained within the present ones, much like how a modern city is built on top of ruins of its earlier phases, or a modern language contains the residue of its earlier versions.

          The fourth selection continues this theme of historical progress by considering two benefits that war brings to the life of a state. First, it prevents factions within society from breaking up the whole. While the state is a force that builds community among isolated individuals, it also has the negative effect of spawning sub-communities and special interests that exist in isolation of each other. War stops this by shaking up the whole system and giving it a clear focus. Second, when society is in a state of peace, people become preoccupied with material things and society stagnates. War, however, has a purifying effect by quickly removing the vanity of material things.

          In the fifth selection, from The Philosophy of Right (1821), Hegel describes the progress that Spirit has made over the long course of history through four successive world Empires. Universal Spirit, he argues, develops over time through actions of individuals, collections of people, and governments. Four particularly important periods of historic development were the Oriental, Greek, Roman, and Germanic Empires. In the earlier Empires, individuals had no self-consciousness of personality, and in the last one the modern nation-state becomes self-conscious of its own nature.

          In the outline above, we've seen that Absolute Spirit is the highest state of Spirit that develops first from individual people (subjective spirit), then from laws and morality created by states (objective spirit). Absolute Spirit finally emerges from the highest forms of culture that human societies create, which specifically are its art, religion and history. The sixth selection, from Lectures on Fine Art (1835), describes how art is the embodiment of Absolute Spirit's Truth within the beauty of material things. Fine art, he argues, is not about the beauty of works of nature, such as ocean vistas, but about human works of design. While art expresses spiritual truths, it can never express the very highest truth of Absolute Spirit since art is perceived through the senses. Religion and philosophy both move beyond art in expressing truth. Fine art, he argues, has developed in three stages (symbolic, classical, romantic), and comic art like Shakespeare's plays represents the pinnacle of romantic art. At the same time, though, through its self-confident silliness, comedy "annihilates" the higher accomplishments of romantic art. Nevertheless, art is not a mere plaything and it at least attempts to liberate the human spirit from its finite condition.

          • The seventh selection, from Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1832), addresses the subject of religion, and Hegel's discussion here follows a straight-forward dialectic:

• Thesis: naive traditional religion

• Antithesis: secular enlightenment

• Synthesis: philosophy

The tension is between traditional religion and science, that is, the sacred and the secular. Traditional religion sees the transcendent God as the center of existence and the solution to all problems. This view, though, was rejected by the Enlightenment view of science and reason, which laid claim to all knowledge and left traditional religion with nothing but feeling. The two then became enemies. The resolution to this conflict, then, is morality, where Spirit displays itself in the laws and morality of the state. Through morality, philosophy thus becomes the new theology and philosophers are like priests.

          The final selection, from Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1833), is about how the history of philosophy is the mechanism by which Absolute Spirit achieves self-consciousness. Hegel argues that philosophy, as it stands now, is intimately connected with all its past phases. This raises a problem: how can eternal truth emerge in a subject like philosophy which changes over time? The solution is that spirit's self-knowledge emerges in stages over time in different people, and, thus, Spirit develops to perfection as the history of philosophy progresses. Hegel proceeds to summarize the main contributions of philosophy during its eight main stages, from the ancient Greeks, on through Kant and other modern German philosophers. The issue throughout is how various philosophers addressed two concepts that are in dualistic tension with each other: the tangible realm of physical things vs. the intangible realm of thought. It is only in its final stage with Schelling and Hegel himself that the two notions are identified with each other.

 

THREE STAGES OF SPIRIT: SUBJECTIVE, OBJECTIVE, ABSOLUTE (Encyclopedia, 1817, Spirit)

385. The development of Spirit (Spirit) is in three stages:

1. In the form of self-relation: within it, it has the ideal totality of the Idea, i.e., it has before it all that its notion contains: its being is to be self-contained and free. This is Spirit Subjective [i.e., the minds of individual people].

2. In the form of reality: realized, i.e. in a world produced and to be produced by it: in this world freedom presents itself under the shape of necessity. This is Spirit Objective [i.e., the group minds of particular communities].

3. In that unity of spirit as objectivity and, of spirit as ideality and concept, which essentially and actually is and forever produces itself, spirit in its absolute truth. This is Spirit Absolute [i.e., the infinite mind of the cosmos].

386. The two first parts of the doctrine of Spirit embrace the finite spirit. Spirit is the infinite Idea; thus finitude here means the disproportion between the concept and the reality—but with the qualification that it is a shadow cast by the spirit's own light—a show or illusion which the spirit implicitly imposes as a barrier to itself, in order, by its removal, actually to realize and become conscious of freedom as its very being, i.e. to be fully manifested. The several steps of this activity, on each of which, with their appearance of being, it is the function of the finite spirit to linger, and through which it has to pass, are steps in its liberation. In the full truth of that liberation is given the identification of the three stages: [1] finding a world presupposed before us, [2] generating a world as our own creation, and [3] gaining freedom from it and in it. To the infinite form of this truth the show purifies itself till it becomes a consciousness of it.

Subjective (Individual) Spirit: Develops through Anthropology, Phenomenology, Psychology

387. Spirit, on the ideal stage of its development, is spirit as cognitive: Cognition, however, being taken here not as a merely logical category of the Idea (§ 223), but in the sense appropriate to the concrete spirit. Subjective spirit is:

a. Immediate or implicit: a soul (the Spirit in Nature)—the object treated by Anthropology.

b. Mediate or explicit: still as identical reflection into itself and into other things: spirit in correlation or particularization: consciousness—the object treated by the Phenomenology of Spirit.

c. Spirit defining itself in itself, as an independent subject—the object treated by Psychology.

In the Soul is the awaking of Consciousness: Consciousness sets itself up as Reason, awaking at one bound to the sense of its rationality: and this Reason by its activity emancipates itself to objectivity and the consciousness of its intelligent unity.

          For an intelligible unity or principle of comprehension, each modification it presents is an advance of development: thus, in spirit, every character under which it appears, is a stage in a process of specification and development, a step forward towards its goal, in order to make itself into, and to realize in itself, what it implicitly is. Each step, again, is itself such a process, and its product is that what the spirit was implicitly at the beginning (and so for the observer) it is for itself—for the special form, viz. which the spirit has in that step. The ordinary method of psychology is to narrate what the spirit or soul is, what happens to it, what it does. The soul is presupposed as a ready-made agent, which displays such features as its acts and utterances, from which we can learn what it is, what sort of faculties and powers it possesses—all without being aware that the act and utterance of what the soul is really invests it with that character in our conception and makes it reach a higher stage of being than it explicitly had before.

          We must, however, distinguish and keep apart from the progress here studied what we call education and instruction. The sphere of education is the individual's only: and its aim is to bring the universal spirit to exist in them. But in the philosophic theory of spirit, spirit is studied as self-instruction and self-education in very essence; and its acts and utterances are stages in the process which brings it forward to itself, links it in unity with itself, and so makes it actual spirit. . . .

Objective (Community) Spirit: Develops through Laws, Morality, Social Ethics

483. The objective Spirit is the absolute Idea, but only existing in potential (in posse): and as it is thus on the territory of finitude, its actual rationality retains the aspect of external appearance. The free will finds itself immediately confronted by differences which arise from the circumstance that freedom is its inward function and aim, and is in relation to an external and already subsisting objectivity, which splits up into different heads: that is, anthropological data (i.e., private and personal needs), external things of nature which exist for consciousness, and the ties of relation between individual wills which are conscious of their own diversity and particularity. These aspects constitute the external material for the embodiment of the will.

The Context for Freedom is Created by Imposing Limitations

          484. But the purposive action of this will is to realize its concept, Liberty, in these externally-objective aspects, making the latter a world molded by the former, which in it is thus at home with itself, locked together with it: the concept accordingly perfected to the Idea. Liberty, shaped into the actuality of a world, receives the form of Necessity, the deeper substantial nexus [i.e., causal web] of which is the system or organization of the principles of liberty, while its phenomenal nexus is power or authority, and the sentiment of obedience awakened in consciousness.

          485. This unity of the rational will with the single will (this being the unique and immediate medium in which the former is actualized) constitutes the simple actuality of liberty. As it (and its content) belongs to thought, and is the virtual universal, the content has its right and true character only in the form of universality. When invested with this character for the intelligent consciousness, or instituted as an authoritative power, it is a Law. When, on the other hand, the content is freed from the mixedness and fortuitousness, attaching to it in the practical feeling and in impulse, and is set and grafted in the individual will, not in the form of impulse, but in its universality, so as to become its habit, temper and character, it exists as manner and custom, or Usage.

          486. This "reality," in general, where free will has existence, is the Law (Right), the term being taken in a comprehensive sense not merely as the limited juristic law, but as the actual body of all the conditions of freedom. These conditions, in relation to the subjective will, where they, being universal, ought to have and can only have their existence, are its Duties; whereas as its temper and habit they are Manners. What is a right is also a duty, and what is a duty, is also a right. For a mode of existence is a right, only as a consequence of the free substantial will: and the same content of fact, when referred to the will distinguished as subjective and individual, is a duty. It is the same content which the subjective consciousness recognizes as a duty, and brings into existence in these several wills. The finitude of the objective will thus creates the appearance of a distinction between rights and duties. . . .

          487. The free will is

a. itself at first immediate, and hence as a single being—the person: the existence which the person gives to its liberty is property. The Right as right (law) is formal, abstract right.

b. When the will is reflected into self, so as to have its existence inside it, and to be thus at the same time characterized as a particular, it is the right of the subjective will, morality of the individual conscience.

c. When the free will is the substantial will, made actual in the subject and conformable to its concept and rendered a totality of necessity,—it is the ethics of actual life in family, civil society, and state.

          488. Spirit, in the immediacy of its self-secured liberty, is an individual, but one that knows its individuality as an absolutely free will. It is a person, in whom the inward sense of this freedom, as in itself still abstract and empty, has its particularity and fulfilment not yet on its own part, but on an external thing. This thing, as something devoid of will, has no rights against the subjectivity of intelligence and volition, and is by that subjectivity made adjectival to it, the external sphere of its liberty: possession. . . .

Absolute (Infinite) Spirit: Develops through Art, Religion and Philosophy

553. The notion of spirit has its reality in the spirit. If this reality in identity with that notion is to exist as the consciousness of the absolute Idea, then the necessary aspect is that the implicitly free intelligence be in its actuality liberated to its notion, if that actuality is to be a vehicle worthy of it. The subjective and the objective spirit are to be looked on as the road on which this aspect of reality or existence rises to maturity.

          554. The absolute spirit, while it is self-centered identity, is always also identity returning and ever returned into itself. If it is the one and universal substance it is so as a spirit, discerning itself into a self and a consciousness, for which it is as substance. Religion, as this supreme sphere may be in general designated, if it has on one hand to be studied as issuing from the subject and having its home in the subject, must no less be regarded as objectively issuing from the absolute spirit which as spirit is in its community. . . .

          556. As this consciousness of the Absolute first takes shape, its immediacy produces the factor of finitude in Art. On one hand that is, it breaks up into a work of external common existence, into the subject which produces that work, and the subject which contemplates and worships it. But, on the other hand, it is the concrete contemplation and mental picture of implicitly absolute spirit as the Ideal. In this ideal, or the concrete shape born of the subjective spirit, its natural immediacy, which is only a sign of the Idea, is so transfigured by the informing spirit in order to express the Idea, that the figure shows it and it alone: the shape or form of Beauty. . . .

          564. It lies essentially in the notion of religion (the religion i.e., whose content is absolute spirit) that it be revealed, and, what is more, revealed by God. Knowledge (the principle by which the substance is spirit) is a self-determining principle, as infinite self-realizing form; it therefore is manifestation out and out. The spirit is only spirit in so far as it is for the spirit, and in the absolute religion it is the absolute spirit which manifests no longer abstract elements of its being but itself. . . .

          572. This [philosophical] science is the unity of Art and Religion. Whereas the vision-method of Art, external in point of form, is but subjective production and shivers the substantial content into many separate shapes, and whereas Religion, with its separation into parts, opens it out in mental picture, and mediates what is thus opened out. Philosophy not merely keeps them together to make a total, but even unifies them into the simple spiritual vision, and then in that raises them to self-conscious thought. Such consciousness is thus the intelligible unity (cognized by thought) of art and religion, in which the diverse elements in the content are cognized as necessary, and this necessary as free.

MASTER AND SLAVE: EMERGENCE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS (Phenomenology of Spirit,1807, B.4.A)

Self-Consciousness Emerges in Relation to Another Self-Consciousness

178. Self-Consciousness exists in itself and for itself [i.e., known to itself], in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or "recognized". The conception of this its unity in its duplication, of infinitude realizing itself in self-consciousness, has many sides to it and encloses within it elements of varied significance. Thus its moments must on the one hand be strictly kept apart in detailed distinctiveness, and, on the other, in this distinction must, at the same time, also be taken as not distinguished, or must always be accepted and understood in their opposite sense. This double meaning of what is distinguished lies in the nature of self-consciousness: of its being infinite, or directly the opposite of the determinateness in which it is fixed. The detailed exposition of the notion of this spiritual unity in its duplication will bring before us the process of Recognition.

          179. Self-consciousness has before it another self-consciousness; it has come outside itself. This has a double significance. First it has lost its own self, since it finds itself as an other being; secondly, it has thereby sublated [Aufheben, i.e., negated and assimilated] that other, for it does not regard the other as essentially real, but sees its own self in the other.

          180. It must cancel this its other. To do so is the sublation of that first double meaning, and is therefore a second double meaning. First, it must set itself to sublate the other independent being, in order thereby to become certain of itself as true being, secondly, it thereupon proceeds to sublate its own self, for this other is itself.

