This is another attempt to expound Hegel. I suppose that it would be superfluous and very possibly self-defeating to try to justify it at the outset. But it is worth looking at the difficulties which beset all such attempts.

The enterprise can easily go awry in one of two opposite ways. Either one can end up being terribly clear and sounding very reasonable at the cost of distorting, even bowdlerizing Hegel. Or one can remain faithful but impenetrable, so that in the end readers will turn with relief to the text in order to understand the commentary.

The reader will have to judge whether I have succeeded in avoiding either or both of these pitfalls. But I should like to explain now how I have tried. Part I of this book is an attempt to expound the central lines of Hegel's conception without confining myself to his own terms. I recognize that this is a hazardous undertaking. But I hope to remain faithful to Hegel's intentions by placing this outline of his philosophy in relation to the main aspirations of his generation, which his philosophical vision was intended to meet in its own unique way.

Chapter 1 is thus devoted to an attempt to describe the aspirations of the generation of young Romantics of the 1790s, from which Hegel sprang and against whom he defined himself. After a brief chapter on Hegel's development, I then try in chapter in to present an outline of his central ideas.

This magnificent Hegelian synthesis has dissolved. After achieving an extraordinary ascendancy over the German intellectual world in the 1820s and 1830s, it began to wane a decade after his death in 1831. We think of the 1840s as the great age of rebellion against the Hegelian system, the age of the Young Hegelians, Feuerbach, Ruge, Stirner, Marx, the time also when Kierkegaard began his short, intense intellectual career.

But to be the object of virulent attack by a generation of young thinkers is still to be very much on the agenda. Much worse was in store for Hegel's absolute idealism. In the 1850s and 1860s it fell into virtual oblivion. Hegel was vaguely remembered in Bismarckian Germany as the state philosopher of ‘Restoration’ Prussia, and peripherally approved of or vilified in consequence. There is an amusing bit of correspondence between Marx and Engels of the 1870s in which they give vent to their impatience at the ignorance of the younger generation. The occasion was a footnote by a young Social- Democratic editor in which he referred to Hegel as the philosopher of the ‘royal Prussian Idea of the state’. The incident illustrates how much the Hegelian roots of Marx and Engels' thought came to be misunderstood even in their own movement.

Hegel, of course, made a ‘comeback’ in Germany towards the end of the century. Lasson's critical work in producing new, more scholarly editions of his work stimulated and was stimulated by this renewed interest.

I have been trying to present in the preceding chapters an idea of the fundamental problems and aspirations which Hegel's philosophy was addressed to. And I have suggested that we can best see these in the light of the yearning of his time to find a way of life and thought which would unite two powerful aspirations, which were both connected yet opposed. One is to that unity with nature, other men and himself which man demands as an expressive being; the other is to the radical moral autonomy which reached paradigm expression in Kant and Fichte.

I have suggested that Hegel by the early 1800s had come to realize how deeply these two aspirations were opposed to each other. In particular, he had come to see that freedom required the breaking up of expressive unity, of the original undivided wholeness within man and communion with other men and nature, which he like many contemporaries attributed to an earlier age – principally that of ancient Greece. The sense of fragmentation within, and of exile in a dead, mechanical universe and society, which so many writers of the age had experienced and testified to, was not an inexplicable and unmitigated loss of an earlier paradise. Rather it was the result of an ineluctable development, essential for the full realization of man as rational and free agent.

But the story was not to end there. This necessary division was to be healed in a higher reconciliation.

Hegel as a young man in the 1780s, first at the Stuttgart Gymnasium then at the Tübinger Stift, was deeply moved by the expressivist current of his time. The image of a whole, integrated life in which man was at one with himself, and men were at one with each other in society, also assumed its paradigmatic form for him in the classical past of Greece.

