Introduction

Summary

What explains this paradox? Behind it was the shift in our view of reality from Nature to History. The modern account of nature as matter in motion shattered the cosmologies of the ancients whereby man could pursue his natural fulfillment within the larger order of nature. Since the modern account of nature could not provide a teaching about the purpose of life beyond the materialistic, Hegel sought to find in the teleological progress of history a new third term that would provide a modern version of the classical cosmologies uniting the individual with the community and with the world. Seeing himself as the modern Plato, he believed that mankind as a whole was reenacting the Platonic ascent of the soul by progressing historically from its primitive origins into (echoing Plato’s Image of the Cave ) “the spiritual daylight of the present.”