          181. This sublation in a double sense of its otherness in a double sense is at the same time a return in a double sense into its self. For, firstly, through sublation, it gets back itself, because it becomes one with itself again through the cancelling of its otherness. But secondly, it likewise gives otherness back again to the other self-consciousness, for it was aware of being in the other, it cancels this its own being in the other and thus lets the other again go free. . . .

          184. In this movement we see the process repeated which came before us as the play of forces; in the present case, however, it is found in consciousness. What in the former had effect only for us [contemplating experience], holds here for the terms themselves. The middle term [i.e., mutual self-recognition] is self-consciousness which breaks itself up into the extremes; and each extreme is this interchange of its own determinateness, and complete transition into the opposite. While qua consciousness, it no doubt comes outside itself, still, in being outside itself, it is at the same time restrained within itself, it exists for itself [i.e., in actuality], and its self-externalization is for consciousness. Consciousness finds that it immediately is and is not another consciousness, as also that this other is for itself only when it cancels itself as existing for itself, and has self-existence only in the self-existence of the other. Each is the mediating term to the other, through which each mediates and unites itself with itself; and each is to itself and to the other an immediate self-existing reality, which, at the same time, exists thus for itself only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another. . . .

Life and Death Struggle for Dominance over the Other which Fails

187. The presentation of itself, however, as pure abstraction of self-consciousness consists in showing itself as a pure negation of its objective form, or in showing that it is fettered to no determinate existence, that it is not bound at all by the particularity everywhere characteristic of existence as such, and is not tied up with life. The process of bringing all this out involves a twofold action—action on the part of the other and action on the part of itself. In so far as it is the other's action, each aims at the destruction and death of the other. But in this there is implicated also the second kind of action, self-activity; for the former implies that it risks its own life. The relation of both self-consciousnesses is in this way so constituted that they prove themselves and each other through a life-and-death struggle. They must enter into this struggle, for they must bring their certainty of themselves, the certainty of being for themselves, to the level of objective truth, and make this a fact both in the case of the other and in their own case as well. It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence, is not the merely immediate form in which it at first makes its appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life. Rather it is thereby guaranteed that there is nothing present but what might be taken as a vanishing moment—that self-consciousness is merely pure self-existence, being-for-self. The individual, who has not staked his life, may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness. In the same way each must aim at the death of the other, as it risks its own life thereby; for that other is to it of no more worth than itself the other's reality is presented to the former as an external other, as outside itself; it must cancel that externality. The other is a purely existent consciousness and entangled in manifold ways; it must view its otherness as pure existence for itself or as absolute negation.

          188. This trial by death, however, cancels both the truth which was to result from it, and therewith the certainty of self altogether. For just as life is the natural "position" consciousness, independence without absolute negativity, so death is the natural "negation" of consciousness, negation without independence, which thus remains without the requisite significance of actual recognition. Through death, doubtless, there has arisen the certainty that both did stake their life, and held it lightly both in their own case and in the case of the other; but that is not for those who underwent this struggle. They cancel their consciousness which had its place in this alien element of natural existence; in other words, they cancel themselves and are sublated as terms or extremes seeking to have existence on their own account. But along with this there vanishes from the play of change the essential moment, viz. that of breaking up into extremes with opposite characteristics; and the middle term [i.e., mutual self-recognition] collapses into a lifeless unity which is broken up into lifeless extremes, merely existent and not opposed. The two do not mutually give and receive one another back from each other through consciousness; they let one another go quite indifferently, like things. Their act is abstract negation, not the negation characteristic of consciousness, which cancels in such a way that it preserves and maintains what is sublated, and thereby survives its being sublated.

The Two Consciousnesses as Master and Slave

189. In this experience self-consciousness becomes aware that life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness. In immediate self-consciousness the simple ego is absolute object, which, however, is for us or in itself absolute mediation, and has as its essential moment substantial and solid independence. The dissolution of that simple unity is the result of the first experience; through this there is posited a pure self-consciousness, and a consciousness which is not purely for itself, but for another, i.e. as an existent consciousness, consciousness in the form and shape of thinghood. Both moments are essential, since, in the first instance, they are unlike and opposed, and their reflection into unity has not yet come to light, they stand as two opposed forms or modes of consciousness. The one is independent, and its essential nature is to be for itself; the other is dependent, and its essence is life or existence for another. The former is the Master, or Lord, the latter the Slave, or Bondsman.

          190. The master is the consciousness that exists for itself; but no longer merely the general notion of existence for self. Rather, it is a consciousness existing on its own account which is mediated with itself through an other consciousness, i.e., through an other whose very nature implies that it is bound up with an independent being or with thinghood in general. The master brings himself into relation to both these moments, to a thing as such, the object of desire, and to the consciousness whose essential character is thinghood. Since the master, is (a) qua notion of self-consciousness, an immediate relation of self-existence, but (b) is now moreover at the same time mediation, or a being-for-self which is for itself only through an other—he [the master] stands in relation (a) immediately to both (b) mediately to each through the other. The master relates himself to the slave mediately through independent existence, for that is precisely what keeps the slave in servitude; it is his chain, from which he could not in the struggle get away, and for that reason he proved himself to be dependent, to have his independence in the shape of thinghood. The master, however, is the power controlling this state of existence, for he has shown in the struggle that he holds it to be merely something negative. Since he is the power dominating existence, while this existence again is the power controlling the other [the slave], the master holds, par consequence, this other in subordination. In the same way the master relates himself to the thing mediately through the slave. The slave being a self-consciousness in the broad sense, also takes up a negative attitude to things and cancels them; but the thing is, at the same time, independent for him and, in consequence, he cannot, with all his negating, get so far as to annihilate it outright and be done with it; that is to say, he merely works on it. To the master, on the other hand, by means of this mediating process, belongs the immediate relation, in the sense of the pure negation of it, in other words he gets the enjoyment. What mere desire did not attain, he now succeeds in attaining, viz. to have done with the thing, and find satisfaction in enjoyment. Desire alone did not get the length of this, because of the independence of the thing. The master, however, who has interposed the slave between it and himself, thereby relates himself merely to the dependence of the thing, and enjoys it without qualification and without reserve. The aspect of its independence he leaves to the slave, who labors upon it.

          191. In these two moments, the master gets his recognition through an other consciousness, for in them the latter affirms itself as unessential, both by working upon the thing, and, on the other hand, by the fact of being dependent on a determinate existence; in neither case can this other get the mastery over existence, and succeed in absolutely negating it. We have thus here this moment of recognition, that is, that the other consciousness cancels itself as self-existent, and, ipso facto, itself does what the first does to it. In the same way we have the other moment, that this action on the part of the second is the action proper of the first; for what is done by the slave is properly an action on the part of the master. The latter exists only for himself, that is his essential nature; he is the negative power without qualification, a power to which the thing is nothing. He is thus the absolutely essential act in this situation, while the slave is not so, he is an unessential activity. But for recognition proper there is needed the moment that what the master does to the other he should also do to himself, and what the slave does to himself, he should do to the other also. On that account a form of recognition has arisen that is one sided and unequal.

Master not really Independent, Slave not really Dependent

192. In all this, the unessential consciousness is, for the master, the object which embodies the truth of his certainty of himself. But it is evident that this object does not correspond to its notion; for, just where the master has effectively achieved mastership, he really finds that something has come about quite different from an independent consciousness. It is not an independent, but rather a dependent consciousness that he has achieved. He is thus not assured of self-existence as his truth; he finds that his truth is rather the unessential consciousness, and the fortuitous unessential action of that consciousness.

          193. The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the consciousness of the slave. This doubtless appears in the first instance outside itself, and not as the truth of self-consciousness. But just as mastership showed its essential nature to be the reverse of what it wants to be, so, too, servitude will, when completed, pass into the opposite of what it immediately is: being a consciousness repressed within itself, it will enter into itself, and change around into real and true independence.

          194. We have seen what servitude is only in relation to mastership. But it is a self-consciousness, and we have now to consider what it is, in this regard, in and for itself [i.e., known to itself]. In the first instance, the master is taken to be the essential reality for the state of servitude; hence, for it, the truth is the independent consciousness existing for itself, although this truth is not taken yet as inherent in servitude itself. Still, it does in fact contain within itself this truth of pure negativity and self-existence, because it has experienced this reality within it. For this consciousness was not in peril and fear for this element or that, nor for this or that moment of time, it was afraid for its entire being; it felt the fear of death, the sovereign master. It has been in that experience melted to its inmost soul, has trembled throughout its every fiber, and all that was fixed and steadfast has quaked within it. This complete perturbation of its entire substance, this absolute dissolution of all its stability into fluent continuity, is, however, the simple, ultimate nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure self-referent existence, which consequently is involved in this type of consciousness. This moment of pure self-existence is moreover a fact for it; for in the master it finds this as its object. Further, this slave's consciousness is not only this total dissolution in a general way; in serving and toiling the slave actually carries this out. By serving he cancels in every particular aspect his dependence on and attachment to natural existence, and by his work removes this existence away. . . .

          196. But again, shaping or forming the object has not only the positive significance that the slave becomes thereby aware of himself as factually and objectively self-existent; this type of consciousness has also a negative significance, in contrast with its moment, the element of fear. For in shaping the thing it only becomes aware of its own proper negativity, existence on its own account, as an object, through the fact that it cancels the actual form confronting it. But this objective negative element is precisely alien, external reality, before which it trembled. Now, however, it destroys this extraneous alien negative, affirms and sets itself up as a negative in the element of permanence, and thereby becomes for itself a self-existent being. In the master, the slave feels self-existence to be something external, an objective fact; in fear self-existence is present within himself; in fashioning the thing, self-existence comes to be felt explicitly as his own proper being, and he attains the consciousness that he himself exists in its own right and on its own account.

HISTORY: DEVELOPMENT OF THE ABSOLUTE SPIRIT (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 1837, Introduction)

Philosophy of History is about the Rational Process of the History of the World

11. The most general definition that can be given is that the Philosophy of History means only the thoughtful consideration of it. Thought is, indeed, essential to humanity. It is this that distinguishes us from the brutes. In sensation, cognition, and intellection; in our instincts and volitions, as far as they are truly human, Thought is an invariable element. To insist upon Thought in this connection with history may, however, appear unsatisfactory. In this [philosophical] science it would seem as if Thought must be subordinate to what is given, to the realities of fact; that this is its basis and guide: while Philosophy dwells in the region of self-produced ideas, without reference to actuality. Approaching history thus prepossessed, Speculation might be expected to treat it as a mere passive material; and, so far from leaving it in its native truth, to force it into conformity with a tyrannical idea, and to construe it, as the phrase is, "a priori." But as it is the business of history simply to adopt into its records what is and has been – actual occurrences and transactions; and since it remains true to its character in proportion as it strictly adheres to its data, we seem to have in Philosophy, a process diametrically opposed to that of the historiographer. This contradiction, and the charge consequently brought against speculation, will be explained and confuted. We do not, however, propose to correct the innumerable special misrepresentations, trite or novel, that are current respecting the aims, the interests, and the modes of treating history, and its relation to Philosophy.

          12. The only Thought which Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process. This conviction and intuition is a hypothesis in the domain of history as such. In that of Philosophy it is no hypothesis. It is there proved by speculative cognition, that Reason (and this term may here suffice us, without investigating the relation sustained by the Universe to the Divine Being) is Substance, as well as Infinite Power; its own Infinite Material underlying all the natural and spiritual life which it originates, as also the Infinite Form – that which sets this Material in motion. On the one hand, Reason is the substance of the Universe; viz., that by which and in which all reality has its being and subsistence. On the other hand, it is the Infinite Energy of the Universe; since Reason is not so powerless as to be incapable of producing anything but a mere ideal, a mere intention – having its place outside reality, nobody knows where; something separate and abstract, in the heads of certain human beings. It is the infinite complex of things, their entire Essence and Truth. It is its own material which it commits to its own Active Energy to work up; not needing, as finite action does, the conditions of an external material of given means from which it may obtain its support, and the objects of its activity. It supplies its own nourishment, and is the object of its own operations. While it is exclusively its own basis of existence, and absolute final aim, it is also the energizing power realizing this aim; developing it not only in the phenomena of the Natural, but also of the Spiritual Universe – the History of the World. That this "Idea" or "Reason" is the True, the Eternal, the absolutely powerful essence; that it reveals itself in the World, and that in that World nothing else is revealed but this and its honor and glory – is the thesis which, as we have said, has been proved in Philosophy, and is here regarded as demonstrated. . . .

          19. It must be observed at the outset, that the phenomenon we investigate – Universal History – belongs to the realm of Spirit. The term "World," includes both physical and psychical Nature. Physical Nature also plays its part in the World's History, and attention will have to be paid to the fundamental natural relations thus involved. But Spirit, and the course of its development, is our substantial object. Our task does not require us to contemplate Nature as a Rational System in itself – though in its own proper domain it proves itself such – but simply in its relation to Spirit. On the stage on which we are observing it – Universal History – Spirit displays itself in its most concrete reality. Notwithstanding this (or rather for the very purpose of comprehending the general principles which this, its form of concrete reality, embodies) we must premise some abstract characteristics of the nature of Spirit. Such an explanation, however, cannot be given here under any other form than that of bare assertion. The present is not the occasion for unfolding the idea of Spirit speculatively; for whatever has a place in an Introduction, must, as already observed, be taken as simply historical; something assumed as having been explained and proved elsewhere; or whose demonstration awaits the sequel of the [philosophical] Science of History itself. We have therefore to mention here: (1) The abstract characteristics of the nature of Spirit. (2) What means Spirit uses in order to realize its Idea. (3) Lastly, we must consider the shape which the perfect embodiment of Spirit assumes – the State.