But there were two other important poles of his thought and aspiration which were already evident at that time and remained vital to him through many transformations: the first was the moral aspiration of the Enlightenment, that man should at last come to the freedom of self-direction through reason. Later he will come to think of Kant as the paradigm proponent of this aspiration, but at the beginning Mendelssohn and Lessing were more important for him. The second major reference point was the Christian religion. That theology was one of his preoccupations might be thought to flow normally from the fact that he received his higher education in a theology seminary. But his interest in Christianity was much deeper. Indeed, the theology he was taught at Tubingen aroused his opposition. It is one of the negative poles against which he defines his position in the early writings. And the fact that his conception of the Christian religion underwent profound changes and yet remained central to his basic views right through to the mature system shows that this orientation was not the result of a passing influence.

The Logic exists in two versions, the Science of Logic, which Hegel first published in 1812–16 and partially revised for a second edition just before his death; and the first part of the system of Science, often called the Encyclopaedia, published first in 1817 and afterwards revised as well. I shall draw on both of these (respectively WL and EL) in what follows.

The Logic is the second of the great derivations of Hegel's vision, and a crucial one as we have seen, because it is the only real candidate for the role of strict dialectical proof. If the real exists and has the structure it has by conceptual necessity, then the task of the Logic is to show this conceptual structure by pure conceptual argument.

This may sound mad to ordinary consciousness and indeed to most philosophers. For we think of our concepts as instruments of our thought which may or may not apply adequately to reality. We start off, that is, with a notion of thought as over against the world about which we think. This dualism is linked to another; since a concept or a category is thought of as a universal which can apply to many contents, we are tempted to think of it as an abstract form over against the sensible contents to which it applies.

Having reached the subject, Hegel is now in a position to spell out what has only been implicit in the earlier books. We saw that the categories of Essence as against those of Being make implicit reference to a subject of knowledge. This reference is now made explicit. And this consciousness that the real is for a subject will no longer be lost sight of in the Logic.

This is the first justification for calling this section the book of the Concept. That the world is for a subject means that the world-as-object-of-knowledge is structured by concepts. This was intrinsic to our starting point in the Logic, which is a dialectic of categories, but it is now to be examined explicitly. And it shows Hegel's debt to Kant. But while Hegel's notion of the Concept owes a lot to Kant, it involves a profound transformation of Kant's basic ideas.

Hegel takes the basic Kantian idea of the original unity of apperception which he says ‘belongs to the deepest and most accurate insights that can be found in the critique of reason’ (WL, 11, 221) and gives it a twist which Kant would have received with horror. This original unity is what unites the different representations, and it is this unity which gives them objectivity, i.e., relates them to an object. As just intuitions, the contents of our experience have no objectivity, but as brought together by the ‘I’, and brought together under concepts, they achieve objectivity.

Hegel's philosophy of history and politics belong together, and form the sphere of what he calls ‘objective spirit’. In the system, this comes after subjective and before absolute spirit. Just as we saw that the underlying rational necessity expresses itself in the general structures of the natural world, so it expresses itself even more in the phenomena of the human world. These phenomena, in so far as they have to do with the existence of individual consciousness, are the matter of the sphere of subjective spirit, and in the Encyclopaedia this recapitulates and takes over some of the ground covered in the PhG. But beyond this realm is the whole domain of the public, social, political reality in history which must now be reclaimed for the Concept.

This domain is discussed in the Encyclopaedia §§468–535, and also in the famous cycle of lectures on the philosophy of history, published after Hegel's death from his notes. Chapter VI of the PhG is a summary version of the philosophy of history. Finally, it includes Hegel's work of 1821, the Philosophy of Right, which is taken as the major mature statement of his political philosophy. Certain works of the early 1800s are also useful here, and will be referred to below from time to time.

Hegel's philosophy of history and politics has to be seen in three related frameworks.

This philosophy also has a history. Before examining this, it might be well to take stock, since we have been through a number of histories which are intricated into each other.

In fact there is only one history, that of Spirit, whose different aspects we have been following in examining the development of political society, art, religion and now philosophy. Any given stage in history is a totality in which the same spirit manifests itself in all these different modes. All the different forms (Gestaltungen) of an age belong together.

