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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: History
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Hegel points out that all personal relations can ... be reduced to the fundamental relation of master and slave, of domination and submission. Each must strive to assert and prove himself, and he who has not the nature, the courage, and the general capacity for preserving his independence, must be reduced to servitude. This charming theory of personal relations has, of course, its counterpart in Hegel's theory of international relations. Nations must assert themselves on the Stage of History; it is their duty to attempt the domination of the World.
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The lectures on the History of Philosophy deal disproportionately with the various epochs, and in some parts date from the beginning of Hegel's career. In trying to subject history to the order of logic they sometimes misconceive the filiation of ideas. But they created the history of philosophy as a scientific study. They showed that a philosophical theory is not an accident or whim, but an exponent of its age determined by its antecedents and environments, and handing on its results to the future. (W. W.; X.) Hegelianism in England.
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Hegel suggests that in religion truth is discovered from outside of it, meaning that it is understood through ritual (Hegel 1840, 71). In the definition of positive religion the source of truth is unknown. The messenger is not what is important for Hegel, but it is the truth revealed that he is concerned with, "through whatever individual the truth may have been given, the external matter is historical, and this is indifferent to the absolute content and to itself, since the person is not the import of the doctrine" (Hegel 1840, 71). For Hegel what matters is that Christ was someone in history.
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Hegel's writing style is difficult to read; he is described by Bertrand Russell in the History of Western Philosophy as the single most difficult philosopher to understand. This is partly because Hegel tried to develop a new form of thinking and logic, which he called "speculative reason" and which includes the more famous concept of "dialectic," to try to overcome what he saw as the limitations of both common sense and of traditional philosophy at grasping philosophical problems and the relation between thought and reality.
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Hegel conceived the subject matter of philosophy to be reality as a whole. This reality, or the total developmental process of everything that is, he referred to as the Absolute, or Absolute Spirit. According to Hegel, the task of philosophy is to chart the development of Absolute Spirit. This involves (1) making clear the internal rational structure of the Absolute; (2) demonstrating the manner in which the Absolute manifests itself in nature and human history; and (3) explicating the teleological nature of the Absolute, that is, showing the end or purpose toward which the Absolute is directed.
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It is clear that Hegel considers the Phenomenology of Spirit not so much as an exercise in philosophy as a type of induction or education of the reader to the standpoint of philosophical thought itself. As such, its structure has been compared to that of an "educational novel", having an abstractly conceived protagonist -- the bearer of an evolving set of "shapes of consciousness" -- whose progress and set backs the reader follows. At least this is how the work sets out, but in the later sections the earlier "shapes of consciousness" become replaced with what seems more to be shapes of human social existence, and the work comes to look like a type of evolution of interlinked forms of existence and thought characterising the history of western European civilization from the Greeks to the end of the nineteenth century. The fact that it ends in the attainment of "Absolute Knowing" seems to support the traditionalist reading in which a "triumphalist" narrative of the growth of western civilization is combined with the theological interpretation of God's self-manifestation and self-comprehension. Supporters of the non-metaphysical Hegel... have argued that what this history tracks is the development of a type of society in which all dogmatic bases of thought have been gradually replaced with demands for conceptually-articulated justifications.
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