1. The Nature of Spirit is Freedom, History is the Process of Spirit Actualizing its Potential Knowledge

21. The nature of Spirit may be understood by a glance at its direct opposite – Matter. As the essence of Matter is Gravity, so, on the other hand, we may affirm that the substance, the essence of Spirit is Freedom. All will readily assent to the doctrine that Spirit, among other properties, is also endowed with Freedom; but philosophy teaches that all the qualities of Spirit exist only through Freedom; that all are but means for attaining Freedom; that all seek and produce this and this alone. It is a result of speculative Philosophy that Freedom is the sole truth of Spirit. Matter possesses gravity in virtue of its tendency toward a central point. It is essentially composite; consisting of parts that exclude each other. It seeks its Unity; and therefore exhibits itself as self-destructive, as verging toward its opposite [an indivisible point]. If it could attain this, it would be Matter no longer, it would have perished. It strives after the realization of its Idea; for in Unity it exists ideally. Spirit, on the contrary, may be defined as that which has its center in itself. It has not a unity outside itself, but has already found it; it exists in and with itself. Matter has its essence out of itself; Spirit is self-contained existence (Bei-sich-selbst-seyn). Now this is Freedom, exactly. For if I am dependent, my being is referred to something else which I am not; I cannot exist independently of something external. I am free, on the contrary, when my existence depends upon myself. This self-contained existence of Spirit is none other than self-consciousness – consciousness of one's own being. Two things must be distinguished in consciousness; first, the fact that I know; secondly, what I know. In self consciousness these are merged in one; for Spirit knows itself. It involves an appreciation of its own nature, as also an energy enabling it to realize itself; to make itself actually that which it is potentially. According to this abstract definition, it may be said of Universal History, that it is the exhibition of Spirit in the process of working out the knowledge of that which it is potentially. As the germ bears in itself the whole nature of the tree, and the taste and form of its fruits, so do the first traces of Spirit virtually contain the whole of that History. The Orientals have not attained the knowledge that Spirit – Man as such – is free; and because they do not know this, they are not free. They only know that one is free. But on this very account, the freedom of that one is only caprice; ferocity – brutal recklessness of passion, or a mildness and tameness of the desires, which is itself only an accident of Nature – mere caprice like the former. – That one is therefore only a Despot; not a free man. 

2. Universal Being (thesis) Opposed by Private Interest (anthesis) creates Law (synthesis)

Spirit Begins to Develop into its Idea through Private Interests, not Morality

24. The question of the means by which Freedom [i.e., Spirit] develops itself to a World [i.e., its Idea], conducts us to the phenomenon of History itself. Although Freedom is, primarily, an undeveloped idea, the means it uses are external and phenomenal; presenting themselves in History to our sensuous vision. The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole springs of action – the efficient agents in this scene of activity. Among these may, perhaps, be found aims of a liberal or universal kind – benevolence it may be, or noble patriotism; but such virtues and general views are but insignificant as compared with the World and its doings. We may perhaps see the Ideal of Reason actualized in those who adopt such aims, and within the sphere of their influence; but they bear only a trifling proportion to the mass of the human race; and the extent of that influence is limited accordingly. Passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are on the other hand, most effective springs of action. Their power lies in the fact that they respect none of the limitations which justice and morality would impose on them; and that these natural impulses have a more direct influence over man than the artificial and tedious discipline that tends to order and self-restraint, law and morality.

Private Passions Often Result in Misery

When we look at this display of passions, and the consequences of their violence; the Unreason which is associated not only with them, but even (rather we might say especially) with good designs and righteous aims; when we see the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man ever created; we can scarce avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of corruption: and, since this decay is not the work of mere Nature, but of the Human Will – a moral embitterment – a revolt of the Good Spirit (if it have a place within us) may well be the result of our reflections. Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simply truthful combination of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest of nations and polities, and the finest exemplars of private virtue – forms a picture of most fearful aspect, and excites emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness, counterbalanced by no consolatory result. We endure in beholding it a mental torture, allowing no defense or escape but the consideration that what has happened could not be otherwise; that it is a fatality which no intervention could alter. At last we draw back from the intolerable disgust with which these sorrowful reflections threaten us, into the more agreeable environment of our individual life – the Present formed by our private aims and interests. In short, we retreat into the selfishness that stands on the quiet shore, and from this enjoys in safety the distant spectacle of "wrecks confusedly hurled." But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized – the question involuntarily arises – to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.

From this point the investigation usually proceeds to that which we have made the general commencement of our inquiry. Starting from this we pointed out those phenomena which made up a picture so suggestive of gloomy emotions and thoughtful reflections – as the very field which we, for our part, regard as exhibiting only the means for realizing what we assert to be the essential destiny – the absolute aim, or – which comes to the same thing – the true result of the World's History. We have all along purposely eschewed "moral reflections" as a method of rising from the scene of historical specialties to the general principles which they embody. Besides, it is not the interest of such sentimentalities, really to rise above those depressing emotions; and to solve the enigmas of Providence which the considerations that occasioned them, present. It is essential to their character to find a gloomy satisfaction in the empty and fruitless sublimities of that negative result. We return them to the point of view which we have adopted; observing that the successive steps (momente) of the analysis to which it will lead us, will also evolve the conditions requisite for answering the inquiries suggested by the panorama of sin and suffering that history unfolds.

The Aim of Spirit is Abstract and Hidden, Will is needed to Actualize that Aim

25. The first remark we have to make, and which (though already presented more than once, and cannot be too often repeated when the occasion seems to call for it) is that what we call principle, aim, destiny, or the nature and idea of Spirit, is something merely general and abstract. Principle – Plan of Existence – Law – is a hidden, undeveloped essence, which as such – however true in itself – is not completely real. Aims, principles, etc., have a place in our thoughts, in our subjective design only; but not yet in the sphere of reality. That which exists for itself only, is a possibility, a potentiality; but has not yet emerged into Existence. A second element must be introduced in order to produce actuality – viz., actuation, realization; and whose motive power is the Will – the activity of man in the widest sense. It is only by this activity that that Idea as well as abstract characteristics generally, are realized, actualized; for of themselves they are powerless. The motive power that puts them in operation, and gives them determinate existence, is the need, instinct, inclination, and passion of man. . . .

Private Interests lead to the State only after Long Struggles and many Social Institutions

27. From this remark on the second essential element in the historical embodiment of an aim, we infer – glancing at the institution of the State in passing – that a State is then well constituted and internally powerful, when the private interest of its citizens is one with the common interest of the State; when the one finds its gratification and realization in the other – a proposition in itself very important. But in a State many institutions must be adopted, much political machinery invented, accompanied by appropriate political arrangements – necessitating long struggles of the understanding before what is really appropriate can be discovered – involving, moreover, contentions with private interest and passions, and a tedious discipline of these latter, in order to bring about the desired harmony. The epoch when a State attains this harmonious condition, marks the period of its bloom, its virtue, its vigor, and its prosperity. But the history of mankind does not begin with a conscious aim of any kind, as it is the case with the particular circles into which men form themselves of set purpose. The mere social instinct implies a conscious purpose of security for life and property; and when society has been constituted, this purpose becomes more comprehensive.

History Begins with Private Interest as Implicit Instruments to Word-Spirit becoming Conscious

The History of the World begins with its general aim – the realization of the Idea of Spirit – only in an implicit form (an sich) that is, as Nature; a hidden, most profoundly hidden, unconscious instinct; and the whole process of History (as already observed), is directed to rendering this unconscious impulse a conscious one. Thus appearing in the form of merely natural existence, natural will – that which has been called the subjective side (physical craving, instinct, passion, private interest, as also opinion and subjective conception) spontaneously present themselves at the very commencement. This vast congeries of volitions, interests and activities, constitute the instruments and means of the World- Spirit for attaining its object; bringing it to consciousness, and realizing it. This aim is none other than finding itself – coming to itself – and contemplating itself in concrete actuality.

          But that those manifestations of vitality on the part of individuals and peoples, in which they seek and satisfy their own purposes, are, at the same time, the means and instruments of a higher and broader purpose of which they know nothing – which they realize unconsciously – might be made a matter of question; rather has been questioned, and in every variety of form negatived, decried and contemned as mere dreaming and "Philosophy." But on this point I announced my view at the very outset, and asserted our hypothesis – which, however, will appear in the sequel, in the form of a legitimate inference – and our belief that Reason governs the world, and has consequently governed its history. In relation to this independently universal and substantial existence – all else is subordinate, subservient to it, and the means for its development. – The Union of Universal Abstract Existence generally with the Individual – the Subjective – that this alone is Truth, belongs to the department of speculation, and is treated in this general form in Logic. – But in the process of the World's History itself – as still incomplete – the abstract final aim of history is not yet made the distinct object of desire and interest. While these limited sentiments [i.e., private interests] are still unconscious of the purpose they are fulfilling, the universal principle is implicit in them, and is realizing itself through them. The question also assumes the form of the union of Freedom and Necessity; the latent abstract process of Spirit being regarded as Necessity, while that which exhibits itself in the conscious will of men, as their interest, belongs to the domain of Freedom. As the metaphysical connection (i.e., the connection in the Idea) of these forms of thought, belongs to Logic, it would be out of place to analyze it here. The chief and cardinal points only shall be mentioned.

Polar Opposition between the Individual's Particular Interest and Universal Absolute Being in Development

28. Philosophy shows that the Idea advances to an infinite antithesis; that, viz., between the Idea in its free, universal form (in which it exists for itself [i.e., in its actuality]) and the contrasted form of abstract introversion, reflection on itself, which is formal existence-for-self [i.e., in its potentiality], personality, formal freedom, such as belongs to Spirit only. The universal Idea exists thus as the substantial totality of things on the one side, and as the abstract essence of free volition on the other side. This reflection of the mind on itself is individual self-consciousness – the polar opposite of the Idea in its general form, and therefore existing in absolute Limitation. This polar opposite is consequently limitation, particularization, for the universal absolute being; it is the side of its definite existence; the sphere of its formal reality, the sphere of the reverence paid to God. To comprehend the absolute connection of this antithesis, is the profound task of metaphysics. This Limitation originates all forms of particularity of whatever kind.

          The formal volition [i.e., the individual person] (of which we have spoken) wills itself; desires to make its own personality valid in all that it purposes and does: even the pious individual wishes to be saved and happy [i.e., he has personal interests]. This pole of the antithesis, existing for itself [i.e., in actuality], is (in contrast with the Absolute Universal Being) a special separate existence, taking cognizance of specialty only, and willing that alone. In short it plays its part in the region of mere phenomena. This is the sphere of particular purposes, in effecting which individuals exert themselves on behalf of their individuality – give it full play and objective realization. This is also the sphere of happiness and its opposite. He is happy who finds his condition suited to his special character, will, and fancy, and so enjoys himself in that condition. The History of the World is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony – periods when the antithesis is in abeyance. Reflection on self (the Freedom above described) is abstractly defined as the formal element of the activity of the absolute Idea. The realizing activity of which we have spoken is the middle term of the Syllogism, one of whose extremes is the Universal essence, the Idea, which reposes in the penetralia of Spirit; and the other, the complex of external things – objective matter. That activity is the medium by which the universal latent principle is translated into the domain of objectivity.

House Construction Analogy: Construction Material Comes from Nature but Used to Block out Nature

29. I will endeavor to make what has been said more vivid and clear by examples.

          The building of a house is, in the first instance, a subjective aim and design. On the other hand we have, as means, the several substances required for the work – Iron, Wood, Stones.

          The elements are made use of in working up this material: fire to melt the iron, wind to blow the fire, water to set wheels in motion, in order to cut the wood, etc. The result is, that the wind, which has helped to build the house, is shut out by the house; so also are the violence of rains and floods, and the destructive powers of fire, so far as the house is made fireproof. The stones and beams obey the law of gravity – press downward – and so high walls are carried up. Thus the elements are made use of in accordance with their nature, and yet to co-operate for a product, by which their operation is limited. Thus the passions of men are gratified; they develop themselves and their aims in accordance with their natural tendencies, and build up the edifice of human society; thus fortifying a position for Right and Order against themselves.

Arson Analogy: An Action can Go Beyond its original Aim of Self-Interest

30. The connection of events above indicated, involves also the fact, that in history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain – that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.

          An analogous example is offered in the case of a man who, from a feeling of revenge (perhaps not an unjust one, but produced by injury on the other's part) burns that other man's house. A connection is immediately established between the deed itself and a train of circumstances not directly included in it, taken abstractedly. In itself it consisted in merely presenting a small flame to a small portion of a beam. Events not involved in that simple act follow of themselves. The part of the beam which was set fire to is connected with its remote portions; the beam itself is united with the woodwork of the house generally, and this with other houses; so that a wide conflagration, ensues, which destroys the goods and chattels of many other persons besides his against whom the act of revenge was first directed; perhaps even costs not a few men their lives. This lay neither in the deed abstractedly, nor in the design of the man who committed it. But the action has a further general bearing. In the design of the doer it was only revenge executed against an individual in the destruction of his property, but it is moreover a crime, and that involves punishment also. This may not have been present to the mind of the perpetrator, still less in his intention; but his deed itself, the general principles it calls into play, its substantial content entails it.

          By this example I wish only to impress on you the consideration, that in a simple act, something further may be implicated than lies in the intention and consciousness of the agent. The example before us involves, however, this additional consideration, that the substance of the act, consequently we may say the act itself, recoils upon the perpetrator – reacts upon him with destructive tendency. . . .

. . . .