Philosophy is one side of this. It is a reflection of the spirit of the times. It cannot thus stand over its time. Or rather, in a sense it does, since philosophy always has the same basic insight. So that it can sometimes be thought afterwards to have shown the world the way it had to go – as Neo-Platonic philosophy foreshadowed the reconciliation which Christianity would achieve (GPhil, 150). But on its own level of development, rather than seen in the light of the eternal truths it points to, a philosophy cannot step over its time.

In the dialectic of consciousness, the tension lay between a certain norm of knowledge and what we actually are able to know in attempting to fulfil it. With self-consciousness, the dialectic will be between our idea of ourselves, what we claim to be, and what we actually are. These are the two moments Hegel calls self-certainty and truth. In the earlier dialectic the key notion was knowledge; here the centre of interest shifts to desire and its fulfilment. In our notion of ourselves, the object of our self-certainty is not something towards which we are neutral; on the contrary we are passionately attached to it. When our truth belies this and forces us on to another model of self-certainty, the transition is not made without pain.

And this transition itself is of a different kind. It must not be seen in intellectual terms, that a certain notion of self becomes untenable and has to be abandoned. Rather it is that the attempt to act out a certain idea of ourselves leads to consequences, in which the original idea is certainly undermined because the goal is not reached, but which give rise to the next stage not so much by refuting the previous self-certainty as by the creation of a new situation for man.

The dialectic of self-consciousness is thus a dialectic of human longing and aspiration, and their vicissitudes. What underlies it? What is the form of aspiration, the self-certainty, which can ultimately be fulfilled and which will bring the dialectic to a close?

Absolute knowledge can be seen as the combination of our two highest stages. It is the final unity of subject and world, or from another point of view, of finite subject and infinite subject, or of absolute substance and subjectivity. But this union is there implicitly (an sich) as religion; whereas the moral consciousness which was the highest stage of the chapter on Spirit contained explicitly (für sich) the notion that the subject's will is at one with the universal.

The result is a unity of the self and the essence or substance of things; which unity as always can be seen as a convergence from each direction; the self is lifted up to essence by seeing itself as the vehicle of Geist; but the essence or substance ‘comes down’ to the self in a sense in coming to grasp itself as subject (and therefore needing a finite subject as its vehicle).

When this comes to full consciousness it yields a form of knowledge, which Hegel calls absolute knowledge. What is this? It cannot be expressed in one proposition, for it is simply a grasp of the true nature of things, and this can only be expressed dialectically. Absolute knowledge is the full understanding that substance must become subject, that subject must go beyond itself, become divided, be over against itself as object, in order to return to unity with itself.

The fulfilment of Spirit therefore requires the growth of a community which will fully express and embody reason. And since spirit posits the world of space and time in order to realize itself, this fulfilment and hence also the community of reason can be considered the goal of history. This is how Hegel speaks of it in Reason in History:

In this passage, both sides of the goal of spirit in history are expressed: spirit is trying to come to an understanding, a knowledge of self. But in order to do this it must bring into existence a reality, a spiritual community which must also be a real community (the ‘geistige Welt’ must be embodied in a ‘Staat’) which is adequate to its concept. Or again:

Thus history is to be understood teleologically as directed in order to realize Geist. What happens in history has sense, justification, indeed, the highest justification.

We have in the logical Idea the pure inner thought of the world. But the truth of this entails that it go over not just in inner necessity but in reality into a world. And hence the Logic ends by deducing the fact of nature. In other words we have just shown that everything emanates from an inner necessity and thus that Being is self-related as a totality, and hence immediate. But this as Hegel says, is no transition, or becoming; it is not like the moving from a less perfect to the more perfect form. These transitions were between levels within the totality. Here we have nothing but the totality itself as we have already shown it to be.

The point is that real self-subsistent necessity has to inhere in an independent reality. It must be a free necessity, that is, must emanate from the reality itself as its own. And this means that there must be a free self-subsisting being which has its own necessity. Hence says Hegel the freedom of the Idea entails that it ‘leaves itself free’ (WL, 11, 505); that it must issue in, be a reality which is not held in the lead strings of the Idea as an external source of control, but which itself has this necessity. But to be is to be determinate. Determinancy implies that things are really external to each other; and this means that they exist in space and time.