The Philosophy Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) by Will Buckingham & Douglas Burnham & Peter J. King & Clive Hill & Marcus Weeks & John Marenbon

Author:Will Buckingham & Douglas Burnham & Peter J. King & Clive Hill & Marcus Weeks & John Marenbon
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781465441065
Publisher: DK Publishing
Published: 2015-03-01T14:00:00+00:00

Napoleon Bonaparte, according to Hegel, perfectly embodied the zeitgeist (spirit of the age) and was able, through his actions, to move history into the next stage of its development.

"Each stage of world-history is a necessary moment in the Idea of the World Spirit."

Georg Hegel

Spirit and nature

But what about the world in which we live, and which seems to go its way quite separately from human history? What does it mean to say that reality itself is historical? According to Hegel, what we ordinarily call “nature” or “the world” is also Spirit. “Nature is to be regarded as a system of stages,” he writes, “one arising necessarily from the other and being the proximate truth of the stage from which it results.” He goes on to claim that one of the stages of nature is the progression from that which is “only Life” (nature as a living whole) to that which has “existence as Spirit” (the whole of nature now revealed as always having been, when properly understood, Spirit).

At this stage of nature, a different dialectic begins, namely that of consciousness itself—of the forms that Absolute Spirit takes in its dialectical progression toward self-realization. Hegel’s account of this progression begins with consciousness first thinking of itself as an individual thing among other individuals, and occupying a separate space to that of matter or the natural world. Later stages of consciousness, however, are no longer those of individuals, but are those of social or political groups—and so the dialectic continues, refining itself until it reaches the stage of Absolute Spirit.

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