Individuals are Means to a Hidden End except for their Inherent Morality

37. We might tolerate the idea that individuals, their desires and the gratification of them, are thus sacrificed, and their happiness given up to the empire of chance, to which it belongs; and that as a general rule, individuals come under the category of means to an ulterior end. However, There is one aspect of human individuality which we should hesitate to regard in that subordinate light, even in relation to the highest; since it is absolutely no subordinate element, but exists in those individuals as inherently eternal and divine. I mean morality, ethics, religion. Even when speaking of the realization of the great ideal aim by means of individuals, the subjective element in them – their interest and that of their cravings and impulses, their views and judgments, though exhibited as the merely formal side of their existence – was spoken of as having an infinite right to be consulted. . . .

3. The State as the Embodiment of Spirit

Ideal of Reason involves the Union of a Person's Subjective Will and the Rational Will of the State

40. The third point to be analyzed is, therefore – what is the object to be realized by these means; i.e. what is the form it assumes in the realm of reality. We have spoken of means; but in the carrying out of a subjective, limited aim, we have also to take into consideration the element of a material, either already present or which has to be procured. Thus the question would arise: What is the material out of which the Ideal of Reason is made? The primary answer would be – Personality itself – human desires – Subjectivity generally. In human knowledge and volition, as its material element, Reason attains positive existence. We have considered subjective volition where it has an object which is the truth and essence of a reality, viz., where it constitutes a great world-historical passion. As a subjective will, occupied with limited passions, it is dependent, and can gratify its desires only within the limits of this dependence. But the subjective will has also a substantial life – a reality – in which it moves in the region of essential being, and has the essential itself as the object of its existence. This essential being is the union of the subjective with the rational Will: it is the moral Whole, the State, which is that form of reality in which the individual has and enjoys his freedom; but on the condition of his recognizing, believing in, and willing that which is common to the Whole. This must not be understood as if the subjective will of the social unit attained its gratification and enjoyment through that common Will; as if this were a means provided for its benefit; as if the individual, in his relations to other individuals, thus limited his freedom, in order that this universal limitation – the mutual constraint of all – might secure a small space of liberty for each. Rather, we affirm, are Law, Morality, Government, and they alone, the positive reality and completion of Freedom. Freedom of a low and limited order is mere caprice; which finds its exercise in the sphere of particular and limited desires. . . .

Each Political Institution is Unique and Does Not Contribute to Successive Institutions, Unlike with Philosophical Theories

49. The State is the Idea of Spirit in the external manifestation of human Will and its Freedom. It is to the State, therefore, that change in the aspect of History indissolubly attaches itself; and the successive phases of the Idea manifest themselves in it as distinct political principles. The Constitutions under which World-Historical peoples have reached their culmination, are unique to them; and therefore do not present a generally applicable political basis. Were it otherwise, the differences of similar constitutions would consist only in a unique method of expanding and developing that generic basis; whereas they really originate in diversity of principle. From the comparison therefore of the political institutions of the ancient World-Historical peoples, it so happens, that for the most recent principle of a Constitution – for the principle of our own times – nothing (so to speak) can be learned. In [philosophical] science and art it is quite otherwise; e.g., the ancient philosophy is so decidedly the basis of the modern, that it is inevitably contained in the latter, and constitutes its basis. In this case the relation is that of a continuous development of the same structure, whose foundation-stone, walls, and roof have remained what they were. In Art, the Greek itself, in its original form, furnishes us the best models. But in regard to political constitution, it is quite otherwise: here the Ancient and the Modern have not their essential principle in common. Abstract definitions and dogmas respecting just government – importing that intelligence and virtue ought to bear sway – are, indeed, common to both. But nothing is so absurd as to look to Greeks, Romans, or Orientals, for models for the political arrangements of our time. . . .

Actuating Principle of the State is its Morality, History of the State is its Deeds

56. Summing up what has been said of the State, we find that we have been led to call its vital principle, as actuating the individuals who compose it – Morality. The State, its laws, its arrangements, constitute the rights of its members; its natural features, its mountains, air, and waters, are their country, their fatherland, their outward material property; the history of this State, their deeds; what their ancestors have produced belongs to them and lives in their memory. All is their possession, just as they are possessed by it; for it constitutes their existence, their being. Their imagination is occupied with the ideas thus presented, while the adoption of these laws, and of a fatherland so conditioned is the expression of their will. It is this matured totality which thus constitutes one Being, the spirit of one People. To it the individual members belong; each unit is the Son of his Nation, and at the same time – in as far as the State to which he belongs is undergoing development – the Son of his Age. None remains behind it, still less advances beyond it. This spiritual Being (the Spirit of his Time) is his; he is a representative of it; it is that in which he originated, and in which he lives. Among the Athenians the word Athens had a double meaning; suggesting primarily a complex of political institutions, but no less, in the second place, that Goddess who represented the Spirit of the People and its unity. . . .

Past Stages of Historical Progress are All Contained in Present Stages

97. Spirit is essentially the result of its own activity; its activity is the transcending of immediate, simple, unreflected existence, — the negation of that existence, and the returning into itself. We may compare it with the seed; for with this the plant begins, yet it is also the result of the plant's entire life. But the weak side of life is exhibited in the fact that the beginning and the result are disjoined from each other. Thus also is it in the life of individuals and peoples. The life of a people ripens a certain fruit; its activity aims at the complete manifestation of the principle which it embodies. But this fruit does not fall back into the bosom of the people that produced and matured it; on the contrary, it becomes a poison-drink to it. That poison-drink it cannot let alone, for it has an insatiable thirst for it: the taste of the draught is its annihilation, though at the same time the rise of a new principle.

          98. We have already discussed the final aim of progression. The principles of the successive phases of Spirit that animate the Nations in a necessitated gradation, are themselves only steps in the development of the one universal Spirit, which through them elevates and completes itself to a self-comprehending totality.

          99. While we are thus concerned exclusively with the Idea of Spirit, and in the History of the World regard everything as only its manifestation, we have, in traversing the past, — however extensive its periods, — only to do with what is present; for philosophy, as occupying itself with the True, has to do with the eternally present. Nothing in the past is lost for it, for the Idea is ever present; Spirit is immortal; with it there is no past, no future, but an essential now. This necessarily implies that the present [historical] form of Spirit comprehends within it all earlier steps. These have indeed unfolded themselves in succession independently; but what Spirit is it has always been essentially; distinctions are only the development of this essential nature. The life of the ever-present Spirit is a circle of progressive embodiments, which looked at in one respect still exist beside each other, and only as looked at from another point of view appear as past. The grades which Spirit seems to have left behind it, it still possesses in the depths of its present.

WAR AS A BENEFIT IN THE ETHICAL LIFE OF A STATE

Spirit Guides Governments to Break Up Individualism through War (Phenomenology of Mind, 1807, "Ethical World")

The community, the higher law whose validity is open to the light of day, makes its concrete activity felt in government; for in government it is an individual whole. Government is concrete actual spirit reflected into itself, the self pure and simple of the entire ethical substance. This simple force allows, indeed, the community to unfold and expand into its component members, and to give each part subsistence and self-existence of its own. Spirit finds in this way its realization or its objective existence, and the family is the medium in which this realization takes effect.

          But spirit is at the same time the force of the whole, combining these parts again within the unity which negates them, giving them the feeling of their lack of independence, and keeping them aware that their life only lies in the whole. The community may thus, on the one hand, organize itself into the systems of property and of personal independence, of personal right and right in things. On the other hand, the community may articulate the various ways of working for what in the first place are particular ends—those of gain and enjoyment—into their own special guilds and associations, and may thus make them independent. The spirit of universal assemblage and association is the single and simple principle, and the negative essential factor at work in the segregation and isolation of these systems. In order not to let them get rooted and settled in this isolation and thus break up the whole into fragments and let the common spirit evaporate, from time to time government has to shake them to the very center through War. By this means the government disrupts the order that has been established and arranged, and violates that right to independence. The individuals, being absorbed in their manner of life, become separated from the whole and strive for inviolable self-existence and personal security. The individuals are then  are made, by the task thus imposed on them by government, to feel the power of their lord and master, death. By thus breaking up the form of fixed stability, spirit guards the ethical order from sinking into merely natural existence. Spirit preserves the self of which it is conscious, and raises that self to the level of freedom and its own powers. The negative essential being shows itself to be the might proper of the community and the force it has for self-maintenance. The community therefore finds the true principle and corroboration of its power in the inner nature of divine law, and in the kingdom of the nether world.

Wars Prevent Stagnation, Strengthen Nations, and Remove Vanity of Temporal Things (Philosophy of Right, 1821, 324)

324. The phase [of the state], according to which the interest and right of individuals is made a vanishing factor, is at the same time a positive element, forming the basis of their, not accidental and fleeting, but absolute individuality. This relation and the recognition of it constitute their substantial duty. If necessary, individuals must sacrifice property and life, not to speak of opinions and the ordinary routine of existence, in order to preserve the substantive individuality, independence, and sovereignty of the state.

          Note. It is a very distorted account of the matter when the state, in demanding sacrifices from the citizens, is taken to be simply the civic community, whose object is merely the security of life and property. Security cannot possibly be obtained by the sacrifice of what is to be secured.

          Herein is to be found the ethical element in war. War is not to be regarded as an absolute evil. It is not a merely external accident, having its accidental ground in the passions of powerful individuals or nations, in acts of injustice, or in anything which ought not to be. Accident involves that which is by nature accidental, and this fate is a necessity. So from the standpoint of the conception and in philosophy the merely accidental vanishes, because in it, as it is a mere appearance, is recognized its essence, namely, necessity. It is necessary that what is finite, such as life and property, should have its contingent nature exposed, since contingency is inherent in the conception of the finite. This necessity has in one phase of it the form of a force of nature, since all that is finite is mortal and transient. But in the ethical life, that is to say, the state, this force and nature are separated. Necessity becomes in this way exalted to the work of freedom, and becomes a force which is ethical. What from the standpoint of nature is transient, is now transient because it is willed to be so; and that, which is fundamentally negative, becomes substantive and distinctive individuality in the ethical order.

          It is often said, for the sake of edification, that war quickly removes the vanity of temporal things. It is the element by which the idealization of what is particular receives its right and becomes an actuality. Moreover, by it, as I have elsewhere expressed it, "finite pursuits are made unstable, and the ethical health of peoples is preserved. Just as the movement of the ocean prevents the corruption which would be the result of perpetual calm, so by war people escape the corruption which would be occasioned by a continuous or eternal peace." The view that this quotation contains merely a philosophical idea, or, as it is sometimes called, a justification of providence, and that actual war needs another kind of justification, will be taken up later. The idealization, which comes to the surface in war, viewed as an accidental foreign relation, is the same as the ideality by virtue of which the internal state functions are organic elements of the whole. This principle is found in history in such a fact as that successful wars have prevented civil broils and strengthened the internal power of the state. So, too, peoples, who have been unwilling or afraid to endure internal sovereignty, have been subjugated by others, and in their struggles for independence have had honor and success small in proportion to their failure to establish within themselves a central political power; their freedom died through their fear of its dying. Moreover, states, which have no guarantee of independence in the strength of their army, states, e.g., that are very small in comparison with their neighbors, have continued to subsist because of their internal constitution, which merely of itself would seem to promise them neither internal repose nor external security. These phenomena are illustrations of our principle drawn from history.

          Addition. In peace, the boundaries of civic life become more and more extended. Each separate sphere walls itself in and becomes exclusive, and eventually mankind stagnates. Their particularity becomes more and more fixed and hardened. Unity of the body is essential to health, and where the organs become hard death results. Everlasting peace is frequently demanded as the ideal towards which mankind must move. Hence, Kant proposed an alliance of princes, which would settle the controversies of states, and the Holy Alliance [between Austria, Prussia, and Russia] was probably intended to be an institution of this kind. But the state is individual, and negation is an essential part of individuality. Although a number of states may make themselves into a family, the union, because it is an individuality, must create an opposition, and so creates an enemy. As a result of war, peoples are strengthened, and nations that are involved in civil quarrels win peace at home by means of war abroad. It is true that war creates insecurity of possessions, but this real insecurity is simply a necessary movement. From the pulpit we hear much about the uncertainty, vanity, and instability of temporal things. At the same time, everyone, no matter how much he is impressed by these utterances, thinks that he will manage to retain his own possessions. But if the uncertainty comes in the form of hussars [i.e., horsemen] with glistening sabers, and begins to work in complete earnest, this touching edification turns right about face, and hurls curses at the invader. In spite of this, wars arise, when they lie in the nature of the matter. The seeds spring up afresh, and words are silenced by the sober repetitions of history.

FOUR EMPIRES OF WORLD HISTORY (The Philosophy of Right, 1821, 341-360)

World History as the Unfolding of the Universal Spirit

World History is a Court of Judgment against Civic Institutions

341. The universal spirit exists concretely in art in the form of perception and image, in religion in the form of feeling and pictorial imaginative thinking, and in philosophy in the form of pure free thought. In world-history this concrete existence of spirit is the spiritual actuality in the total range of its internality and externality. It is a court of judgment because in its absolute universality the particular, namely, the Penates, the civic community, and the national spirit in their many-colored reality, are all merely ideal. The movement of spirit in this case consists in visibly presenting these spheres as merely ideal.

World History does not Direct Events by Force or Fate, but by the Unfolding of the Universal Spirit

342. Moreover, world-history is not a court of judgment, whose principle is force, nor is it the abstract and irrational necessity of a blind fate. It is self-caused and self-realized reason, and its actualized existence in spirit is knowledge. Hence, its development issuing solely out of the conception of its freedom is a necessary development of the elements of reason. It is, therefore, an unfolding of the spirit's self-consciousness and freedom. It is the exhibition and actualization of the universal spirit. . . .

