In Our Time - Hegel's Philosophy of History

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ideas of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831) on history. Hegel, one of the most influential of the modern philosophers, described history as the progress in the consciousness of freedom, asking whether we enjoy more freedom now than those who came before us. To explore this, he looked into the past to identify periods when freedom was moving from the one to the few to the all, arguing that once we understand the true nature of freedom we reach an endpoint in understanding. That end of history, as it's known, describes an understanding of freedom so far progressed, so profound, that it cannot be extended or deepened even if it can be lost.WithSally Sedgwick Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Boston UniversityRobert Stern Professor of Philosophy at the University of SheffieldAnd Stephen Houlgate Professor of Philosophy at the University of WarwickProducer: Simon Tillotson

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. What's the air is the help-a-hoccus, auto-pessu, pyukki-ri-ripstus, ruoccaupus and reupteer. Pyrrhic and reperture, Verrin, helipa,

is now-ucaupus in this year-Holaceptair. Helvotimmer in Rokakopas-Coyntia. S-caupat, Suomensuant, RUwan Verkkkaup. Latae, Sovelos. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, Hegel 1770 to 1831, is one of the most influential of modern philosophers. And one of his essential questions was whether we enjoy more freedom now than those who came before us. To explore that, he looked into the past to see when freedom was moving from one to the few to everyone, defining history itself as the progress in the consciousness of freedom.

With me to discuss Hegel's philosophy of history are Sally Sedgwick, Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Boston University, Robert Stern, Professor at Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, and Stephen Hoolgate, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Stephen Hulgate, his own history had some bearing on his ideas, So can you tell us about Hegel's early death? Hegel was born in 1770, the same year as Beethoven and Wordsworth. So he was a young man going on 19 when the French Revolution broke out in 1789,

and he was initially filled with enthusiasm for it and its ideals of freedom and equality, but then clearly deeply disappointed, as I guess a lot of people were at the time, when the terror arose. But that prompted Hegel to formulate some thoughts about the intimate connection between certain conceptions of freedom and death. There is a way of conceiving freedom, Hegel thinks, that leads not to freedom, but death. And Hegel was very interested in that.

In 1807, Hegel published his first major work, the phenomenology, which is a difficult but fascinating text, that contains a number of his most famous sections, the master-slave dialectic, the unhappy consciousness and an account of the French Revolution. Now, the phenomenology was famously completed during the Battle of Jena. Hegel could hear the cannons from his room as he was completing the final pages of the book. And after the battle, he had one copy, and he sent this one copy on horseback through French lines to the publisher and didn't know for several days whether it would arrive. And the day before the battle, he saw Napoleon ride out on reconnaissance

and called him the world's soul, the figure who carried. the fate of the world on his back. After completing the phenomenology, Hegel was the head of a grammar school for some years, during which time he got married, he had children, and he wrote his second major work, which is called The Science of Logic, which explains in great detail what he means by dialectic. In 1820, he then published the philosophy of right, which is his philosophy of freedom,

and which contains the first detailed account of the philosophy of his, history at the end of that text. Hegel lectured on the philosophy of history throughout the 1820s until his death in 1831 in Berlin. And there's one final thing, if I could just add, that's relevant, I think, to what we're going to talk about. Hagle saw war in Jena. Jena was burnt and French troops were belitted in his apartment. He also saw political repression around 1819 in Berlin. And indeed on one occasion he and some friends had to row along the river in Berlin to the prison in which one of his students was incarcerated and talked to him through the window in Latin so that the guards would not hear him. And this was a real risk Hegel was taking.

And I just wanted to highlight that so one doesn't get the impression that Hegel was surveying history from the comfort of his living room. He wasn't. He knew the turbulent times that people were living through and experienced them himself. Thank you. He was born into a Lutheran household. Is there any way in which his Lutheran upbringing, let's put it that way, or his Lutheran beliefs, transferred itself into his philosophy?

Yes, absolutely. Hegel with his friend Friedrich Helderlin, who was a German poet, and another young philosopher Friedrich Schelling, all attended the seminary in Tübingen and were initially actually destined for a life in the priesthood. But Hegel, in fact, they all fell away from that and went different ways. Just to keep it brief.

There's one, I wouldn't say it's exclusively Lutheran, but broadly Christian idea that I think does inform the whole of Hegel's philosophy. And that is a simple thought that if you cling to life, you'll lose it. If you lose life, you're ready to lose life, you'll gain it. And I think that is very much the key to dialectic, insisting on a particular concept or phenomenon will turn it into its opposite and we'll lose it. Whereas if we're open to letting go of a particular thought,

then we will gain new insights. Sally, can you tell us what Hegel meant by Geist, a term at the heart of his system? Geist is usually translated as spirit, and the way to understand that is just, he was referring to human freedom. for Hegel only human animals have freedom. Even highly intelligent animals have capacities for self-motion.

