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Dr. Michael Sugrue earned his BA at the University of Chicago and PhD at Columbia University.

Being given only 1 lecture to cover the philosophy of Hegel is a very difficult task.

It's so huge, so comprehensive, so exhausting, as simply to follow Hegel's lines of reasoning and to plow your way through Hegel's books makes it a kind of a difficult project.

Woody Allen once said that he had gone to a speed reading class, and he learned how to read War and Peace in 45 minutes.

And when he was finished, he said, it was about Russia.

I have some of the same feelings about teaching you

You're going to find that it's about the world.

And all philosophies are about everything, if they're any good at all, so it's not especially illuminating to find out that it's about the world.

So let me take as my point of departure the idea of spirit in German, Geist.

It's central to his conception of reasoning, to his conception of history, to the big topics in Hegel's thinking.

Now, Geist is translated in English as spirit.

It's the part of the world, the part of that which is, which isn't nature, which isn't matter, or isn't exclusively matter, isn't exclusively physical.

of the world that isn't the tables and chairs, the animals and plants.

Geist is exactly everything that isn't nature.

would be worthwhile to consider the origins of the word Geist.

has the same roots as 2 words that are in contemporary English.

1 is gist, as in the gist of an argument, the kind of logical center, the logical marrow of a series of thoughts.

So somehow the essence, the logical essence of something, the gist of an argument, is connected to Hegel's idea of Geist, built into the idea.

And a second word that we have in contemporary English,

which is derived from the same root as the German word, Geist, is geyser.

The kind of natural phenomenon they have in Yellowstone Park, every hour or so, old faithful, the geyser shoots water under pressure out of the ground on a more or less regular schedule.

The idea of a geyser, the idea of a natural upwelling, is also implied in Hegel's idea of geist and The combination of logical essence or essentiality, logical, I don't know, marrow of an argument, in this case the logical marrow of human existence, of human being, the plan of all of human life, is what he's driving at with the idea of a Geist.

Geist is spirit, Geist is soul, Geist is mind, but Geist as Hegel uses it is not, does not specifically refer to the individual minds or psyches that you and I might have.

I mean, that's part of it, but it's a great deal more than that.

And in order to understand what more it could mean, or what its significance is, we have to drop back a little bit to my lecture on Kant.

I finished up Kant by talking about Kant's political philosophy.

The reason I did that is because I wanted to discuss briefly the idea of subjectivity, the idea of personality, the idea of being an ego.

And Kant thinks, and this is very important for understanding Hegel, because he's in

the next generation of German idealism after Kant.

Kant thinks that personality, that subjectivity, is not just a quality of this person, and this person, and this person.

There are other subjects, other rational, free, moral agents that are not people.

For example, God, the angels, or in Cato's case of Kant, nations, nations of free rational moral agents.

That's why the categorical imperative applies to them.

The categorical imperative does apply to all free rational agents, and Kant sees nations as being such rational agents.

In other words, his idea of subjectivity, of personality, is not limited to the meat that individual human beings are.

this idea of a collective subject, this idea of a personality that inheres in things larger and more complex than individual human beings.

But he's going to go beyond Kant's idea that individual nations are rational, free, moral agents, that they have moral personality and moral responsibility, and instead he's going to view the entire human species as being 1 enormous collective subject.

So in other words, the whole species of human beings, from the very beginning of human history and human existence, form a life history which is like the life history of an individual human being.

What this means is that the phases of human history are analogized, and I think more than analogized, actually identified with the phases of development in an individual human being.

So the human species comes into existence in a kind of infancy, ignorance,

superstition, and an inadequate understanding of its own qualities, of its own capacities, and of its own potentials.

In other words, primitive human beings didn't understand the nature of the entire human project, of all of human existence, for the same reason that 5 and six-year-olds don't understand what it's like to be an adult, because they lack the appropriate experience and they lack the appropriate

development and knowledge that comes from experiencing the world.

Hegel holds the view that all human beings taken together on a global, universal scale.

And this emphasis on the global, the universal, is very much a part of German idealism.

You hear resonances of Kant in many parts of Hegel.

Hegel thinks that all human beings form 1 giant collective subject.

And that means that we can go back and look at the actual phases of human history as the kind of life story of this giant subject.

And he thinks that it is possible not only to look back on these phases of development, but actually discern the process of maturation, the process of development, the process by which this giant subject, this ultimate subject, realizes the potentials that were in it from the very beginning.

kind of, I mean, it's an analogy, but it has a certain plausibility to it.

There is something buried deep within children that allows them to eventually become scientists or mathematicians or whatever.