Four World-Historical Realms

352. The concrete ideas, which embody the national minds or spirits, has its truth in the concrete idea in its absolute universality. This is the spirit of the world, around whose throne stand the other spirits as perfecters of its actuality, and witnesses and ornaments of its splendor. Since it is, as spirit, only the movement of its activity in order to know itself absolutely, to free its consciousness from mere direct naturalness, and to come to itself, the principles of the different forms of its self-consciousness, as they appear in the process of liberation, are four. They are the principles of the four world-historic kingdoms.

Features of Each Realm

353. In its first and direct revelation the world-spirit has as its principle the form of the substantive spirit, in whose identity individuality is in its essence submerged and without explicit justification.

          In the second principle the substantive spirit is aware of itself. Here spirit is the positive content and filling, and is also at the same time the living form, which is in its nature self-referred.

          The third principle is the retreat into itself of this conscious self-referred existence. There thus arises an abstract universality, and with it an infinite opposition to objectivity, which is regarded as deprived of spirit.

          In the fourth principle this opposition of the spirit is overturned in order that spirit may receive into its inner self its truth and concrete essence. It thus becomes at home with objectivity, and the two are reconciled. Because the spirit has come back to its formal substantive reality by returning out of this infinite opposition, it seeks to produce and know its truth as thought, and as a world of established reality.

Four World-Historic Empires

354. In accordance with these four principles the four world-historic empires are (1) the Oriental, (2) the Greek, (3) the Roman, and (4) the Germanic.

1. The Oriental Empire (individuality submerged): Monistic Realm with no Internal Divisions

355. The Oriental Empire: The first empire is the substantive world-intuition, which proceeds from the natural whole of patriarchal times. It has no internal divisions. Its worldly government is theocracy, its ruler a high priest or God, its constitution and legislation are at the same time its religion, and its civic and legal regulations are religious and moral commands or usages. In the splendor of this totality the individual personality sinks without rights; external nature is directly divine or an ornament of God, and the history of reality is poetry. The distinctions, which develop themselves in customs, government, and the state, serve instead of laws, being converted by mere social usage into clumsy, diffuse, and superstitious ceremonies, the accidents of personal power and arbitrary rule. The division into classes becomes a caste fixed as the laws of nature. Since in the Oriental empire there is nothing stable, or rather what is firm is petrified, it has life only in a movement, which goes on from the outside, and becomes an elemental violence and desolation. Internal peace is merely a private life, which is sunk in feebleness and sluggishness.

2. The Greek Empire (made aware of itself): Pluralistic Realm with Several National Minds

356. The Greek Empire: This empire still contains the earlier substantive unity of the finite and infinite, but only as a mysterious background, suppressed and kept down in gloomy reminiscence, in caves and in traditional imagery. This background under the influence of the self-distinguishing spirit is recreated into individual spirituality, and exalted into the daylight of consciousness, where it is tempered and clarified into beauty and a free and cheerful ethical life. Here arises the principle of personal individuality, although it is not as yet self-centered, but held in its ideal unity. One result of this incompleteness is that the whole is broken up into a number of particular national minds or spirits. Further, the final decision of will is not as yet entrusted to the subjectivity of the independent self-consciousness, but resides in a power, which is higher than, and lies beyond it. Moreover, the particularity, which is found in wants, is not yet taken up into freedom, but segregated in a class of slaves.

3. The Roman Empire (retreats into itself): Dualistic Realm of Aristocracy and Democracy

357. The Roman Empire: In this empire the distinctions of spirit are carried to the length of an infinite rupture of the ethical life into two extremes, personal private self-consciousness, and abstract universality. The antagonism, arising between the substantive intuition of an aristocracy and the principle of free personality in democratic form, developed on the side of the aristocracy into superstition and the retention of cold self-seeking power, and on the side of the democracy into the corrupt mass. The dissolution of the whole culminates in universal misfortune, ethical life dies, national individualities, having merely the bond of union of a Pantheon, perish, and individuals are degraded to the level of that equality, in which they are merely private persons and have only formal rights.

4. The German Empire (accepts objectivity): Objective Realm with Unified Religion and Politics

358. The German Empire: Owing to the loss of itself and its world, and to the infinite pain caused by it, a loss of which the Jewish people were already held to be the type, spirit is pressed back into itself, and finds itself in the extreme of absolute negativity. But this extreme is the absolute turning-point, and in it spirit finds the infinite and yet positive nature of its own inner being. This new discovery is the unity of the divine and the human. By means of it objective truth is reconciled with freedom, and that, too, inside of self-consciousness and subjectivity. This new basis, infinite and yet positive, it has been charged upon the northern principle of the Germanic nations to bring to completion.

Reason in the Development of History

German Kingdom is an Intellectual Empire

359. The internal aspect of this northern principle exists in feeling as faith, love, and hope. Although it is in this form still abstract, it is the reconciliation and solution of all contradiction. It proceeds to unfold its content in order to raise it to reality and self-conscious rationality. It thus constructs a kingdom of this world, based upon the feeling, trust, and fellowship of free men. This kingdom in this its subjectivity is an actual kingdom of rude caprice and barbarism in contrast with the world beyond. It is an intellectual empire, whose content is indeed the truth of its spirit. But as it is yet not thought out, and still is veiled in the barbarism of picture-thinking, it exists as a spiritual force, which exercises over the actual mind a despotic and tyrannical influence.

The Realm of Mind Lowers Itself to an Earthly Condition

360. These kingdoms are based upon the distinction, which has now won the form of absolute antagonism, and yet at the same time are rooted in a single unity and idea. In the stubborn struggle, which thus ensues, the spiritual must lower its heaven to the level of an earthly and temporal condition, to common worldliness, and to ordinary life and thought. On the other hand the abstract actuality of the worldly is exalted to thought, to the principle of rational being and knowing, and to the rationality of right and law. As a result of these two tendencies, the contradiction has become a marrowless phantasm. The present has stripped off its barbarism and its lawless caprice, and truth has stripped off its beyond and its casualness. The true atonement and reconciliation has become objective, and unfolds the state as the image and reality of reason. In the state, self-consciousness finds the organic development of its real substantive knowing and will, in religion it finds in the form of ideal essence the feeling and the vision of this its truth, and in [philosophical] science it finds the free conceived knowledge of this truth, seeing it to be one and the same in all its mutually completing manifestations, namely, the state, nature, and the ideal world.

ART: ABSOLUTE SPIRIT'S TRUTH EMBODIED IN BEAUTIFUL THINGS (Lectures on Fine Art, 1835)

Art is Not about Nature, but about the Mind's Knowledge of Truth (Introduction, 1-2)

The present inquiry has for its subject-matter Aesthetic. It is a subject co-extensive with the entire realm of the beautiful; more specifically described, its province is that of Art, or rather, we should say, of Fine Art. . . .

          To merely maintain, in a general way, that spirt and the beauty of art which originates from it stand higher than the beauty of Nature is, no doubt, to establish next to nothing. The expression higher is obviously entirely indefinite; it still indicates the beauty of Nature and art as standing in contrast with each other within the field of conception, and emphasizes the difference as a quantitative and accordingly external difference. But in predicating of spirit and its artistic beauty a higher place in contrast to Nature, we do not denote a distinction which is merely relative. Spirit, and spirit alone, is receptive to truth, comprehending all in itself, so that all which is beautiful can only be truly beautiful as partaking in this higher sphere and as created by it. In this sense the beauty of nature reveals itself as but a reflection of the beauty which belongs to the spirit, as an imperfect, incomplete mode of being, as a mode whose really substantial element is contained in the spirit itself.

          Apart from this we will find the restriction to the beauty of art quite normal, for in so far as the beauties of Nature may have come under discussion—a rarer occurrence among ancient writers than among ourselves—yet at least it has occurred to no one to insist emphatically on the beauty of natural objects to the extent of proposing a science, or systematic exposition of such beauties. It is true that the point of view of utility has been selected for such exclusive treatment. We have, for example, the conception of a science of natural objects in so far as they are useful in the conflict with diseases, in other words a description of minerals, chemical products, plants, animals, which that are of use for purposes of healing. We do not find any analogous exploitation and consideration of the realm of Nature in its aspect of beauty. In the case of natural beauty we are too acutely conscious that we are dealing with an indefinite subject-matter destitute of any real criterion. It is for this reason that such an effort of comparison would carry with it too little interest to justify the attempt. . . .

Works of Fine Art Express Spiritual Truths (Introduction, 3)

Fine art is not art in the true sense of the term until it is also thus free, and its highest function is only then satisfied when it has established itself in a sphere which it shares with religion, and philosophy, becoming thereby merely one  mode and form through which the Divine, the profoundest interests of mankind, and spiritual truths of widest range, are brought home to consciousness and expressed. It is in works of art that nations have deposited the richest intuitions and ideas they possess; and not infrequently fine art supplies a key of interpretation to the wisdom and religion of peoples; in the case of many it is the only one. This is an attribute which art shares in common with religion and philosophy, the unique distinction in the case of art being that its presentation of the most exalted subject-matter is in sensuous form, thereby bringing them nearer to Nature and her mode of envisagement, that is closer to our sensitive and emotional life. The world, into the profundity of which thought penetrates, is a supersensuous one, a world which to start with is posited as a Beyond in contrast to the immediacy of ordinary conscious life and present sensation. It is the freedom of reflecting consciousness which disengages itself from this immersion in the "this side," or immediacy, in other words sensuous reality and finitude. But the spirit is able, too, to heal the fracture which is thus created in its progression. From the wealth of its own resources it brings into being the works of fine art as the primary bond of mediation between that which is exclusively external, sensuous and transitory, and the medium of pure thought, between Nature and its finite reality, and the infinite freedom of a reason which comprehends. . . .

Art is Limited to the Sensuous and Cannot Represent the Highest Level of Truth (Introduction, 3.2)

But if from this particular point of view we place art thus highly, we must not, on the other hand, fail to remember that neither in respect to content or form is art either the highest or most absolute mode of bringing the true interests of our spiritual life to consciousness. The very form of art itself is sufficient to limit it to a definite content. It is only a particular sphere and grade of truth which is capable of being reproduced in the form of a work of art. Such truth must have the power in its own determinate character to go out freely into sensuous shape and remain adequate to itself therein, if it is to be the genuine content of art, as is the case, for example, with the gods of Greece. On the other hand there is a profounder grasp of truth, in which the form is no longer on such easy and friendly terms with the sensuous material as to be adequately accepted and expressed by that medium. Of such a type is the Christian conception of truth; and above all it is the prevailing spirit of our modern world, or, more strictly, of our religion and our intellectual culture, which have passed beyond the point at which art is the highest mode under which the absolute is brought home to human consciousness. The type unique to art-production and its products fails any longer to satisfy man's highest need. We are beyond the stage of reverence for works of art as divine and objects deserving our worship. The impression they produce is one of a more reflective kind, and the emotions which they arouse require a higher test and a further verification. Thought and reflection have taken their flight above fine art. To those who are fond of complaint and grumbling such a condition of things may be held as a form of decadence; it may be ascribed to the obsession of passion and selfish interests, which scare away the seriousness of art no less than its blithesomeness. Or we may find the fault to lie in the exigencies of the present day, the complex conditions of social and political life, which prevent the soul, entangled as it is in microscopic interests, from securing its freedom in the nobler objects of art, a condition, too, in which the intelligence itself becomes a menial to such trifling wants and the interests they excite in sciences, which subserve objects of a like nature, and are seduced into the voluntary exile of such a wilderness. . . .

The Progress, Limits and Goal of Art (Part 3.3.3, Conclusion)

Three Stages in the History of Art: Symbolic, Classical, Romantic

Having completed our review of the types under which comedy is elaborated, we have at last reached the absolute conclusion of our scientific inquiry. We started with symbolic art, in which the ideality of the human soul struggles to discover itself as content and configuration, and, in a word, to become an object to itself. We passed on to the plastic of classical art, which displays to human vision that which has become unveiled to itself as substantive being in man's vital personality. We reached our conclusion in the romantic art of the individual soul-life, that inward world united to the absolute medium of its self-conscious energy, which expatiates unfettered within its own ideal life of Spirit; and which, content with that realm, no longer unites itself with what is objective and particularized, and finally makes itself aware of the negative significance of such a resolution in the humor of the comic Spirit.

Comedy's Self-Assurance Dissolves the Higher Aim of Art

Nevertheless we find that in this very consummation it is Comedy which opens the way to a dissolution of all that human art implies. For the aim of all art is nothing else than that identity asserted and displayed by the human Spirit, in which the eternal, the Divine, the essential and explicated truth is unfolded in the forms and phenomenal presence of the objective world to the apprehension of our external senses and our emotional life and imagination. If, however, as is the fact, comedy merely enforces this unity under a mode that annihilates it [through "pure silliness, and, in a word, exploited self-assurance"], inasmuch as the absolute substance, which strives here to enforce its realized manifestation, perceives that this realization is,—through the instrumentality of those interests which have now secured an independent freedom within the embrace of the objective world of Nature, and are as such exclusively directed to what is contingent and personal to the soul,—itself shattered, it follows that the presence and activity of the Absolute is no longer truly asserted in positive coalescence with the individual characters and ends of existing objective reality, but rather solely gives effect to itself in the negative form that everything which does not correspond with itself is thereby cancelled, and all that remains is the presence of this free personal activity of soul-life which is displayed in and along with this dissolution as aware of itself and self-assured.