They can adapt to environmental change, they can alter their behaviors and so forth. But they cannot adopt a point of view. They can't act from self-conscious reasons. They don't have those kinds of powers of reflection. And it's those powers of reflection or thought that are uniquely human, for Hegel, without which we would not have freedom at all. This capacity for thought and therefore also for freedom is something that we have as creatures of nature. So Hegel's view of freedom doesn't require the appeal to another world beyond or outside this world. It's not a numinal form of

freedom as in Kant, which is a capacity to start a causal series from a standpoint point out time. It's nothing spooky like that. It's just a natural capacity we have, but it's a capacity that makes us very special and different from other animals. We hear the word idealism later, but what would Hegel mean by that? There's a caricature of Hegel, according to which he's an idealist meaning, all that exists are ideas. There really is no material reality, there's nothing physical. As I say, I think that's a caricature. His idealist, in which he labels absolute idealism, rather terrifying label,

is a thesis about what he considers to be the identity of mind and nature or mind and world or subject and object. You know, Hegel thinks there's a material reality out there that we don't make, but it's dependent on concepts. That is, for our cognitive access to it, we cognitively access it through concepts. And then I would argue that the dependence goes in the other direction as well. That is, when we talk about forms of thought, somehow for Hegel, they're dependent on material reality. Of course, this is more difficult to explain, but I think take the idea of freedom.

I mean, what does it mean to say that the idea of freedom for Hegel is itself historical? One thing it means is that if you look at history, you're going to notice that the concept of freedom has changed over time. We haven't always meant the same thing by it. And then the question is, well, what accounts for that change? Is it just human beings or philosophers sitting alone in their rooms, thinking about thinking in abstraction from what's going on outside in the world? I don't think that's his view. I think his view is that human thought is responsive to what is to actual reality.

So you might find a people or a nation whose conception of freedom is rather primitive in a certain way. And that might be, for example, accountable by the fact that they live, that this people happens to inhabit a part of the world which suffers from terribly harsh environmental conditions, which then has the consequence that they're spending all of their resources just feeding themselves. They don't have the luxury to develop cultural institutions or ensure that everybody has universal education or anything like that.

Robert, another term that's going to help us with what follows is, what would Hegel mean by dialectical? The dialectics are a term often associated with the language of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, where you have the thought that there's one position counted by its opposite, and that leads to some kind of unity between the two. But actually, Hegel never uses that terminology himself. But Hegel talks about the understanding, which he says distinguishes between concepts in a one-sided way, which then set them up in opposition, and that does lead to a contradiction that needs to be resolved by reason.

So just give you one example, you might think of the concepts of finite and infinite, and then if you think, well, the finite is opposed by the infinite, that there's some radical distinction between the finite and infinite, as many people do, then the result is that you're thinking of the infinite as being limited by the finite. and so the infinite becomes finite itself, and so in that way turns into its opposite and therefore results in a kind of contradiction. So you have to learn to think of this relation between these two concepts in a different way. You have to think, for example, of perhaps the infinite encompassing the finite rather than

being opposed to it. And then just to give one quick example, say from social philosophy, you might think, well, the individual is real, but there's no society, or you might think society. or you might think society is real but there's no individual, but either of those views on Hegel's view will lead to a contradiction. So the dialectic refers to the way that these one-sided and limited positions become unstable and they turn into their opposites. Stephen already mentioned it in his discussion of the Lutheran thought of,

if you're clinging on to life in a one-sided way, you'll lose it and you somehow have to combine the clinging on to the letting go. and that would be the more dialectical solution to that sort of relation. Hegel saw history as the development of ideas about freedom. What did you mean by freedom, Robert? In a way, we've had a little bit of an introduction to that from what Sally was saying. One way that you can think of freedom is just as, say, being able to satisfy your desires. So, you know, I wanted to be a university lecturer.

I managed to become a university lecturer. My desire is satisfied. I've acted freely in that way. But as Sally was saying, you could think of, for example, an animal as being free in that way. Animals have desires and they satisfy them. So that's one side of thinking about freedom. Again, thinking about it in this dialectical way, but that seems inadequate. So then you might move to the opposite view, which is that freedom is actually the ability to give up on your desires,

to give up on your projects, to become a pure self, how rising above all those sorts of ends and goals. And that's the idea of the freedom of the mystic, as Hegel sometimes suggests. There's as pure self rising above your desires and so on. But the trouble with that view is that it becomes so abstract that you do nothing because you're not going to commit yourself to any content, to any activity. So in this sort of dialectical fashion, what you need is some way of a middle ground. And I think what's really interesting about Hegel's view of freedom

is that the state, the society, has a fundamental role to play in this because it's only insofar as you reflect on your desires and see them as meaningful in a way that, say, an animal can't, that they will then seem to express yourself, your eye in that way. But that's only possible if they're given more than just your own individual meaning and your own individual life, but some broader social meaning. So I might think, well, yeah, I mean, I am a university lecturer. That satisfied my own particular desire.

