HAS HISTORY SHOWN US WE NEED TO MOVE BEYOND HEGEL’S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY?

Abstract

Hegel’s philosophy of history seems in many ways too outdated and committed to impossible presuppositions to be viable for us. However, if we take Geist to be more or less equivalent to self-conscious life, and we look at Geist as a species-term, we can begin to see how one might stay within the Hegelian system and still have something to say to the twenty-first century. In particular, if we take up Thomas Khurana’s arguments about Kantian and Hegelian freedom as a kind of life giving formation to itself, one is equipped with a way of updating Hegel that remains consistent with his other views. In particular, Hegelian freedom is that of having no authority govern- ing one’s thoughts and actions external to oneself. That, however, looks as if it might be empty and therefore useless for action-guiding. In his Logic, Hegel says that all dialectical development sees itself as laying down provisory fixed points (what he calls «tied knots») to give content to what is otherwise an indeterminate movement. The tying and untying of these «knots» is dialec- tical both in thought and in history. We can also turn to two of Hegel’s closest philosophical allies, E. Gans and F.W. Carové, to get an idea about how to take this further.