Art Seeks to Liberate the Human Spirit from its Finite Condition

By such a path, then, as this we have arrived at our goal; and with the aid of our philosophical method have gathered every essential type and determinant of the beauty and conformation of art into a garland, the task of arranging which in its associate completeness belongs to the most worthy of any within the range of human science to undertake. For in human Art we are not merely dealing with playthings, however pleasant or useful they may be, but with the liberation of the human Spirit from the substance and forms of finite condition. We are occupied with the presence and reconciliation of the Absolute in sense and the phenomenal, with a revelation of truth, which is not exhausted of its wealth in natural-history, but is unfolded in the history of the world, as a constituent part of which Art supplies us with the most beautiful point of view, the most generous reward for the severe labors of our contact with objective reality and the grievous pains of knowledge. For this reason it was impossible that our inquiry should wholly restrict itself to the criticism of individual works of art, or any mere recipe or inducement to their production. Rather it could have but the one object, namely, that of following up, of seizing and retaining in and through the instrumentality of thought the fundamental notion of beauty and art through all the stages which it passes in its process of realization.

RELIGION: RECONCILING THE SACRED AND SECULAR THROUGH PHILOSOPHY (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1832)

Ordinary Conception of Religion: The Center of Existence, Solves all Problems (Introduction)

To begin with, it is necessary to remember generally what object we have before us in the Philosophy of Religion, and what is our ordinary idea of religion. We know that in religion we withdraw ourselves from what is temporal, and that religion is for our consciousness that region in which all the enigmas of the world are solved, all the contradictions of deeper-reaching thought have their meaning unveiled, and where the voice of the heart's pain is silenced—the region of eternal truth, of eternal rest, of eternal peace. Speaking generally, it is through thought, concrete thought, or, to put it more definitely, it is by reason of his being Spirit, that man is man; and from man as Spirit proceed all the many developments of the sciences and arts, the interests of political life, and all those conditions which have reference to man's freedom and will. But all these manifold forms of human relations, activities, and pleasures, and all the ways in which these are intertwined; all that has worth and dignity for man, all wherein he seeks his happiness, his glory, and his pride, finds its ultimate center in religion, in the thought, the consciousness, and the feeling of God. Thus, God is the beginning of all things, and the end of all things. As all things proceed from this point, so all return back to it again. He is the center which gives life and quickening to all things, and which animates and preserves in existence all the various forms of being. In religion man places himself in a relation to this center, in which all other relations concentrate themselves, and in so doing he rises up to the highest level of consciousness and to the region which is free from relation to what is other than itself, to something which is absolutely self-sufficient, the unconditioned, what is free, and is its own object and end. . . . Such is the general perception, sensation, consciousness, or however we may designate it, of religion. To consider, to examine, and to comprehend its nature is the object of the present lectures. . . .

Conflict between the Sacred and Secular (Introduction, A. 1.a)

In the relation in which religion, even in its immediacy, stands to the other forms of the consciousness of man, there already lie germs of division, since both sides are conceived of as in a condition of separation relatively to each other. In their simple relation they already constitute two kinds of pursuits, two different regions of consciousness, and we pass to and fro from the one to the other alternately only. Thus man has in his actual worldly life a number of working days during which he occupies himself with his own special interests, with worldly aims in general, and with the satisfaction of his needs; and then he has a Sunday, when he lays all this aside, collects his thoughts, and, released from absorption in finite occupations, lives to himself and to the higher nature which is in him, to his true essential being. But into this separateness of the two sides there directly enters a double modification. . . .

The Secular takes Possession of Knowledge, the Sacred Reduces to Simple Feeling (Introduction, A.1.b)

Thus both sides have developed themselves completely in their opposition. On the side of religion the heart is filled with what is Divine, but without freedom, or self-consciousness, and without consistency in regard to what is determinate, this latter having, on the contrary, the form of contingency. Consistent connection of what is determinate belongs to the side of knowledge, which is at home in the finite, and moves freely in the thought-determinations of the manifold connections of things, but can only create a system which is without absolute substantiality—without God. The religious side gets the absolute material and purpose, but only as something abstractly positive. Knowledge has taken possession of all finite material and drawn it into its territory, all determinate content has fallen to its share; but although it gives it a necessary connection, it is still unable to give it the absolute connection. Since finally science has taken possession of knowledge, and is the consciousness of the necessity of the finite, religion has become devoid of knowledge, and has shriveled up into simple feeling, into the contentless or empty elevation of the spiritual to the Eternal. It can, however, affirm nothing regarding the Eternal, for all that could be regarded as knowledge would be a drawing down of the Eternal into the sphere of the finite, and of finite connections of things.

          Now when two aspects of thought, which are so developed in this way, enter into relation with one another, their attitude is one of mutual distrust. Religious feeling distrusts the finiteness which lies in knowledge, and it brings against science the charge of futility, because in it the subject clings to itself, is in itself, and the "I" as the knowing subject is independent in relation to all that is external. On the other hand, knowledge has a distrust of the totality in which feeling entrenches itself, and in which it confounds together all extension and development. It is afraid to lose its freedom should it comply with the demand of feeling, and unconditionally recognize a truth which it does not definitely understand. When religious feeling comes out of its universality, sets ends before itself, and passes over to the determinate, knowledge can see nothing but arbitrariness in this, and if it were to pass in a similar way to anything definite, would feel itself given over to mere contingency. When, accordingly, reflection is fully developed, and has to pass over into the domain of religion, it is unable to hold out in that region, and becomes impatient with regard to all that uniquely belongs to it.

Sacred and Secular see each other as Enemies (Introduction, A.1.c)

Now that the opposition has arrived at this stage of development, where the one side, whenever it is approached by the other, invariably thrusts it away from it as an enemy, the necessity for an adjustment comes in, of such a kind that the infinite shall appear in the finite, and the finite in the infinite, and each no longer form a separate realm. This would be the reconciliation of religious, genuine simple feeling, with knowledge and intelligence. This reconciliation must correspond with the highest demands of knowledge, and of the Notion, for these can surrender nothing of their dignity. But just as little can anything of the absolute content be given up, and that content be brought down into the region of finiteness; and when face to face with it knowledge must give up its finite form. . . .

          So far we have considered the progressive growth of the antitheses only in the form in which they have not yet developed into actual philosophy, or in which they still stand outside of it. . . .

Reconciliation between the Sacred and Secular through Morality (Part 3.C.3.c)

[T]his contradiction cancels itself in Morality, that the principle of freedom has forced its way into secular life; and since secular life so constructed is itself in conformity with the Notion, reason, truth, eternal truth, it is a freedom which has become concrete, the rational will.

          It is in the organization of the State that the Divine has passed into the sphere of reality; the latter is penetrated by the former, and the existence of the secular element is justified in-and-for-itself [i.e., known to itself], for its basis is the Divine Will, the law of right and freedom. The true reconciliation whereby the Divine realizes itself in the region of reality is found in moral and legal life in the State; this is the true disciplining of the secular life.

          The institutions of morality are divine, are holy, not in the sense in which what is holy is opposed to what is moral, as when it is held that celibacy represents what is holy as opposed to family life, or voluntary poverty as opposed to active acquisition by one's own efforts, to what is lawful. In the same way blind obedience passes for being something holy; while, on the contrary, what makes morality is obedience in freedom, free, rational will, the obedience of the subject in respect of what is moral. In morality the reconciliation of religion with reality, with the secular life, is an actual and accomplished fact.

Three Stages of Religious Development: Naive Religion, Secular Enlightenment, Philosophy

But, in so far as thought begins to place itself in opposition to the concrete, the process of thought then consists in carrying through this opposition until it reaches reconciliation. This reconciliation is philosophy; so far philosophy is theology, it sets forth the reconciliation of God with Himself and with Nature, and shows that Nature, Other-Being is divine, that it partly belongs to the very nature of finite Spirit to rise into the state of reconciliation, and that it partly reaches this state of reconciliation in the history of the world.

          This religious knowledge thus reached through the Notion is not universal in its nature, and it is further only knowledge in the Spiritual Community, and thus we get in reference to the Kingdom of God three stages or positions: the first position is that of immediate naive religion and faith; the second, the position of the Understanding, of the so-called cultured, of reflection and Enlightenment; and finally, the third position, the stage of philosophy. . . .

          For us philosophical knowledge has harmonized this discord, and the aim of these lectures has just been to reconcile reason and religion, to show how we know this latter to be in all its manifold forms necessary, and to rediscover in revealed religion the truth and the Idea.

          But this reconciliation is itself merely a partial one without outward universality. Philosophy forms in this connection a sanctuary apart, and those who serve in it constitute an isolated order of priests, who must not mix with the world, and whose work is to protect the possessions of Truth. How the actual present-day world is to find its way out of this state of disruption, and what form it is to take, are questions which must be left to itself to settle, and to deal with them is not the immediate practical business and concern of philosophy.

PHILOSOPHY: ABSOLUTE SPIRIT KNOWING ITSELF (Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1833)

History of Philosophy is the Development of Self-Conscious Reason in the Universal Mind (Introduction)

There are various aspects under which the History of Philosophy may possess interest. We will find the central point of this interest in the essential connection existing between what is apparently past and the present stage reached by Philosophy. That this connection is not one of the external considerations which may be taken into account in the history of Philosophy, but really expresses its inner character: that the events of this history, while they perpetuate themselves in their effects like all other events, yet produce their results in a special way this it is which is here to be more clearly expounded.

          What the history of Philosophy shows us is a succession of noble minds, a gallery of heroes of thought, who, by the power of Reason, have penetrated into the being of things, of nature and of spirit, into the Being of God, and have won for us by their labors the highest treasure, the treasure of reasoned knowledge.

          The events and actions of this history are therefore such that personality and individual character do not enter to any large degree into its content and matter. In this respect the history of Philosophy contrasts with political history, in which the individual, according to the uniqueness of his disposition, talents, affections, the strength or weakness of his character, and in general, according to that through which he is this individual, is the subject of actions and events. In Philosophy, the less deserts and merits are accorded to the particular individual, the better is the history; and the more it deals with thought as free, with the universal character of man as man, the more this thought, which is devoid of special characteristic, is itself shown to be the producing subject.

          The acts of thought appear at first to be a matter of history, and, therefore, things of the past, and outside our real existence. But in reality we are what we are through history: or, more accurately, as in the history of Thought, what has passed away is only one side, so in the present, what we have as a permanent possession is essentially bound up with our place in history. The possession of self-conscious reason, which belongs to us of the present world, did not arise suddenly, nor did it grow only from the soil of the present. This possession must be regarded as previously present, as an inheritance, and as the result of labor the labor of all past generations of men. Just as the arts of outward life, the accumulated skill and invention, the customs and arrangements of social and political life, are the result of the thought, care, and needs, of the want and the misery, of the ingenuity, the plans and achievements of those who preceded us in history, so, likewise, in science, and specially in Philosophy, do we owe what we are to the tradition which, as Herder has put it, like a holy chain, runs through all that was transient, and has therefore passed away. Thus, has been preserved and transmitted to us what antiquity produced.

          But this tradition is not only a stewardess who simply guards faithfully that which she has received, and thus delivers it unchanged to posterity, just as the course of nature in the infinite change and activity of its forms ever remains constant to its original laws and makes no step in advance. Such tradition is no motionless statue, but is alive, and swells like a mighty river, which increases in size the further it advances from its source. The content of this tradition is that which the intellectual world has brought forth, and the universal Mind does not remain stationary. But it is just the universal Mind with which we have to do. It may certainly be the case with a single nation that its culture, art, science its intellectual activities as a whole are at a standstill. This appears, perhaps, to be the case with the Chinese, for example, who may have been as far advanced in every respect two thousand years ago as now. But the world-spirit does not sink into this rest of indifference; this follows from its very nature, for its activity is its life. This activity presupposes a material already present, on which it acts, and which it does not merely augment by the addition of new matter, but completely fashions and transforms. Thus that which each generation has produced in science and in intellectual activity, is an heirloom to which all the past generations have added their savings, a temple in which all races of men thankfully and cheerfully deposit that which rendered aid to them through life, and which they had won from the depths of Nature and of Mind. To receive this inheritance is also to enter upon its use. It constitutes the soul of each successive generation, the intellectual substance of the time; its principles, prejudices, and possessions; and this legacy is degraded to a material which becomes metamorphosed by Mind. In this manner that which is received is changed, and the material worked upon is both enriched and preserved at the same time.

          This is the function of our own and of every age: to grasp the knowledge which is already existing, to make it our own, and in so doing to develop it still further and to raise it to a higher level. In thus appropriating it to ourselves we make it into something different from what it was before. On the presupposition of an already existing intellectual world which is transformed in our appropriation of it, depends the fact that Philosophy can only arise in connection with previous Philosophy, from which of necessity it has arisen. The course of history does not show us the Becoming of things foreign to us, but the Becoming of ourselves and of our own knowledge.

          The ideas and questions which may be present to our mind regarding the character and ends of the history of Philosophy, depend on the nature of the relationship here given. In this lies the explanation of the fact that the study of the history of Philosophy is an introduction to Philosophy itself. The guiding principles for the formation of this history are given in this fact, the further discussion of which must thus be the main object of this introduction. We must also, however, keep in mind, as being of fundamental importance, the conception of the aim of Philosophy. Since, as already mentioned, the systematic exposition of this conception cannot here find a place, such discussion as we can now undertake, can only propose to deal with the subject provisionally and not to give a thorough and conclusive account of the nature of the Becoming of Philosophy.

          This Becoming is not merely a passive movement, as we suppose movements such as those of the sun and moon to be. It is no mere movement in the unresisting medium of space and time. What we must represent to ourselves is the activity of free thought; we have to present the history of the world of thought as it has arisen and produced itself.