But, you know, that has a broader social role. So when I step back from that desire, I can give it that wider meaning. And the British idealist F.H. Bradley has a nice way of putting this, thinking about Hegel, but paraphrasing Gertr, he says that to be a whole, you have to join a whole. But to be a unified self or agent with freedom, you have to join a society. that is itself a kind of whole, and that might give your life some wider meaning. Sally, do you want to come in and add a few words to this idea of freedom? Bob, it's right. There are different conceptions of freedom,

and I think Hegel would identify as the most primitive, is the one that we all, each of us has held at some point or other in our lives, I'm sure. And that is, I'm free when I can just do whatever I ding, please. Freedom consists in just doing what I want. A very different and much more adequate conception of freedom would imply something like this. You know, I can't really be free unless you're free, unless everyone else is free. That's a very different conception of what freedom consists in. But I think his view is if you look at world history and its development, you will see that there's been progress in how we've thought about the conditions and the nature of human freedom.

so that we can look back and we can judge older conceptions. Stephen, would you like to add anything to this before we move on? Starting with Sally's idea that freedom doesn't mean that we can just do what we want, Hegel has a rather paradoxical way of thinking about this issue, and that is to say that there is a certain necessity built into freedom. Freedom has its own necessities. And those necessities get expressed, particularly in the idea of a right. So for Hegel, the idea of a right is a...

what you must will if you are to be free. Now, that's an odd idea to think that there are things you must will. But I think this is crucial for Hegel, and that's why his philosophy of freedom is called a philosophy of right. The other idea he has is that there are not only, Bob and Sally are right, not only is it the case that freedom is in community with others in a whole, but that whole, the state, society, has to have certain necessary distinctions. Hegel thinks a free state must have a clear distinction.

between civil society and the state, within the state, a clear distinction between the legislature, the executive, and the sovereign. And these are not arbitrary distinctions, these are built into the very fabric of freedom. So I think that idea, which is not unique to Hegel, but it's very specific to him, I suppose, that freedom has its own necessity built into it

is really important. Saying with you, Stephen, in his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel examined different ages. I mean, he looked at China, he looked at Rome, He looked at Greece and so on. What was he looking for? And what did he find?

Well, if we start from the idea that history is the progress in the consciousness of freedom, Hegel has a nice simple way of putting the point and explaining what he means by progress, we move in history from the idea that one person is free, to the idea that some are free, to the idea that all are free. Now, Hegel starts, therefore, his account of history with China, which he takes to be a well-ordered state. In fact, he says it's benevolent and wise. But power is located, he thinks, in one person, in the emperor.

And indeed, the emperor stands in a patriarchal relationship to his subjects. He's like a father exercising power over his subjects. So beyond the emperor, there is no individual freedom, Hegel thinks, no civic political freedom for ordinary citizens. So one is free. If we move to Greece, or more particularly 5th century Athens, individuals do have freedom. But two things limit that freedom. First of all, individuality is immersed in institutions and customs of the state.

So individuals don't think of themselves as private individuals, but they're moved by social and political values. And Hegel thinks this is exemplified most clearly in Sophocles' play Antigone, in which Antigone is an individual but moved and motivated by the interests of the family. Crayon is an individual motivated by the state. So that's the first limit. The second limit is that only some are free in Greece. There are slaves.

Now the same idea then is carried over in Rome. In Rome too, there is slavery, only some are free. But there, Hegel thinks, individuals do have a more developed sense of private rights. Though those rights accrue to people through their particular status. It's actually a charge he makes against England in the 90th century, too. Rights don't belong to people because they're all free and equal before the eyes of the law. They get rights through their particular status. So fathers have rights over wives and children. In Christianity, Hegel thinks, all are free in the eyes of God in principle. And so slavery is a wrong within Christianity and we do all we can to get rid of it. This religious principle then becomes a second. principle of rights, and that brings us, Hegel thinks, into modern freedom. Now, Hegel talks about other cultures, India, Persia and Egypt, but China, Greece, Rome,

and what we might call Christian Europe, I think, are the central ones. Now, one last point on this, which I think is important to note, is you ask what's Hegel looking for. What is looking for in each civilization is the conception of freedom that it embodies. He's not trying to give an exhaustive account of the culture. So there will be omissions. There will be a lot that Hegel doesn't say about China and Greece. But what he's trying to see in each culture is the specific conception of freedom that it embodies.

