Hegel and His Beliefs Concerning History

Georg W.F. Hegel

    


      Georg W.F. Hegel was a German philosopher of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.  Kantian philosophy championed philosophy of the time when Hegel became prominent.  Following after Kant, a lot of Hegel's philosophy responded to the foundation Kant built.  Where Kant pushed God's transcendence, Hegel took to the opposite that God is immanent and knowable.  Kant's statement that things cannot be known in themselves, building a wall between knowing and being, pushed Hegel to argue that everything is actually known in itself. 
      Hegel viewed God as weltgeist.  The weltgeist (world-spirit, or world-mind) is in everything and in every move of history.  This view of God is a form of panentheism.  In Hegel's view of the weltgeist, God evolves alongside human culture.  Hegel taught that God needs humans to become a self-realization by people's discovery of God. 
      A very important idea within Hegel's philosophy is his dialectic of history.  History is summed up by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.  In Hegel's philosophy these three processes move humanity and history to a climax where there is true freedom and a full actualization of the weltgeist.  An example of Hegel's view of history is: Parmenides, a Greek philosopher, taught that everything is in constant change (thesis); Heraclitus, another Greek philosopher, taught that the world is made up of one unchangeable thing (antithesis); Plato taught that the world is made up of unchangeable forms represented by changing images/copies (synthesis). 
      Hegel understood history as a very simple thing which followed his dialectic quite well.  This dialectic is still used today by some historians.  At the center of Hegel's dialectic, Hegel believed that thesis, antithesis, and synthesis worked together to create a more free and perfect world.  Hegel believed that history would climax in perfection with the weltgeist fully realized and fully actualized in the minds of man.  Perfect harmony and freedom would result from history's natural path.


Here are some good lectures:

This is an introduction to Hegel's ideas.

This lecture deals with Hegel's view of the weltgeist and history.

This lecture deals with Hegel's dialectic of history.