The Philosophy of History by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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Hegel did his best to calibrate his philosophy to humankind. In doing so he adopts a Rousseauian sense geography influencing culture and culture itself arising out of a necessity of universality as individuals attain self awareness through the signal of the abstract greater Good that Christianity is formulated around.
This “Reality that is not sensuous” is both a rejection and a correction of Kantian transcendental philosophy, in which Hegel bridges the suture. While he talks about the raw material of geography providing the initial context for how culture of different peoples arises, he jumps this to the final point of Abstraction, in which the elevation of “Form into Universality”: where “Objective Spirit attains manifestation”. This is in a way, a literal reconciliation of the self with his soul, the soul with Truth of the State.
We can read this almost sideways and get a better sense that attaining selfhood within the European framework is only possible within European self-awareness because of its tautological nature. If we were to accept that there are different rationalities, we would need to discard Hegel’s theory completely. But as the Modernist that he is, he never considers this possibility, subjugating/mapping all rationality within the metaphysical container of Rationality. If we were to consider each self within their respective culture as needing to understand its individuality within that context as an expression of its rightful Will, we could destroy the hierarchical of Hegel’s motion. But this is a difference of modernism and post-structuralism, wherein in modernism the correct context is unspoken and assumed to be evidently correct throughout.
Interesting book. Definitely interesting ideas. Racist ideas, but Hegel was working within his own time expressing his structures with the available ideas of that era. This doesn’t mean what he did is useless but it does mean we should understand the limits of what he produced and be sensitive to the possible value his ideas still have as we would sometimes assume them.
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