And that's, I guess, what one has to judge him on, whether he's right about that. Sally, to follow that up, what does Hegel mean by historical and unhistorical? As I said a minute ago, the development of freedom has to be accounted for in part as a response to real events and time, whether planned or unplanned. I mean, I gave the example before of how a people's idea of freedom might be arrested just because of environmental conditions. But another example would be, you know, sometimes a certain individual comes along in history who does something that turns out to have enormous world historical consequences. So Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, who was a black woman who just said, look, I'm not going to sit at the back of the bus. I don't care what the law demands of me.

And she couldn't possibly have known that she was going to become an icon. She couldn't possibly have known that she was going to inspire generations and be an important figure in the whole civil rights movement here in the United States. So that's a way in which what something actually does in historical time can move the course of world history along, can move the development of freedom along. So history can have an impact on the development of the idea of freedom. Roberts, a lot of made of Hegel minimizing societies outside Europe and China. What are the issues there and are they fatal to his system? Hegel does distinguish between a sort of prehistoric period, which he associates mainly with Africa, and then moves on to history proper, beginning with China and so on.

And in the detail of some of the things he says, to the modern reader, they're certainly going to cause alarm and concern, and he can seem to indulge in cultural and even racial stereotypes and to succumb to a sort of Eurocentrism. He talks about history moving from east to west, like the Sun, which sort of suggests that history is being pulled into Europe. He talks about African black people as human beings in an untamed and natural state who lacks self-control.

He characterizes the people of China, and India is living as a natural vegetative existence. And while he's opposed to slavery, because as an injustice, as Stephen says, he saw that clearly, he does seem to have taken it to have a kind of civilising effect in Africa. And his view of Africa as outside history has itself had negative effects on subsequent debates and views of the continent. And finally, just to mention that he relies pretty uncritically on various colonial British sources, for example, in his views of India. So problems there. On the issue of Eurocentrism, in one sense, Hegel's project is Eurocentric. and as we've heard he sees Europe as a place

where the highest conception of freedom is realised that all can be free. But his criterion for assessing other cultures is not are they European. That would be a very Eurocentric question, but rather are they capable of supporting through law, institutions and social practices the realisation of the idea of freedom

that he finds in Europe? And then similarly, when Hegel tries to explain why this idea of freedom, as a freedom of all, didn't arise in other times and cultures, he doesn't fundamentally appeal to racial characteristics. He much more importantly refers to issues like geography, culture, social and political structure, religion. There is nonetheless one thing that he does use as a unit of explanation, which is religion. That's fundamental to him.

And he certainly sees Christianity as the highest form of religion. And then finally just to say, I mean, it's worth reminding ourselves, as we've been saying, that Hegel does think that all are free. Thank you, Stephen, following that up, looking around, did he mark periods where signs of progress were more effectively pursued than in others? The Greek period, there's no doubt about it. One of the distinctions that Hegel draws between different historical cultures is between those cultures that he has been. thinks don't develop. They are important stages in the development of freedom overall, but they don't have internal development. The other important major shift, I think, is with the Reformation. The Reformation marks a fundamental turning point. Christianity itself does, but I think almost,

almost even more, the Reformation. Because what that does is give people a sense of inner spiritual freedom. Now, what Hegel means by that is not that people can believe whatever they want, Lutheranism has doctrines, but that people come to accept doctrine through the witness of their own inner faith, not through external authority. And I think this is crucial for the development of freedom in modernity, and it has marked the world we live in now. Sally, what would you say was the ideal relationship between the state and the individual for Hegel? There's a kind of caricature that in the Hegelian state, The Hegelian state is a totalitarian system. It demands the total sacrifice of individual rights and liberties and the total erasure of individual differences.

I don't think that that's – well, I call that a caricature, so put my cards on the table. You know, when he talks about ethical life, characterizes ethical life, this is a market economy. You know, Hegel had read his Adam Smith. It's an economy which individuals pursue the satisfaction of their own interests and profits, and the Hegelian state comes in and regulates these pursuits so that, for example, penalties are in place if you trespass on my property. So I think his view is, you know, an ethical state has the duty to protect individual freedom. At the same time, there's a sense, there's a kind of individual. that Hegel is arguing against or a kind of conception of who I am as an individual that he thinks is just a myth.