They have some sort of potential for logical analysis, for the comprehensive articulation of their experiences, and they also have the ability to learn from their experiences what they are and what the world around them is.

And that, according to Hegel, is what the career of all of human history amounts to.

So we could say, when you stop and think about it, that Geist is the soul of all of humanity.

It's the part of all of human beings which is not material, which is intellectual, which is rational, which is somehow metaphysical.

very much in the German tradition, but in addition to that he's going for much bigger game.

He is trying to do what may well be impossible.

He's certainly the last philosopher to attempt this project.

The project that Hegel has is to present a comprehensive interpretation of human existence.

It's an attempt to say this is what human beings are, This is what their whole career amounts to.

And by implication, he hopes to kind of plot the trajectory of human history and of human life and find out also where human existence is going.

He honestly thinks and seriously believes that it is possible to discern the ultimate goal of human existence.

He believes that it is possible to rationally find out what the goal of humanity is,

what the point of human existence is, And he's certainly the last of the great philosophers to attempt such a perhaps impossible task.

Now we found when we studied Kant that in some respects Kantian moral theory is a

way of taking the biblical moral theories, the idea that we ought to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, of taking the golden rule, of taking essentially Christian ethics, and putting it in a kind of formulation which allows it to be intellectually respectable in the age of idealistic philosophical systems.

In other words, Kant takes Christian morality and provides a justification for

it, which is independent of scripture, but which is

viewed as being essentially complementary to scripture.

There's no conflict between scripture properly understood through right reason and the results that we get when we apply reasoning to questions like the categorical imperative, the questions of universal morality and universal ethical judgment.

Well Hegel is going to do something analogous.

Hegel wishes to take not Christian ethics but Christian eschatology, the idea that there will be an end of the world, that the end of the world is part of God's universal plan for all human beings, and essentially dip it into the vocabulary and into the patterns of thought characteristic of German idealism.

So where Kant takes Christian morals and gives it a logical foundation, a logical connection to the trends of Enlightenment thought, what Hegel does is take the idea of an end of the world, of a millennial change in the human condition, where there'll be a reconciliation between God and man.

Those of you who are familiar with the New Testament will know that the book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament, details the end of the world.

to cash in everybody's chips at some point and say enough is enough, finally I'm going to end this progress from the earliest condition of human beings in the Garden of Eden or moving up the ladder of evolution or wherever they stem from and he is actually going to finish this project.

who has a providential plan for all of human beings.

Not a sparrow falls but not God knows about it.

Well there's something like that built in to the Hegelian philosophy of history.

Hegel believes that he can seriously tell us what the ultimate purpose of human history is.

He can tell us what the whole goal of all of human existence is and what all of human history drives towards.

I think most people would hold that he was

I think that's a fairly reasonable assessment, but in part it's just the grandeur and the enormous aspiration of this attempt, which at least immediately should involve our attention.

Now what Hegel wants to do is go back and look at all the history he

can have access to, and that's not very much.

Even though Germany put together a very remarkable historical culture in the 19th century, the amount of actual historical data that Hegel has to work with is not very good, not very accurate, not very comprehensive.

And thus, his history itself suffers from certain defects with regard to that.

But he does think that he sees the broad general outlines in the

Progress is central to Hegel's conception of history, and his conception of history is central to

What he adds to the rationalism and idealism of the German Enlightenment is the idea of history.

He has freedom and rationality existing in space and time.

He brings down the world of metaphysics, in other words, and puts it here in the realm of physics.

It's not that there aren't 2 worlds, a metaphysical and a physical realm, it's just they seem to beautifully overlap.

sort of pantheism in Hegel, which you also see in Tolstoy, if those of you who know Tolstoy's novels, where there's a vast kind of oceanic feeling that you get, and you come away with the feeling if you read War and Peace that God is really running everything and that we're all just atoms in this vast flux, this vast pattern put together according to some rules that we ourselves are incapable of completely discerning.

he is completely able to discern these, which is, again, perhaps the vanity of

But give him credit just for the project that he attempts.

Now, when we're dealing with Hegel's philosophy of history, what we're going to be dealing with is the Geist, the human soul, the human spirit.

And how is it that we can account for the fact that the Geist used to be different?

That human self-consciousness, that human society, that human culture, all of which are expressions of the Geist, incidentally, that

How is it that something perfect, ultimately rational, ultimately real, where the capital R, the German philosophers are famous for capitalizing their nouns to make them abstractions.

It doesn't actually happen in the German language.

But in order to get the sense of how they're using words in unusual and unfamiliar ways, we usually capitalize Hegelian rationality, Geist, and things like that.

