Freedom and the Logic of History

Abstract

A key problem in Hegel’s philosophy of history is how to understand the world historical development it depicts. A standard interpretation of this has been to see it as secularized eschatology, as the transposition of divine providence onto reason. On this view, the realization of freedom that unfolds in the philosophy of history from antiquity to nineteenth century Europe is a path laid out in advance by reason. This chapter argues that while there are teleological elements to Hegel’s philosophy of history, these cannot be understood as the driving force in Hegel’s understanding of historical development. There is a fundamental tension at the heart of Hegel’s philosophy of history. On the one hand, he assumes a central role for self-determining agents in world history, and on the other hand, he describes historical development as the cunning of reason. The developments of history take place largely through individuals who are able to discern in a collapsing shape of life the seed of a new shape of life. They may not know this, as something that they could articulate, nevertheless through their passion they pursue it. They discern somehow the tension between an emerging concept and the concepts that govern an existing form of life and they bring to a head the dissatisfaction at play in society. The deficiencies in an existing form of life collapse and transition into a new form of life. The philosophical role is to understand the necessity at play in these transformations. At the heart of what Hegel is trying to understand is how we can provide a justification for the emergence of a new concept. The argument of the paper is that Hegel’s logical and methodological terms such as the negative, being at home with oneself and otherness, reason and the understanding provide a far better basis for understanding historical development than teleology. In the first instance they allow us to understand how it is that a form of life comes to be satisfied, and why it ultimately falls apart. This approach will allow us to understand the central role of the state in world history, and why he thinks of it as the realization of freedom.