It's kind of a silly view, but it's held by many. And that is the view that I am the sole crafter or author of my identity, of my aims, of my desires, of my personality, of my character. I mean, this goes back to points that Bob was making a minute ago. Just to take a very trivial example, nature makes it the case that each of us sometimes need to quench our thirst. But nature has nothing to do with the fact that right now I really would like a Pepsiola. I don't want a Coke, I want a Pepsi. Most of our desires are responses to the worlds in which we live,

the influences of the advertisement industry, all kinds of social influences. The idea that I all by myself craft my identity, he thinks that's just a silly. It's a metaphysically bankrupt idea. Robert, Robert Stern, how strong was Hegel's grasp of history as many people think of it, traditionally, dates, events, that sort of thing?

So it's first, I think, helpful to use the sort of distinctions Hegel himself makes between types of history. So he talks about original history, which is history writing by the person at the time. So he mentions Herodotus and Thucydides. And then what he calls reflective history, which is perhaps closer to what most people might think of as history, so forming a kind of narrative of the past but from the present

and perhaps using that to learn something from the past, draw moral lessons from it and so on. And then what he calls philosophical history. Now, of course, the worry is that, and calling it that, it sounds like it's a philosopher's construction, something made a priori, as we say, and that's sort of just a rational structure that we dream up in the study. And then we impose on history and don't care for the dates and the facts and the details. And this will, of course, alarm the proper historian.

But actually, Hagle goes out of his way to say, no, that's not what he's doing. One comment he makes is we have to take history as it is. we must proceed historically, empirically. So he's not blind to that worry. And in fact, he rejects various positions that he thinks are a priori are just purely abstract, like the state of nature, because there never was such a state of nature,

and he doesn't think that makes any sense in thinking about history. So it's not entirely sort of top down in that sense, but it is a finding of underlying structures in the world that aren't immediately evident in experience and that, as it were, the ordinary historian may not be so interested in. So any kind of history is going to have to be more than just listing historical events.

But as I said, he doesn't think we can ignore the historical evidence. Stephen, what's what you think is most innovative about Hegel's approach? Just briefly echo what Bob said about. Hegel is bringing a distinctive philosophical position. perspective on history. And what he thinks this illuminates is that history is more than just a sad story of war, bloodshed and misery. There is progress in history. So that's one thing. I think the second feature I would highlight is that although I suggested earlier that Hegel is not trying to give an exhaustive account of the individual societies he looks at,

he is arguing that the conception of freedom that any given society expresses is manifest in multiple different aspects of that society in its political institutions, in its customs, in its religion, in its art, and in Greece even, in its athletic activity. So Hegel has a distinctively holistic approach to understanding different civilizations. It's not good enough just to look at the doings of kings and queens. One has to look at multiple dimensions of a society to understand even just the conception of freedom that it is embodying. And I think that is really important.

And the last thing I would highlight is I think we've talked a little bit about whether Hegel is really doing justice to other cultures. I think Hegel's aim is to do justice to all cultures. But he also wants, as I think Sally has indicated, to see that there is a progression through from one conception of freedom to another. Sally, when you mentioned Rosa Parks earlier, what role for Hegel does the individual generally have in advancing history? There is no history without individuals, individuals acting and thinking, but I want to emphasize how he's interested in differences. He's interested in how individuals are different. I already spoke to this a minute ago. He thinks that in an ethical state, you've got to have institutions that value individuality and respect individuality. But also, you know, as a historian, he's interested in how cultures have personalities, so to speak.

So that's one point. It's just a value of individuality, which I think is often missed in how people read Hegel. But Rosa Parks could never have anticipated the kinds of consequences of her one rather modest refusal not to sit at the back of the bus. And so individuals act, but Hagle wants to say there's also sort of these larger forces at work. You could say, call them just world historical forces. there might be a meaning to my actions that's not part of my intention, a meaning that comes to be rewarded to my action, years hence, you know, after the action has been performed, a meaning that's awarded by history itself.

Thank you, Robert, Robert Stern. We hear then about Hegel talking about the end of history. What does it mean by that? We can, could understand the end of history idea is history coming to a stop, like the end of a road. But it's pretty clear. He doesn't mean that, partly because something we haven't mentioned, but he does see, while he's looking for patterns in history,

he sees an important element of contingency in history. So it's not like everything is going to come to a halt. And he talks about the future beyond Europe, for example, talking about America. So I don't think that's what he means. You could also think, well, history is driven by some overarching purpose and end in that sense. But then that would make history and people in history puppets. And as Sally said, that would take away individuality in too strong a way for Hegel.

