III - Self-positing Spirit

Summary

I have been trying to present in the preceding chapters an idea of the fundamental problems and aspirations which Hegel's philosophy was addressed to. And I have suggested that we can best see these in the light of the yearning of his time to find a way of life and thought which would unite two powerful aspirations, which were both connected yet opposed. One is to that unity with nature, other men and himself which man demands as an expressive being; the other is to the radical moral autonomy which reached paradigm expression in Kant and Fichte.

I have suggested that Hegel by the early 1800s had come to realize how deeply these two aspirations were opposed to each other. In particular, he had come to see that freedom required the breaking up of expressive unity, of the original undivided wholeness within man and communion with other men and nature, which he like many contemporaries attributed to an earlier age – principally that of ancient Greece. The sense of fragmentation within, and of exile in a dead, mechanical universe and society, which so many writers of the age had experienced and testified to, was not an inexplicable and unmitigated loss of an earlier paradise. Rather it was the result of an ineluctable development, essential for the full realization of man as rational and free agent.

But the story was not to end there. This necessary division was to be healed in a higher reconciliation.