The History of Philosophy is that of Thought Finding Itself over 2,500 Years (Introduction)

There is an old tradition that it is the faculty of thought which separates men from beasts; and to this tradition we shall adhere. In accordance with this, what man has, as being nobler than a beast, he has through thinking. Everything which is human, however it may appear, is so only because the thought contained in it works and has worked. But thought, although it is thus the essential, substantial, and effectual, has many other elements. We must, however, consider it best when Thought does not pursue anything else, but is occupied only with, itself with what is noblest when it has sought and found itself. The history which we have before us is the history of Thought finding itself, and it is the case with Thought that it only finds itself in producing itself; indeed, that it only exists and is actual in finding itself. These productions are the philosophic systems; and the series of discoveries on which Thought sets out in order to discover itself, forms a work which has lasted twenty-five hundred years.

          If the Thought which is essentially Thought, is in and for itself [i.e., known to itself] and eternal, and that which is true is contained in Thought alone, how, then, does this intellectual world come to have a history? In history what appears is transient, has disappeared in the night of the past and is no more. But true, necessary thought and it is only with such that we have to do is capable of no change. The question here raised constitutes one of those matters first to be brought under our consideration. But in the second place, there are also many most important things outside of Philosophy, which are yet the work of Thought, and which are left unconsidered [in our discussion here]. Such are Religion, Political History, forms of Government, and the Arts and Sciences. The question arises as to how these operations differ from the subject of consideration, and how they are related in history? As regards these two points of view, it is desirable to show in what sense the history of Philosophy is here taken, in order to see clearly what we are about. . . .

Problem: How can Eternal Truth Emerge in Philosophy which Changes over Time? (Introduction, A)

The thought which may first occur to us in the history of Philosophy, is that the subject itself contains an inner contradiction. For Philosophy aims at understanding what is unchangeable, eternal, in and for itself [i.e., known to itself]: its end is Truth. But history tells us of that which has at one time existed, at another time has vanished, having been expelled by something else. Truth is eternal; it does not fall within the sphere of the transient, and has no history. But if it has a history, and as this history is only the representation of a succession of past forms of knowledge, the truth is not to be found in it, for the truth cannot be what has passed away.

          It might be said that all this argument would affect not only the other sciences, but in like degree the Christian religion, and it might be found inconsistent that a history of this religion and of the other sciences should exist; but it would be superfluous further to examine this argument, for it is immediately contradicted by the very fact that there are such histories. But in order to get a better understanding of this apparent contradiction, we must distinguish between the outward history of a religion or a science and the history of the subject itself. . . .

          The other sciences, including Philosophy, have also an external history like Religion. Philosophy has a history of its origin, diffusion, maturity, decay, revival; a history of its teachers, promoters, and of its opponents often, too, of an outward relation to religion and occasionally to the State. This side of its history likewise gives occasion to interesting questions. Amongst other such, it is asked why Philosophy, the doctrine of absolute Truth, seems to have revealed itself on the whole to a small number of individuals, to special nations, and how it has limited itself to particular periods of time. Similarly with respect to Christianity, to the Truth in a much more universal form than the philosophical, a difficulty has been encountered in respect to the question whether there is a contradiction in the fact that this religion should have appeared so late in time, and that it should have remained so long and should still remain limited to special races of men. But these and other similar questions are too much a matter of detail to depend merely on the general conflict referred to, and when we have further touched upon the unique character of philosophic knowledge, we may go more specially into the aspects which relate to the external existence and external history of Philosophy.

          But as regards the comparison between the history of Religion and that of Philosophy as to inner content, there is not in the latter as there is in Religion a fixed and fundamental truth which, as unchangeable, is apart from history. The content of Christianity, which is Truth, has, however, remained unaltered as such, and has therefore little history or as good as none. Hence in Religion, on account of its very nature as Christianity, the conflict referred to disappears. The errors and additions constitute no difficulty. They are transitory and altogether historical in character.

          The other sciences, indeed, have also according to their content a History, a part of which relates to alterations, and the renunciation of tenets which were formerly current. But a great, perhaps the greater, part of the history relates to what has proved permanent, so that what was new, was not an alteration on earlier acquisitions, but an addition to them. These sciences progress through a process of juxta position. It is true that in Botany, Mineralogy, and so on, much is dependent on what was previously known, but by far the greatest part remains stationary and by means of fresh matter is merely added to without itself being affected by the addition. With a science like Mathematics, history has, in the main, only the pleasing task of recording further X, additions. Thus, to take an example, elementary geometry in so far as it was created by Euclid, may from his time on be regarded as having no further history.

          The history of Philosophy, on the other hand, shows neither the motionlessness of a complete, simple content, nor altogether the onward movement of a peaceful addition of new treasures to those already acquired. It seems merely to afford the spectacle of ever-recurring changes in the whole, such as finally are no longer even connected by a common aim. . . .

Solution: Mind's Self-Knowledge emerges in Stages over Time in Different People (Introduction, A.3.1)

The first question which may be asked in reference to this history [of philosophy], concerns that distinction in regard to the manifestation of the Idea, which has just been noticed. It is the question as to how it happens that Philosophy appears to be a development in time and has a history. The answer to this question encroaches on the metaphysics of Time, and it would be a digression from our object to give here more than the elements on which the answer rests.

It has been shown above in reference to the existence of Mind, that its Being is its activity. Nature, on the contrary, is, as it is; its changes are thus only repetitions, and its movements take the form of a circle merely. To express this better, the activity of Mind is to know itself. I am, immediately, but this I am only as a living organism; as Mind I am only in so far as I know myself. "gnothi seauton" Know thyself, the inscription over the temple of the oracle at Delphi, is the absolute command which is expressed by Mind in its essential character. But consciousness really implies that for myself, I am object to myself. In forming this absolute division between what is mine and myself, Mind constitutes its existence and establishes itself as external to itself. It postulates itself in the externality which is just the universal and the distinctive form of existence in Nature. But one of the forms of externality is Time, and this form requires to be further examined both in the Philosophy of Nature and the finite Mind.

This Being in existence and therefore Being in time is a moment not only of the individual consciousness, which as such is essentially finite, but also of the development of the philosophical Idea in the element of Thought. For the Idea, thought of as being at rest, is, indeed, not in Time. To think of it as at rest, and to preserve it in the form of immediacy is equivalent to its inward perception. But the Idea as concrete, is, as has been shown, the unity of differences; it is not really rest, and its existence is not really sense-perception, but as differentiation within itself and therefore as development, it comes into existent Being and into externality in the element of Thought, and thus pure Philosophy appears in thought as a progressive existence in time. But this element of Thought is itself abstract and is the activity of a single consciousness. Mind is, however, not only to be considered as individual, finite consciousness, but as that Mind which is universal and concrete within itself; this concrete universality, however, comprehends all the various sides and modes evolved in which it is and becomes object to the Idea. Thus Mind's thinking comprehension of self is at the same time the progression of the total actuality evolved. This progression is not one which takes its course through the thought of an individual and exhibits itself in a single consciousness, for it shows itself to be universal Mind presenting itself in the history of the world in all the richness of its form. The result of this development is that one form, one stage in the Idea comes to consciousness in one particular race, so that this race and this time expresses only this particular form, within which it constructs its universe and works out its conditions. The higher stage, on the other hand, centuries later reveals itself in another race of people. . . .

Spirit Develops to Perfection in the History of Philosophy (Section 3.3.E, Final Result)

To this point the World-spirit has come, and each stage has its own form in the true system of Philosophy; nothing is lost, all principles are preserved, since Philosophy in its final aspect is the totality of forms. This concrete idea is the result of the strivings of spirit during almost twenty-five centuries of earnest work to become objective to itself, to know itself: "What a struggle it was for the mind to know itself" (tantae molis erat, se ipsam cognoscere mentem). All this time was required to produce the philosophy of our day; so tardily and slowly did the World-spirit work to reach this goal. What we pass in rapid review when we recall it, stretched itself out in reality to this great length of time. For in this lengthened period, the Notion of Spirit, invested with its entire concrete development, its external subsistence, its wealth, is striving to bring spirit to perfection, to make progress itself and to develop from spirit. It goes ever on and on, because spirit is progress alone. Spirit often seems to have forgotten and lost itself, but inwardly opposed to itself, it is inwardly working-ever forward (as when Hamlet says of the ghost of his father, " Well said, old mole! canst work i the ground so fast?", until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of earth which divided it from the sun, its Notion, so that the earth crumbles away. At such a time, when the encircling crust, like a soulless decaying tenement, crumbles away", and spirit displays itself arrayed in new youth, the seven league boots are at length adopted. This work of the spirit to know itself, this activity to find itself, is the life of the spirit and the spirit itself. Its result is the Notion which it takes up of itself; the history of Philosophy is a revelation of what has been the aim of spirit throughout its history; it is therefore the world's history in its inner most signification. This work of the human spirit in the recesses of thought is parallel with all the stages of reality; and therefore no philosophy oversteps its own time. The importance which the determinations of thought possessed is another matter, which does not belong to the history of Philosophy. These Notions are the simplest revelation of the World spirit: in their more concrete form they are history.

          We must, therefore, in the first place not take lightly what spirit has won, namely its gains up to the present day. Ancient Philosophy is to be reverenced as necessary, and as a link in this sacred chain, but all the same nothing more than a link. The present is the highest stage reached. In the second place, all the various philosophies are no mere fashionable theories of the time, or anything of a similar nature; they are neither chance products nor the blaze of a fire of straw, nor casual eruptions here and there, but a spiritual, reasonable, forward advance; they are of necessity one Philosophy in its development, the revelation of God, as He knows Himself to be. Where several philosophies appear at the same time, they are different sides which make up one totality forming their basis; and on account of their one-sidedness we see the refutation of the one by the other. In the third place we do not find here feeble little efforts to establish or to criticize this or that particular point; instead of that, each philosophy sets up a new principle of its own, and this must be recognized.

Main Contributions of Philosophy in its Stages

If we glance at the main epochs in the whole history of Philosophy, and grasp the necessary succession of stages in the leading moments, each of which expresses a determinate Idea, we find that after the Oriental whirl of subjectivity [in China and India], which attains to no intelligibility and therefore to no subsistence, the light of thought dawned among the Greeks.

          1. The philosophy of the ancients had the absolute Idea as its thought; and the realization or reality of the same consisted in comprehending the existing present world, and regarding it as it is in its absolute nature. This philosophy did not make its starting-point the Idea itself, but proceeded from the objective as from something given, and transformed the same into the Idea; the Being of Parmenides.

          2. Abstract thought, mind (nous), became known to itself as universal essence or existence, not as subjective thought; the Universal of Plato.

          3. In Aristotle the Notion emerges, free and unconstrained, as comprehending thought, permeating and spiritualizing all the forms which the universe contains. [i.e., "he may be said to have extended his attention to the whole circle of human conceptions, to have penetrated all regions of the actual universal, and to have brought under the subjection of the Notion both their riches and their diversitude" (Sect. 2.3.B).

          4. The Notion as subject, its independence, its inwardness, abstract separation, is represented by the Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics: here we have not the free, concrete form, but universality abstract and in itself formal. [i.e., "Since Skepticism is the annulling of the opposites which in Stoicism and Epicureanism were accepted as the universal principles from which all other opposites took their rise, it likewise is the unity in which these opposites are found as ideal determinations, so that the Idea must now come into consciousness as concrete in itself" (Section 2)]

          5. The thought of totality, the intelligible world, is the concrete Idea as we have seen it with the Neo-Platonists. This principle is ideality generally speaking, which is present in all reality, but not the Idea which knows itself: this is not reached until the principle of subjectivity, individuality, found a place in it, and God as spirit became actual to Himself in self-consciousness.

          6. But it has been the work of modern times to grasp this Idea as spirit, as the Idea that knows itself. In order to proceed from the conscious Idea to the self-conscious, we must have the infinite opposition, namely the fact that the Idea has come to the consciousness of being absolutely severed in two [i.e., between matter and spirit]. As spirit had the thought of objective existence, Philosophy thus perfected the intellectuality of the world, and produced this spiritual world as an object existing beyond present reality, like Nature, the first creation of spirit. The work of the spirit now consisted in bringing this Beyond back to reality, and guiding it into self-consciousness. This is accomplished by self-consciousness thinking itself, and recognizing absolute existence to be the self-consciousness that thinks itself. With Descartes pure thought directed itself on that separation [between matter and spirit] which we spoke of above. Self-consciousness, in the first place, thinks of itself as consciousness; therein is contained all objective reality, and the positive, intuitive reference of its reality to the other side. With Spinoza Thought and Being [i.e., matter] are opposed [as two attributes of God] and yet identical; he has the intuitive perception of substance, but the knowledge of substance in his case is external. We have here the principle of reconciliation taking its rise from thought as such, in order to abrogate the subjectivity of thought: this is the case in Leibnitz's monad, which possesses the power of representation [of the whole universe].

          7. In the second place, self-consciousness thinks of itself as being self-consciousness; in being self-conscious it is independent, but still in this independence it has a negative relation to what is outside self-consciousness. This is infinite subjectivity, which appears at one time as the critique of thought in the case of Kant, and at another time, in the case of Fichte, as the tendency or impulse towards the concrete. Absolute, pure, infinite form is expressed as self-consciousness, the Ego.