So I think what it means really is more like a conceptual claim, that there's a sort of conceptual closure that's possible in history, in the sense that if we go back to his idea that all are free, we're not going to – well, we could give that up in the sense that it could happen historically. But if we did conceptually, we'd be going backwards. it would be necessarily a regressive move. Now that's not to say, as I said, that it couldn't happen. Maybe we could end up in a dystopian world,

a sort of handmaid's tale world where freedom does get taken away from people. And I don't think Hegel's saying, well, that could never happen. You know, I know as a philosopher, a priori, that that would never happen. But he is saying, as a philosopher, what I know is that that would count as a regressive move. That would not be progressed. That would be going backwards in history in that sense. And I think that's a very powerful idea because it is hard to imagine

how conceptually going back on that idea could count as anything like progress. Thank you, Stephen. What impacted Hegel's ideas have in his lifetime? They were mixed, if we're honest. On the positive side, Hegel was able to found a school. I mean, I don't mean a physical building, but a set of followers of students,

not all of whom perhaps are very well known, but some are the legal philosopher Edward Gantz, for example. He founded a journal which disseminated his ideas. His lectures were extremely popular, both with students and with the members of the public that were able to attend them, including Ludwig Feuerbach, David Friedrich Strauss, both of whom became prominent philosophers after Hegel. And indeed, Felix Mendelssohn also attended Hegel's lectures.

Now, these were all critical of Hegel, but also impressed by what Hegel had to say. Hegel knew Goethe, he had communication with various political and cultural figures. So he was in that sense at the centre of cultural life, and many of his ideas did influence certain theologians. However, on the negative side. Including Roan Williams. Of course, not during Hegel's lifetime.

That's exactly right. And, well, yes, I mean, the legacy, Carbart and. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and there's a whole lot of others. Yes, that's for another program, perhaps. The hostility that Hegel aroused, though, was equal to the favour that he found with a lot of his friends and students. Schelling, the theologian Schleiermacher,

and most famously, I suppose, the philosopher Artus Schopenhauer, were very, very hostile to Hegel. Now, this is partly to do with personal animosity. People might know that Schopenhauer put his lectures on at the same time as Hegel. Five people came, Schopenhauer was deeply upset.

But there were also philosophical reasons for the hostility that Hegel encountered. Hegel was, as we've discussed, he was pro-reason, pro-freedom. And also, which one forgets, he was very critical of aspects of his time that did not match up to the standards of freedom and reason. And he suspected that other approaches advocated by his colleagues, a more historical approach to law, for example, was just conservative. It yielded no principle of critique. And he was also antagonistic to the romantics, Friedrich Schlegel,

because he saw them as celebrating the unconscious and the irrational. So his ideas did not go down well with them at all. Robert, Hamer's turn. Marx is thought to be perhaps Hegel's greatest disciple. How significant was Hegel's influence on Marx? Well, that's a huge question. Yes, just focusing perhaps on the philosophy of history side because there are differences, influences more broadly

in metaphysics and other areas. But thinking about history, there are definite similarities between the two. So Marx, I think, will agree or does agree with Hegel that history can be made intelligible and that it's possible to discern in patterns of events some underlying structure which gives history a certain direction and so on. So there are certainly similarities. Now, they are said to differ, not least by Marx himself,

in the way they understand how that pattern develops and what drives it. And this is often summarised in the sort of terminology of idealism versus materialism. Sally explained a little bit about Hegel's materialism earlier, but to just give you one short quote that is relevant here, Hegel says, all cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categorism. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because Spirit has changed its categories. So that sounds very much like idealism in the sense. It sounds like Hegel saying, well, it's ideas, it's the categories, it's the concepts that we think about and how we change them that determines history. And then, of course, you might think, well, Marx's view is utterly opposed to that because he's focusing much more on economic forces, on material conditions, changes in technology, changes in patterns of ownership and so on.

But I think that's too simplistic and in a way going back to what I think things Sally were saying right at the beginning that Hegel certainly does not neglect the way in which material conditions impact on our ideas and our thinking. And he himself, particularly in the philosophy of history, talks about various, if you want to put it in Marxist's termed, material conditions for thinking. So, for example, he talks about geography,

he talks about technologies, he mentions that the gunpowder helps bring about the end of a sort of aristocratic era by changing the nature of war and so on. And on the other side, Marx himself sees a role for ideas. But I think just finally, there is a difference, and it's an interesting one, that in a way I think Marx is more of a social scientist and, if you like, a political activist,

in the way he's thinking about history. Hegel is interested in finding these deep patterns of reason, which for him have a philosophical significance, beyond, say, social science and political activism. For Hegel, it's important to find the world a rational place for us to be at home in the world in a deep way. And I think that's why history is very important for Hegel. That's another place where we can find reason.

Well, thank you very much. Finally, Sally, what would you say changed in philosophy because of the ideas of Hegel? The idea that most interests me or about which I have most to say is just the connection between philosophy and history. So I think Hegel, many people have pointed this out, Hegel is a philosopher who took history very seriously, and that's not just the rather trivial idea that philosophy has a history.

