Hegel’s Phenomenology: Paths to Revolution

Abstract

We are so used to revolutions that we accept them as normal occurrences. It is therefore difficult to remember what an immense shock the French Revolution was, not only to those who were immediately affected, but to those Europeans who merely observed its course from a distance. No writer can remind us more forcefully than Hegel of how shaking an impact these events had. Fifteen years after its outbreak Hegel saw nothing less than the end and fulfillment of the European spirit in the French Revolution. If there was to be a future, his own age, an “age of transition”, could not know it.¹ Politically it was a vacuum. Europe was in an indefinable condition about which nothing could be said. Its only immediate achievement, German philosophy, had explicated the moral implication of the Revolution. As such it was a spiritual completion, and Hegel found it wanting in many respects. It was purely a triumph of intellectual fulfillment, not a sign of new possibilities. The real philosophical reward for having seen the disintegration of Europe’s religious and secular spirit was to understand its meaning. It was the historical equivalent of being at the end of time.