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PHILOSOPHERS and HISTORIANS (2 of 6)

Another romantic was the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He had an impact on history. He saw history as moving through a conflict of ideas. He believed that change was inevitable. After his death in 1831 students in Germany picked up on Hegel's idea of change to the annoyance of government authorities. The authorities were worried that the young Hegelians were interpreting Hegel's change to include political change. Government officials began interfering in academia and spying on students. One among the students influenced by Hegel that they spied upon was Karl Marx.

Hegel was born 48 years before Marx, a different generation from Marx, and unlike Marx he was romantic in his belief in great men moving history -- men like Napoleon, whom he admired. Like other romantics of his day, Hegel viewed art as as an expression of freedom and nature as spirit, and he saw the world developing in spirit and freedom in stages.

Hegel saw ideas as connected to historical context. Ideas were significant insofar as they were antithetical to other ideas -- in other words in conflict. For Hegel, progress takes place as the clash of ideas produces something new. That something he described as a "synthesis."

Hegel believed in specifics and scientific fact. But he went beyond this in his belief in development to an absolute, an end, an ultimate and God. The ultimate for him was a God created political arrangement, created by history, called Prussia -- convenient for his patriotic attachment to the state in which he happened to live.

Some believed that designating Prussia as the ultimate in political perfection was premature. But also some saw Hegel as having created a useful way of looking at the world. The 21st century sociologist Francis Fukuyama described Hegel as having contributed to an understanding of humanity by describing humanity as having progressed through a series stages. Writes Fukuyama:

Hegel was the first philosopher to speak the language of modern social science insofar as man for him was the product of his concrete historical and social environment and not, as earlier natural right theorists would have it, a collection of more or less fixed "natural" attributes.

Karl Marx was to take God from Hegelism and create historical materialism. For Marx the clash was between economic classes and the synthesis was rule by the working class.

Hegel quotes:

As for the individual, every one is a son of his time.
                                     (Preface to the Philosophy of Right)

I saw the Emperor -- this world-soul -- riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.
                                   (Letter to Niethammer, 13 October 1806)