Everybody knows that, nobody would deny that point. But it's more a couple of points. One of them is for philosophy to know itself, to know what it is. It has to engage with its history, just like if you ask yourself, who am I? From where did the desires that I have today come? Or why do I have the problems that I have today?

Or how come I have the personality that I have? How could you possibly answer questions like that without looking back at your history and taking account of where you've come from and all the influences on you? And the same thing goes for philosophy. So that's one point. I mean, philosophy really can't know who it is or what it is if it doesn't know its history,

if it doesn't appreciate where it's come from, what other ideas have impacted it. But I think if you ask the question, why is it important to know, for example, that the concept of freedom has developed, that there have been different ways of understanding what freedom consists in. Why is that even important? I think that this is really one of Hegel's greatest gifts to intellectual history, to think about this. You know, how am I to develop any sort of critical perspective on where I am now or how I understand my freedom now if I don't have some sort of critical distance upon it? And the only way I get critical distance, so sort of a toolbox for evaluating what I take my freedom to consist in or whether I think the state in which I live is a just state or not, how do I evaluate these things if I don't have a toolbox that's stocked with an understanding of the way in which there have been different understandings of what freedom consistent and what a just state looks like. So history gives us to that toolbox without which critical analysis, critical evaluation,

just simply isn't possible. You know, you need to be able to stand back and evaluate where you are. And you can only do that if you have some access to other ways of thinking about things. And that's what history gives us. And I think Hegel saw that deeply, and that's why he urges that we study the history. of philosophy, the history of ideas, the history of art, the history of religion. It's all in the service of being able to be critical thinkers. Well, thank you very much.

Thanks to all of you. Thanks, Sally Sedgwick, Robert Stern and Stephen Hulgate, and our studio engineer, Duncan Hanant. Next week, it's another chance to hear our Shakespeare Sonnus program. Then on June the 9th, we have supernobas, white dwarves, and red giants, and what happens when stars die. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did you miss out that you wish you'd said and then we'll get going from there? I bet a lot of people in the audience would wonder, we really didn't talk about whether Hegel's right to think that the course of world history is developing in the direction of progress.

you might think that there are lots of things happening. Evidence of the contrary. It doesn't always seem that plausible. So we might ask about, you know, why does he say that? What's his justification? Where does he get his evidence? Or is he just, is it just wishful thinking? That's one thing that occurred to me.

I'd like to sort of respond to what Sally said with perhaps a slightly different way of putting it, which is that, Hegel, it seems to me, is not starting with what we ordinarily take to be history and sort of finding patterns in it. He's much more in a sense defining what is to count as history. And for Hegel, the idea is that we have come in modernity to a certain understanding of freedom that Hegel thinks is the most developed form of freedom. And as Sally argued before, that we have to understand the history of how we got from where we started to hear. But he thinks that philosophy can tell us the stages through which historical development must pass.

And I think he then uses that idea to define them what counts as history. So this is part of the understanding of what is a historical and what is not a historical state. Hegel is not saying that certain cultures, let's take some of the Slavic cultures, for example, which Hegel says very little about, are not important in terms of world events. but the issue always is do they carry forward the idea of history? And in fact, he argues that it's a very select group. So there's something similar going on, it seems to me, in Hegel's aesthetics, in his theory of tragedy, which is another area that he's particularly famous for.

He doesn't just read all the tragedies and then try to tease out what's common to them. But he approaches the plays with a conception of what it is to be tragic. And then some count as tragedies and some don't. But it doesn't mean that the other plays don't matter. It's just that they're not, they don't count as being a tragedy. And I think the background to this is Kant, actually, the idea that categories actually help us identify what counts as something. And I think this is how Hegel approaches history.

So is Hegel right? Well, in one says yes. I mean, he's obviously right because he's defining history as the progress of the development of freedom. Now, is he right to say that he could. can find these different stages within empirical history, that is a matter of judgment and that's for all of us to decide. But that's a slightly different question to, is he right about history? He's right about history as he understands it. And that might not be a very satisfactory answer, but I think that is really what he's doing. He's trying to get us to

understand what is meant by history in a different way from the way we ordinarily do. But, Sally, is your worry about history that things don't look so great at the moment? therefore that's a worry about Hegel's view or? I don't have this worry at all. Right, okay, good. People might have. Yeah, because I guess I was trying to address that in my comments that this isn't the claim that history might go badly rock in the empirical sense.

I think you addressed that well, if I may say so, that's exactly right. There's no guarantee. In fact, it's worth noting that Hegel is very worried about some of the developments in his own time. He's worried about the political developments. I noted him. He suffered political repression himself. He's not an optimist in that sense. He just thinks that we've understood things now

that haven't been so well understood in the past. Yeah, and I think as far as I would see it, there is a kind of a priori bit, which is the argument that all being free is an improvement on one and a few being free. And that's a priori mainly because it's a normative claim, right? It's not an empirical claim. It's a claim about value and what matters in that sense.