          8. This is a light that breaks forth on spiritual substance, and shows absolute content and absolute form to be identical; substance is in itself identical with knowledge. Self-consciousness thus, in the third place, recognizes its positive relation as its negative, and its negative as its positive, or, in other words, recognizes these opposite activities as the same, i.e. it recognizes pure Thought or Being as self-identity, and this again as separation. This is intellectual perception; but it is requisite in order that it should be in truth intellectual, that it should not be that merely immediate perception of the eternal and the divine which we hear of, but should be absolute knowledge. . . . Pure thought has advanced to the opposition of the subjective and objective; the true reconciliation of the opposition is the perception that this opposition, when pushed to its absolute extreme, resolves itself; as Schelling says, the opposites are in themselves identical and not only in themselves, but eternal life consists in the very process of continually producing the opposition and continually reconciling it. To know opposition in unity, and unity in opposition this is absolute knowledge; and science is the knowledge of this unity in its whole development by means of itself.

The Culmination of All Philosophy in the Self-Consciousness of Absolute Spirit

This is then the demand of all time and of Philosophy. A new epoch has arisen in the world. It would appear as if the World-spirit had at last succeeded in stripping off from itself all alien objective existence, and apprehending itself at last as absolute Spirit, in developing from itself what for it is objective, and keeping it within its own power, yet remaining at rest all the while. The strife of the finite self-consciousness with the absolute self- consciousness, which last seemed to the other to lie outside of itself, now comes to an end. Finite self-consciousness has ceased to be finite; and in this way absolute self-consciousness has, on the other hand, attained to the reality which it lacked before. This is the whole history of the world in general up to the present time, and the history of Philosophy in particular, the sole work of which is to depict this strife. Now, indeed, it seems to have reached its goal, when this absolute self-consciousness, which it had the work of representing, has ceased to be alien, and when spirit accordingly is realized as spirit. For it becomes such only as the result of its knowing itself to be absolute spirit, and this it knows in real [philosophical] scientific knowledge. Spirit produces itself as Nature, as the State; nature is its unconscious work, in the course of which it appears to itself something different, and not spirit; but in the State, in the deeds and life of History, as also of Art, it brings itself to pass with consciousness; it knows very various modes of its reality, yet they are only modes. In [philosophical] scientific knowledge alone it knows itself as absolute spirit; and this knowledge, or spirit, is its only true existence. This then is the standpoint of the present day, and the series of spiritual forms is with it for the present concluded.

          At this point I bring this history of Philosophy to a close. It has been my desire that you should learn from it that the history of Philosophy is not a blind collection of imaginary ideas, nor a fortuitous progression. I have rather sought to show the necessary development of the successive philosophies from one another, so that the one of necessity presupposes another preceding it. The general result of the history of Philosophy is this: in the first place, that throughout all time there has been only one Philosophy, the contemporary differences of which constitute the necessary aspects of the one principle; in the second place, that the succession of philosophic systems is not due to chance, but represents the necessary succession of stages in the development of this science; in the third place, that the final philosophy of a period is the result of this development, and is truth in the highest form which the self-consciousness of spirit affords of itself. The latest philosophy contains therefore those which went before; it embraces in itself all the different stages thereof; it is the product and result of those that preceded it. We can now, for example, be Platonists no longer. Moreover, we must raise ourselves once for all above the pettinesses of individual opinions, thoughts, objections, and difficulties; and also above our own vanity, as if our individual thoughts were of any particular value. For to apprehend the inward substantial spirit is the standpoint of the individual; as parts of the whole, individuals are like blind men, who are driven forward by the indwelling spirit of the whole. Our standpoint now is accordingly the knowledge of this Idea as spirit, as absolute Spirit, which in this way opposes to itself another spirit, the finite, the principle of which is to know absolute spirit, in order that absolute spirit may become existent for it.

STUDY QUESTIONS

Please answer all of the following questions.

1. In the section on the "Three Stages of Spirit", describe the nature of subjective spirit.

2. In the section on the "Three Stages of Spirit", describe the nature of objective spirit.

3. In the section on the "Three Stages of Spirit", describe the nature of Absolute Spirit.

4. In the section on "Master and Slave", describe the life and death struggle for dominance.

5. In the section on "Master and Slave", describe why the master is not really independent or the slave really dependent.

6. In the section on the "Philosophy of History," Hegel begins by explaining an apparent conflict in the very idea of a "philosophy of history" since history and philosophy each seem to be doing different things. Explain this apparent conflict and how Hegel solves it.

7. In the section on the "Philosophy of History," explain how private passions often result in misery.

8. In the section on the "Philosophy of History," explain Hegel's house construction and arson analogies.

9. In the section on the Philosophy of History, explain Hegel's seed analogy.

10. In the section on "War", describe how individualism within the community emerges and how war breaks it up.

11. In the section on "War", explain Hegel's ocean analogy.

12. In the section on the "Four Empires," describe how history is the unfolding of Universal Spirit.

13. In the section on the "Four Empires," describe the distinguishing feature of each Empire.

14. In the section on "Art", why, according to Hegel, is art not about nature?

15. In the section on "Art", what are the limitations of art's capacity to express truth?

16. In the section on "Religion", describe Hegel's view of the conflict between the sacred and secular.

17. In the section on "Religion", how, for Hegel, is the conflict between the sacred and secular resolved?

18. In the section "Philosophy: Absolute Spirit Knowing Itself", what is the problem of philosophy and truth that Hegel points out and what is the solution?

19. In the section "Main Contributions of Philosophy in its Stages", what, for Hegel, are the main contributions of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant?

20. In the final section "The Culmination of All Philosophy", according to Hegel, how does the Absolute Spirit obtain self-consciousness?

21. Short essay: please select one of the following and answer it in a minimum of 100 words.

          a. Schopenhauer makes the following general criticism of Hegel: "Indeed there finally results from this [tendency of the mind to work with abstract concepts] a mere juggling with words, of which the most shocking example is afforded us by the mind-destroying Hegelism, in which it is carried to the extent of pure nonsense" [World as Will, Bk 1, Supplement 4]. Illustrate Schopenhauer's point with some passage by Hegel, and discuss how Hegel might respond.

          b. Kierkegaard argues that Hegel's concept of truth collapses into skepticism: "According to Hegel, truth is the continued world-historical process. Each generation, each stage of this process, is legitimated, yet is only an element in the truth. . . . The positive Hegelian truth is as illusory as was happiness in paganism. Only afterwards does one get to know whether or not one has been happy; and similarly the next generation gets to know what truth was in the preceding generation. The great secret of the system (yet this remains unter uns [between us], just like the secret among the Hegelians) is close to Protagoras's sophism 'Everything is relative', except that here everything is relative in the continued progression. But this is no help to the living" (Postcript, 1846, 1.1.1 note). Discuss Kierkegaard's point and how Hegel might respond.

          c. Kierkegaard criticizes Hegel's has rejected the longstanding "law of contraction" that a proposition and its opposite cannot both be true: "As everyone knows, the Hegelian philosophy has done away with the law of contradiction, and Hegel himself has more than once passed a scathing judgment on those thinkers who remained in the sphere of understanding and reflection, and therefore insisted on an either/or. . . . Hegel is utterly and absolutely right in saying that when viewed eternally, sub specie aeterni [from the viewpoint of eternity], in the language of abstraction, in pure thought and pure being, there is no aut-aut [either-or]. Where the devil should it be, once abstraction has taken away the contradiction? . . . On the other hand, Hegel is just as wrong when, in forgetting the abstraction, he plunges out of it and down into the realm of existence in order, with might and main, to annul the double aut [either-or]" (Postscript, 1846, 2.2.3.1). Explain Kierkegaard's point and how Hegel might respond.

          d. Kierkegaard criticizes common comparisons between Hegel's and Hereclitus's respective notions of constant change: "Misled by constant talk of a continual process in which opposites combine in a higher unity, and then in a higher unity again, etc., people have drawn a parallel between Hegel's doctrine and that of Heraclitus, that everything is in a flux and nothing remains constant. But this is a misunderstanding, because everything said in Hegel's philosophy about process and becoming is an illusion" (Postscript, 1846, 2.2.3.1 note). Discuss Kiekegaard's point that change for Hegel is an illusion, and how Hegel might respond.

          e. Kierkegaard criticizes Hegel's attempt to reduce ethics to an activity of the state: "The desperate attempt of the abortive Hegelian ethics to make the state the highest ethical authority is a most unethical attempt to finitize individuals, an unethical flight from the category of individuality into that of the race" (Postscript, 1846, 2.2.4.A.3, note). Explain Kierkegaard's point and how Hegel might respond.

          f. Nietzsche makes the following criticism of Hegel: "The belief that one is a latecomer of the ages is, in any case, paralyzing and depressing: but it must appear dreadful and devastating when such a belief one day by a bold inversion raises this latecomer to godhood as the true meaning and goal of all previous events, when his miserable condition is equated with a completion of world-history. Such a point of view has accustomed the Germans to talk of a 'world-process' and to justify their own age as the necessary result of this world-process" (Untimely Meditations, 1876, 2.8). Explain Nietzsche's point and how Hegel might respond.

          g. Nietzsche makes the following criticism of Hegel's view of history as God's path to self-revelation: "History understood in this [developmental] Hegelian fashion has been mockingly called God's sojourn on earth, though the god referred to has been created only by history. This god, however, became transparent and comprehensible to himself within the Hegelian craniums and has already ascended all the dialectically possible steps of his evolution up to this self-revelation: so that for Hegel the climax and terminus of the world-process coincided with his own existence in Berlin" (Untimely Meditations, 1876, 2.8) Explain Nietzsche's point and how Hegel might respond.

          h. Dewey makes the following criticism of Hegel's view of war between conflicting countries: "No philosopher has ever thought so consistently and so wholly in terms of strife and overcoming as Hegel. When he says the "world history is the world judgment" he means judgment in the sense of assize [i.e., judicial inquest], and judgment as victory of one and defeat of another—victory being the final proof that the world spirit has now passed from one nation to take up its residence in another. To be defeated in a way which causes the nation to take a secondary position among nations is a sign that divine judgment has been passed upon it" (German Philosophy and Politics, 1915, 3). Discuss Dewey's point and how Hegel might respond.

          i. Dewey makes the following criticism of Hegel's concept of freedom: "Hegel's statement that the fundamental principle of history is the progressive realization of freedom does not mean what an uninstructed English reader would naturally take it to mean. Freedom is always understood in terms of Reason. Its expression in history means that Thought has progressively become conscious of itself; that is, has made itself its own object. Freedom is the consciousness of freedom. Liberty of action has little to do with it" (German Philosophy and Politics, 1915, 3). Discuss Dewey's point and how Hegel might respond.

          j. Dewey makes the following criticism of Hegel's devaluing of concrete situations: "Although Hegel asserted in explicit form that the end of states and institutions is to further the realization of the freedom of all, his effect was to consecrate the Prussian State and to enshrine bureaucratic absolutism. Was this apologetic tendency accidental, or did it spring from something in the logic of the notions that were employed? Surely the latter. If we talk about the state and the individual, rather than about this or that political organization and this or that group of needy and suffering human beings, the tendency is to throw the glamor and prestige, the meaning and value attached to the general notion, over the concrete situation and thereby to cover up the defects of the latter and disguise the need of serious reforms" (Reconstruction in Philosophy, 1920, 8). Discuss Dewey's point about general notions eclipsing concrete situations and how Hegel might respond.

          k. Russell makes the following criticism of Hegel's notion of freedom: "One might have supposed that democracy would be the appropriate form of government where all are free, but not so. Democracy and aristocracy alike belong to the stage where some are free, despotism to that where one is free, and monarchy to that in which all are free. This is connected with the very odd sense in which Hegel uses the word "freedom." For him (and so far we may agree) there is no freedom without law; but he tends to convert this, and to argue that wherever there is law there is freedom. Thus "freedom" for him, means little more than the right to obey the law" ("Hegel", History of Philosophy, 1945). Discuss Russell's point and how Hegel might respond.

          l. Russell makes the following criticism of Hegel's view that ethics is tied to the state: "do the citizens exist for the sake of the State, or the State for the sake of the citizens? Hegel holds the former view; the liberal philosophy that comes from Locke holds the latter. It is clear that we shall only attribute intrinsic value to the State if we think of it as having a life of its own, as being in some sense a person. At this point, Hegel's metaphysic becomes relevant to the question of value. A person is a complex whole, having a single life; can there be a super-person, composed of persons as the body is composed of organs, and having a single life which is not the sum of the lives of the component persons? If there can be such a super-person, as Hegel thinks, then the State may be such a being, and it may be as superior to ourselves as the whole body is to the eye. But if we think this super-person a mere metaphysical monstrosity, then we shall say that the intrinsic value of a community is derived from that of its members, and that the State is a means, not an end" ("Hegel", History of Philosophy, 1945). Discuss Russell's point and how Hegel might respond.

          m. Karl Popper criticizes Hegel's philosophy for being unfalsifiable: "Hegel's intention is to operate freely with all contradictions. 'All things are contradictory in themselves', he insists, in order to defend a position which means the end not only of all science, but of all rational argument. And the reason why he wishes to admit contradictions is that he wants to stop rational argument, and with it scientific and intellectual progress. By making argument and criticism impossible, he intends to make his own philosophy proof against all criticism, so that it may establish itself as a reinforced dogmatism, secure from every attack, and the unsurmountable summit of all philosophical development" (Open Society and its Enemies, 1945, 12). Illustrate Popper's point with some passage by Hegel, and discuss how Hegel might respond.

          m. Robert Pippin makes the following criticism of Hegel's discussion of Master and Slave: "Hegel's account of self-consciousness in chapter IV of his Phenomenology of Spirit is the most influential, and perhaps the most insightful, passage in his works. Yet, like Plato's allegory of the cave, it seems to point in too many directions to allow a consensus about its meaning" (review of "Hegel on Self-Consciousness", 2011).  Is there a dominant point to Hegel's master-slave discussion that might clarify its meaning?