Well, the special use of the geist demands in a way that we inquire how the geist could have come to have the properties that it does,

and how it is that it's changed over time, and are there laws by which we can describe and then implicitly predict the future development of human history.

According to Hegel's understanding of human history and human spirit, each time, each epoch, each historical moment has its own geist, has its own level of maturity.

And each great historical epoch makes a contribution to the development of this overall human spirit.

It's something analogous to, I don't know if you know, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the idea of an oversoul, right, that connects us all.

Well, the oversoul has been developing over time.

Emerson was a great fan of German idealism.

And the Geist, the spirit, has been developing over time, And it hasn't been developing in a haphazard fashion.

It's been developing according to its own necessary laws.

And these laws are the laws of rationality and freedom.

1 thing you'll want to note when you study German philosophy, particularly German idealism, is that all the German metaphysicians, Kant as well as Hegel, connect the idea of freedom and rationality.

Freedom and rationality are always closely bound up.

Now, the Geist is the essence of human existence.

It's the part of human beings that isn't meat, that isn't the corpse that we carry around with us.

And each historical epoch has a different spirit or soul and that spirit is expressed in the characteristic cultural productions of that time.

Most of us can see some sort of connection between the Renaissance humanism of say Machiavelli's political theory and the development of say Renaissance humanism in the arts.

For example, the development of perspective in visual art is something we don't see in the visual art of the Middle Ages.

Well, this emphasis on humanism is something that carries over into the various products of the Renaissance, and you can see a consistent sort of spirit of the times in the characteristic cultural products.

The typical philosophers of the Enlightenment are the German rationalists or the French rationalists and the English empiricists.

Both of these have a kind of scientific orientation to the world that brings them into line with the developments in physical science that are being made in roughly the same time.

And then if we look at the art that's characteristic of the Enlightenment, if you know the Bach's Brandenburg concertos, it's like walking into a giant clockwork.

We're walking into the Newtonian universe when we hear the Brandenburgs.

So the idea of a spirit of the time, however nebulous and amorphous, has a certain plausibility to those of us who can kind of make these kind of broad generalizations.

And up to a point you see it or you don't, But I think most persons can get a sense that common intellectual concerns, common intellectual questions, interact with each other and influence each other in the same concrete historical moments.

So we have these abstract ideas of moving our intellectual orientation, say, from God to nature, which is characteristic of the Enlightenment.

Well, you can see those concerns not just in physical science, but also in political science, in moral theory, and also in visual art, in music, in all the cultural products.

And the cultural products of our society are the expressions of its spirit.

We often in kind of everyday terms talk about things that are consistent with the spirit of the times and inconsistent that seem out of step with the times.

Well what we're really saying there is that it doesn't seem consistent with the general trend of the culture and its orientation.

Now, the idea of a spirit of the times means that there's 1 spirit that all of these kind of coalesce into, and what that is is the universal mind of humanity, the soul of humanity.

And it turns out that the soul of humanity, that the spirit, is becoming progressively more knowledgeable both about the world around it and about itself.

As spirit, which is the kind of general, collective, universal human soul, becomes more conscious of itself, it becomes more conscious of its essential characteristics.

And the essential characteristics of spirit are that it's not nature.

In other words, that it's free and that it has the potential for autonomous rationality.

Again, this harks back to Kant's conception of the distinction between nature and mind or phenomena and noumena.

Well, Hegel is going to connect these over, have phenomena and noumena in some respects overlap, but hold on to certain metaphysical tinges here.

He wants an entirely this-worldly, historically comprehensive treatment of human existence, and he wants to have God, freedom, spirit, rationality with a capital R, continental sense of

Now, spirit, in developing its consciousness, in becoming more conscious of itself, learns essentially modern Newtonian physics.

It learns how to push nature around, which is what physics is.

You apply it to your physical knowledge of the world,

and what you get is technology, the ability to push nature in ways that satisfy you.

The other thing that spirit learns is about itself, and what it learns is that it's free, that it's rational, and that it's somehow separate from nature.

Now, it's a commonplace of Enlightenment thought,

And what that means is that since our knowledge, both of the world around us and of ourselves, has increased throughout history, has been a progressive addition of new elements of knowledge to the human spirit, by implication we have also increased the amount of power that we have because knowledge is power and progressively increasing knowledge means progressively increasing power.

Now we have to ask ourselves what happens when we calculate out the trajectory

of this, to use a sort of Newtonian image.

When we figure out, more or less graphically, where this gradual increase of knowledge and power goes, What

it goes is to the absolute completion of all of knowledge and all of power.

