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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
In his Wissenschaft der Logik Hegel defines actuality as ‘the unity of essence and existence’. It is the gradual progress towards the realization of this unity which constitutes the meaning of history for Hegel. Out of what appears as incomprehensible chaos, the philosopher has to distill the hidden meaning written into it by reason. While previous philosophies, and Kant's in particular, tended to divorce the realms of essence and existence and even postulated their ultimate incommensurability, Hegel sees history as the context where the Nous is in the process of being realized. In history, spirit externalizes itself and becomes objective and man's consciousness reaches awareness of itself:
The genuine truth is the prodigious transfer of the inner into the outer, the building of reason into the real world, and this has been the task of the world during the whole course of its history. It is by working at this task that civilized man has actually given reason an embodiment in law and government and achieved consciousness of the fact.
That such a view of history could lead to a deterministic theory of development is obvious to Hegel himself and he repeatedly cautions against this eventuality, pointing to the place of consciousness in the process of history. Since spirit is to him the content of history, history is not a spectacle in which the mighty have the last say.
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