But then it's just an empirical question, well, where did that come from? Where did the idea, in real cultural terms, emerge from? And that's then a philosophy of history. You're asking yourself, where did this fundamental idea arise? And then I agree, I think, I mean, if I've understood it right, Stephen's view, then it's an empirical question where you think it emerged from, and there's plenty of room for debate. I mean, Hegel clearly thinks, you know, Greece plus Christianity,

you might have another view. You might think it's come some other route in history. I think that doesn't challenge the project. That's just another version of Hegel's philosophy of history or trying to find out where did this idea of freedom come from. So, and then the fact it's all gone a bit pair-shaped recently as well as in a way neither here nor there from the point of view of that project. It did emerge, not in a perfect form, as Stephen said,

but the goal of all being free has emerged. I think he's right. We can't give up on that conceptually. But yes, that doesn't guarantee that all will go swimmingly with human history from now on. Is it relevant to insert here that he thought the ideal, the end of history and the ideal end of history had been realized in Prussia? Well, yes and no. So he didn't really quite believe that, although that is one of the, again, things that one, you know, is often said, and the philosophy of right is a much more critical book of current political conditions.

But one thing that is right, and we haven't actually said, is that for him, his project is something that, in a sense, has to take place retrospectively. And this is something in a way he shares with Marx, that you're not, you can't, I mean, this book couldn't have been written by even the most clever Greek looking forward, right? He can write the book, because in some, sense history has come to an end, i.e., we've arrived at this idea in a sense. But I don't think, again, he means we've therefore perfectly realised it. And that would be the claim that, you know, in Prussia at that time, full freedom has been

realised. He certainly doesn't believe that. But he does think that he, standing at the end of history in the sense of after Christianity, after further developments, he and others, I mean, his society is able to take very seriously the idea that all of his... for it, all are free. And that's something in a way we're privileged to be able to do from where we stand in history. That wouldn't have made much sense

to your average Greek. And that's something we're able to do because we live, you know, downstream, as it were, from the developments that he's interested in, like Christianity and so on. I'd like to respond to that, but I don't know, Sally, do you want to go first? Well, just one little thing.

And that is, we have, Hegel's also famous for saying that we don't really know what comes next. That is, of course, we're going to make predictions on the basis of empirical evidence, but he's committed to the view that we can't really know what's coming next, precisely because we can't escape our time. So the philosopher who thinks that she knows what the next stage of history is going to be is fooling herself from that point of view.

So no knowledge, but of course we're going to make predictions about it. I'd like to add something if possible in direct response to Melvin's question. There are a couple of things to be said about the end of history. First of all, Hegel does not identify any single state as being the perfect embodiment of the idea of freedom. He identifies a group of states, some of which might surprise the listeners, Denmark, the Netherlands, England,

and reformed Prussia. That is, Prussia after 1806, when it's been under the influence of the French, and a number of reforms have taken place. there's been a partial emancipation of the Jews, there was the municipal ordinance which granted autonomy to local communities. All of these happened in the years following 1806. And Hegel does think that this does mark a progression in the idea of freedom and the embodiment of freedom. But none of these states embodies freedom exactly.

So in fact, what's interesting is the realization of freedom is the realization of freedom, more or less, in a group of states, none of which is the perfect embodiment of freedom. And of course, Bob said before that things have gone pear-shaped. Things went pear-shaped in at least 1848. In fact, they went pear-shaped in 1841, as far as Hegel's concerned. Well, he was dead then, but he would have thought that was where it went pear-shaped. And there was a threat of it going pear-shaped, even in 1819. So I think the powers of conservatism of the Ancian regime of the Restoration

were things that Hegel was deeply, deeply worried about. But as Bob pointed out, they did not affect what freedom is. They just marked a deep and profound regression in our capacity to live a free life. Thank you all very much. Thank you very much indeed. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. What if I'm poisoning her? Microplastic particles in the placentas of unborn babies. There are insufficient funds in your account.

You are a minus person. I'm declining. What if I'm state four and I don't even know it? They said it shouldn't hurt until it's too late. Healthy, healthy. What is your lusis? Cleanse, ton, serum, moisturise. If you don't do your rituals, they're all going to do.

How am I supposed to sleep well and that is definitely... Sometimes I feel every fun thing in my life that I want more of, comes an obsession. Hashtag FOMO. Hashtag I'm not doing enough. Hashtag I'm not enough. What is your Lusis? What is your Lusus?

Brought to you by BBC Radio 4. Subscribe to the Lusus podcast on BBC Sounds.