Where else would it go if you stop and think about it?

If we can continue this on more or less forever, because although individual human beings die, the species seems to go on without much of a chance of dying, well then add the idea of not just temporality but eternal temporality to this process.

It means that human beings are progressing in self-consciousness, which means that they are progressing in their knowledge of themselves and the things around them, which means that they are gradually increasing their knowledge, which means that they are gradually increasing their power, and the final limit, the final end, the ultimate purpose of human existence is the finishing of this project of increasing our knowledge and our power.

Now there's a being that's all knowledgeable and all powerful.

Now when I said earlier that what Hegel's philosophy is, is Christian Chileasm, or Christian millennialism, or Christian eschatology, the end of the world, the unification of God and man, God's final, ultimate judgment on human existence.

Well, what Hegel has done is taken that idea and said that he has rationally discerned the ultimate pattern of all of human existence.

All of human culture, all the products of the human mind and spirit gradually allow us to climb the ladder of self-consciousness.

And when we complete the product of self-consciousness, we have completed the purpose of spirit.

the philosophy of history, that the owl of Minerva only flies at dusk.

Now, we'll add the owl of Minerva to our philosophical bestiary.

Hegel's particular contribution to our philosophical zoo, the owl of Minerva, is the idea

that we really only understand things in hindsight.

That you're really only able to comprehend what's going on after you've done it, and you can retrospect about it and think about it.

You look, for example, at the events of your own life.

You go back and read your own diary or you look at your own photographs from your Sweet 16 party and you say, if only I knew then what I knew now, or what I know now.

Then I was at 1 particular point in my development and I was doing the best I could, But now I've moved on beyond that and I can see what was coming now.

I understand much better now than I did then what was really going on.

Well Hegel thinks that that's true right across the board for all of human history.

And that means that we all participate in the Geist, and we all move the Geist further.

We all manage to add to this general, global, universal progress of the human spirit when we connect with the spirit of the times and push it a little bit further.

You can hear also the echoes of the sort of ruthlessness that's characteristic of all rationalistic thought.

of as the motto of the ruthless rationalistic thinker.

He's told you all what your purpose is and he's told everybody what their purpose is to the end of time.

It is, in fact, a kind of mythology, but it's a profound sort of mythology and 1 that deserves our close consideration and respect.

on-the-job difficulties of the philosopher of history.

And perhaps Vico is the first of them, but Hegel is

Hegel not only thinks that he's telling you about the Geist, Hegel thinks he is the Geist.

It has consolidated itself on his writing table.

He is not writing the Geist's history, he is writing the Geist's autobiography because he's the first guy at the time, at the very tail end of the Enlightenment, to say, I finally figured out what the Enlightenment means.

It means that human beings as a species collectively finally understand what they really are and what they really, and capital R really here, what they really are is Geist in the world of space and time gradually realizing its own potential.

You may not see it there, but it's hidden there, and if you give it

the right conditions, those potentials are realized.

What Hegel thinks is true about human beings is that they have buried within them on the species level an entelechy, that back at the time of the Greeks or even before were a kind of acorn that contains with it in the entirety of human self-consciousness.

In other words, all roads lead to Hegel's writing desk.

All of history leads up to the point where we finally understand what we are.

And he is essentially ending human history.

In other words, history ends when we finally reconcile ourselves with the divine mind.

When we finally understand what we really are, when we finally come to the culmination of the development of freedom and rationality, and it finally happens when human beings as a species become conscious of their own entelechy, and that is what Hegel thinks he has done.

In other words, he has capped off the entire history of human existence.

Makes you want to stop and take a breath.

So it's somewhat, I mean in other words, I wasn't being entirely facetious when I said at the beginning of the lecture that it's like reading War and Peace in 45 minutes and saying it's about Russia.

It's about what it means, it's about where it's going, it's about what its intrinsic properties are, It's about how you connect to it.

It accounts for the rest of human development as well.

Hegel has been an enormously influential thinker.

Those who objected to the metaphysical, essentially Kantian, elements in Hegel give it a new twist later on in the career of philosophy.

They adopt a materialistic naturalism, which tries to discern the progressive laws of history based upon a one-world naturalistic ontological orientation.

Marxism in that respect is an extension of the Hegelian project of discerning what the ultimate laws of historical development are.

The difference between Marxism and Hegelianism is this.

Hegel thinks that there are no laws of history in the sense of causative laws which makes 1 thing happen in a determinate way after another.

The laws of history are not the laws of causal determination.

We're splitting the world into phenomena and noumena.

The laws of history are the laws of freedom, the laws of rationality.

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Hegel's Philosophy of History